Alison Mau: Preparing my comfortable shoes and credit card for Costco

Friday, 14 June 2019

Bulk buy bargain retailer coming to New Zealand

OPINION: I'm just popping out to Costco. You may as well order the headstone now, because that'll be the engraving on mine.

You'll have heard this membership-only retail colossus has finally put a ring on it after years of flirting with New Zealand, and will build a 14,000sqm complex in West Auckland. The PR release plopped into my inbox on Tuesday, and the opening lines felt a little ominous.

'The launch of US bulk-buy club Costco in New Zealand shows the country has reached the population density needed to support the arrival of mega-retailers!!!' (emphasis mine) it thundered.

Sounding more like the opening voice-over from a climate disaster movie starring The Rock than a business update, the hyperbole galloped on - apparently retail has 'reached its next evolutionary stage which can only exist once the local population reached a critical mass'.

* Three reasons Costco is different from anything else in NZ

* Costco is coming to New Zealand, changing the way we shop**

Why do I feel like the arrival of Costco means retail Armageddon for some?

Big Box store Costco has announced its coming to New Zealand.

Maybe I'm catastrophising. Perhaps it won't mean the final blow in the lingering death of high street shopping outlets owned and run by Kiwis.

There is nevertheless a strange kind of fanaticism attached to the Costco brand by its loyal customers (sorry, members - it's going to cost you around $60 before your first purchase even makes it to the check-out) that's not inspired by other retailers. You can find Costco pretty much anywhere in the world - it has over 750 stores in 11 countries - but ubiquity has not calmed the cult-like consumer following it inspires.

They call it 'Costco craze.'

When I started falling down the Costco rabbit-hole I had to look hard online to find a single bad word said about it. As a shopping experience it's not everyone's cup of Darjeeling, but by all accounts it pays its workers well and you can't even give it a ticking-off for waste, since almost everything is sold in bulk; including - heave! - 10 litre buckets of macaroni cheese.

What else can you buy there? At least one of everything, from coffins to hearing aids to hot dogs. It is legendary for food, particularly roast chickens for five bucks. No, I didn't know that either, you're most welcome.

Before you rejoice too hard, you should know that its homebrand vodka - which some say rivals Grey Goose at a fraction of the price - won't be available at the Kiwi Costco, given the brand has chosen a site in the bounds of West Auckland's Licensing Trust-controlled 'dry' area.

All of the above and much more, bar the vodka, will be available to us at discounts of between 20 and 30 per cent. I love a bargain and I've long been of the opinion that '10 per cent off' does not a sale make; by contrast 30 per cent is a decent discount indeed. It's also part of the titanic retailer's modus operandi; instead of trying to work out the maximum it can charge for an item, Costco always asks 'could this be less expensive for the customer?'

Doesn't that sound great? It does to me. There are other parts to its MO, however, that you might not like quite as much.

Costco provides as little in-store signage as it can get away with, which means you have to trudge around the entire place to find the things you want. In this way you are much more likely to forget you only came for the three kilo can of crushed tomatoes and leave with the six-burner barbecue as well.

Alison Mau nearly killed her fern which she acquired in a spending spree at Bunnings.

Been there before. I remember when my folks were a bit younger and sprightlier, their favourite thing was to pop up to the local Bunnings Warehouse in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. We did not have Bunnings here at the time (it entered the NZ market in 2002) and their tales of happy Sunday afternoons among the building supplies always made me envious. Who wouldn't want to wander in a fog of DIY dreaming among the shelves for an hour or two?

The reality, of course, is so very different. I will pop in to our local Bunnings Warehouse (which is literally a five-minute drive from my house, help!) for two things max - on the last visit, it was LED bulbs and a new ladder fern to replace the latest one I killed. I inevitably won't choose a trolley because, well, I'm only here for two items, which are small, and which I can easily carry to the checkout I can just make out in the distance, half a kilometre down the store.

It's also a proper scandal that it's taken so many years for the proportion of women directors to limp up to this level, writes Alison Mau.

By the time I get to said checkout I am staggering under the weight of the bulbs, plant, a new mop, three replacement pop-up sink wastes from plumbing department (I've just watched a YouTube tutorial, it'll be fine) lawn seed, pet shampoo and a jumbo bag of barbecue charcoal.

The always-helpful checkout operator will suppress their seen-it-all snigger because, well, they've seen all this before. Usually just moments before, with the guy who went through juggling four boxes of floor tiles, five tubes of silicone and a kids' paddling pool.

Maybe this big-box retail thing isn't as fun as it sounds. Wear comfy shoes and always choose a trolley.

Retail marketing experts have analysed Costco and found it sells more stuff to more customers, because its members really do believe they're saving money by spending more money. Once they've surrendered to that, they also fall for the purchases they might not have expected to see in a discount warehouse. This has been my shopping mantra for years, and just quietly, it hasn't exactly made me rich.

Back to that PR release for a moment; interestingly, it wasn't sent by Costco but by Vinod Kumar, the Kiwi who found retail success with Mitre 10 Mega. Kumar is about to open another warehouse behemoth, furniture and homewares store Nido, on another chunk of dirt at Westgate. He is welcoming Costco with open arms and says it will be happy days for other West Auckland businesses too.

It might, if your business is a short shuffle from Costco. And if you don't sell the same stuff, because the whole point of Costco is to sell the stuff you can buy elsewhere but much, much cheaper.

Other retailers, particularly the supermarket duopoly behind New World, Pak 'nSave and Countdown, might feel the pinch. Their reaction this week was more like a gritted teeth smile than an open-arms welcome.

Either way, I live a quick 17 minutes drive from this retail promised land, and I'm likely to be there a lot. This lady loves a bargain, as long as it comes with a living wage for workers. In recent years I've managed to get a grip on my shop-more-save-more delusions and have been determined to collect far less stuff, for the sake of both the planet and my wallet.

With Costco looming, I fear my good intentions might not hold. So order the headstone, and come opening day in 2021, RIP my credit card.