“It is America’s greatest hot dog. And the country’s last great deal.”
Costco has held its hot dog and soda combo at the same price for decades while every other fast food deal quietly vanished. That’s not generosity, it’s a loss leader designed to get you through the door and into a $1,600 mattress or a pallet of paper towels. Still, the fact that a $1.50 meal counts as news says more about the collapse of the rest of the value menu than it does about Costco’s pricing genius. Everyone else raised prices and shrank portions. Costco just let the hot dog be the last honest deal left.