Costco needs to go ‘Breaking Bad’ and do business like a drug dealer
Sep 13, 2013, 1:43 PM | Updated: Sep 17, 2013, 5:11 pm
(AP Photo/File)
Taken from Friday’s edition of the Dori Monson Show
Do you watch “Breaking Bad” at all? Why does the meth dealer give a little sample to somebody who’s never tried it? To get them hooked, right?
The cocaine dealers, the crack dealers. They will get people hooked on their product, then do they stop providing the product when they get the person hooked? No.
So why can’t Costco start running their business like the meth dealers run theirs?
Costco, they’ll have a product there for a short period of time and then it’s gone. It’s the hunter-gatherer thing for men as we roam the aisles. Because the wives, they always want to say, ‘Just wait, get it the next time we come. Think about it. Do you really need it? And if you really do then let’s get it next time.’ And at Costco they’ll pull things randomly and it might not be there next time so if you want it you better get it right now.
So I believe that it taps into our primitive, DNA encoded hunter-gatherer mentality. So people will make impulse buys.
I’ve never gotten peanut butter at Costco, but they sell it in bulk. About two years ago they just pulled it randomly (from stores.) Now this week the bulk peanut butter is back at Costco, so you can get 80 ounces of this stuff at a time.
Costco’s got to stop doing this. They’ve got to stop giving us samples, getting us hooked on stuff. One that I’ve railed about for years is the cherry pie. I haven’t found it for the last two years now. I’ll tell you there is no better dessert made by man or machine than Costco cherry pie.
It’s got that thick, coarse confectioners sugar dusted on top of the cross pastry crust. They’ll appear for like a week or two and then they’ll disappear for the rest of the year. I don’t know why because they can the cherries. There’s no reason to do it except to mess with my head. I think that’s their only motivation left for doing it.
Several years ago when I was talking about the Costco cherry pies a friend of mine brought a cherry pie and left it on my front porch. And I had bought two myself the day before. My wife and three daughters went down to Vancouver, Washington to visit my wife’s family. So I’m home on a Saturday. I’m a bachelor. I’m childless. I was determined I wasn’t going to eat a big slice of pie because then, as now, I was watching weight. So what I would do is I would just put a fork in the pie tin and I would just have one bite as I walked by. But I would walk by 20 times every half hour.
I’d watched college football all day and I finally gave up because it was too far to walk to the kitchen to get a forkful of pie. So I just grabbed the second Costco pie. I’d eaten the whole one. And I’m walking through the living room with the pie in my left hand, the fork in my right hand wearing nothing but a t-shirt and boxers. And I realized at that moment it was my dream for a day that if I wasn’t married and didn’t have a wife and kids so that this was anomaly, that would be my existence. And I would be the world’s biggest loser.
But I didn’t stop eating the pie. Of course not. It was so good. It was a good game. I wish the family would leave more often.
Anyway, they’re making a big deal that they’re bringing back the bulk peanut butter. I haven’t seen a cherry pie there for a couple of years. At some point I’m asking, no – demanding, that Costco start running their business like the neighborhood meth dealer. Because they know how to attract, keep and serve their clients.
Don’t get me wrong. Costco is a very successful business and they probably don’t need nor want my advice. But I’m just telling them – if they would just take some lessons from Walter White and Jesse they’d get me over there a lot more often.
JK