I'm only consuming "far more than I normally would" if I'm routinely throwing away things I bought from CostCo, unconsumed.
I don't. Nor does anyone else I know.
It's just consumption moved around in time.
I know, I know, it may be aesthetically distasteful to you to see people walking out with 36 rolls of toilet paper instead of six. It may be hard not to sneer at the poor people trapped on the capitalist treadmill.
But you should get over it, because in most ways you're better off when people shop at CostCo, because buying that way and storing things at home for a time is much more packaging and environmentally efficient that packing things into little bundles to be bought every day. And buying like that also minimizes the little bites being taken out by middlemen who are doing the packaging into little bundles. And a car trip taken to CostCo that fills the car is more efficient than lots of little trips to the grocery store.
I suspect this is the real source of the hostility, rather than aesthetics: Costco represents, in general, a larger-land-footprint, car-dependent, suburban (or even semi-rural) lifestyle.
There's likely something of a false dichotomy at work here, as well, in that there could be Costco-compatible dense-city living, but that doesn't seem to be true currently.
I shop at Costco regularly (once every two weeks at least, sometimes weekly). Yes I gasp drive a car. But I put less than 3k miles on my car a year since I work from home. Maybe shopping at Costco isn't the problem for most people. It's working in an office.
To clarify, my point wasn't about the driving itself, but rather, what both driving and Costco (and bulk purchases in general) represent, which is incompatible with a walkable, high-density city.
I'm confident some people also object to the car use itself, but that's way too general a topic.
I mean, I agree, in the sense that I also like to buy in bulk and save a lot on things I use a lot this way. But it is true that a membership makes people shop at a store more to "get their money's worth" for the membership.
I don't. Nor does anyone else I know.
It's just consumption moved around in time.
I know, I know, it may be aesthetically distasteful to you to see people walking out with 36 rolls of toilet paper instead of six. It may be hard not to sneer at the poor people trapped on the capitalist treadmill.
But you should get over it, because in most ways you're better off when people shop at CostCo, because buying that way and storing things at home for a time is much more packaging and environmentally efficient that packing things into little bundles to be bought every day. And buying like that also minimizes the little bites being taken out by middlemen who are doing the packaging into little bundles. And a car trip taken to CostCo that fills the car is more efficient than lots of little trips to the grocery store.