Costco, in one sense, is simple enough to define. It’s a chain retailer that operates on a club model, offering members who pay sixty-five dollars a year the chance to buy bulk goods at prices close to wholesale. Costco sells fresh and packaged foods, household and pharmacy staples, electronics, furniture, and clothing, from both name brands and Kirkland Signature, the company’s private label, which appears on everything from golf clubs to gasoline. Employees, who receive excellent wages and benefits, often work there for years. The stores are called warehouses, and this captures their look: merchandise stacked on pallets across industrial shelves rising toward high ceilings.

从某种意义上说，好市多（Costco）的定义足够简单。它是一家采用会员制运营的连锁零售商，每年支付65美元会费的会员可以以接近批发价的价格购买大宗商品。好市多出售生鲜和包装食品、家居用品、药店常备品、电子产品、家具和服装，既有名牌商品，也有公司自有品牌“科克兰”（Kirkland Signature），该品牌商品涵盖从高尔夫球杆到汽油等各种品类。员工薪资优厚，福利待遇好，许多员工在那里工作多年。它的门店被称为“仓库”，这形象地描述了它们的外观：商品堆放在托盘上，置于工业货架上，这些货架高耸入屋顶。

During my childhood in San Jose, California, Costco was a source of many cherished treats—the six-pouch box of Ghirardelli triple-chocolate brownie mix comes to mind. Yet this fails to explain the atavistic loyalty I have to its warehouses. I know exactly how Costco smells—like clean concrete and the static of plastic wrap—and would recognize that smell anywhere. The parts of California where going someplace requires getting on a highway and driving for thirty minutes feel like both Costco’s native habitat and my own. The Costco where my family got its paper towels, frozen French-bread pizzas, and ibuprofen—Warehouse No. 148, on Senter Road—opened the week I was born. “I will be cremated in a Kirkland flame lol,” my brother texted me when he heard that I was writing about the company. My late father, our family’s designated Costco shopper, wore Kirkland Signature pants.

我童年时期在加利福尼亚州圣何塞（San Jose）生活时，好市多（Costco）是我许多珍爱零食的来源——我立马想到了那盒六袋装的捷尔德利（Ghirardelli）三重巧克力布朗尼预拌粉。然而，这并不能完全解释我对好市多门店那种根深蒂固的忠诚。我清楚地知道好市多闻起来是什么味道——就像干净的水泥地和保鲜膜摩擦产生的静电味——无论在哪里我都能辨认出这种气味。在加利福尼亚州，那些需要驾车在高速公路上行驶三十分钟才能抵达的地方，感觉既是好市多天然的生长环境，也是我自己的家园。我家常去购买纸巾、冷冻法式面包披萨和布洛芬的那家好市多——位于森特路（Senter Road）的148号仓库——在我出生的那周开业了。我哥哥听说我正在写关于好市多的文章时，发短信给我说：“我大概会‘在科克兰（Kirkland）的火焰中火化’吧，哈哈。”我已故的父亲，我们家指定的好市多购物员，就穿着科克兰自有品牌（Kirkland Signature）的裤子。

Recently, I called my dad’s best friend, Scott Willis. He and my dad, then colleagues at the San Jose Mercury News, spent my childhood riffing on their respective Costcos. “We were both on journalism salaries in Silicon Valley,” Scott told me—it was fun to get a deal. These days, he said, he likes to go early to Senter for gas and to the Coleman Avenue Costco—“a great Costco”—for the kind of San Pellegrino that his wife prefers.

最近，我给我爸爸最好的朋友斯科特·威利斯（Scott Willis）打了电话。当时，他和爸爸是《圣何塞信使报》（San Jose Mercury News）的同事，在我童年时期，他们经常津津乐道地谈论各自常去的Costco。“我们俩在硅谷都只拿着记者的薪水，”斯科特告诉我，“所以能买到便宜货真是件开心的事。”他说，现在他喜欢提前去圣特（Senter）加油，然后再去科尔曼大道（Coleman Avenue）的Costco——“一家很棒的Costco”——去买他妻子喜欢的那种圣培露（San Pellegrino）矿泉水。

Get Costco shoppers talking and they all have personal strategies and rules. “If I can’t find parking in under eight minutes, I drive away,” the comedian Sheng Wang says in his 2022 standup special. Shopping there almost inevitably involves a degree of hassle: not only parking but searching, schlepping, and waiting in line. It is the opposite of frictionless, a term usually valorized in modern commerce. But friction is where stories begin, and people love telling stories about Costco—which relies on word of mouth rather than advertising.

问起Costco的顾客，他们每个人都有自己的一套购物策略和规矩。喜剧演员王盛（Sheng Wang）在他2022年的脱口秀特辑中说：“如果八分钟内找不到停车位，我就开车走人。” 在Costco购物几乎不可避免地会遇到一些麻烦：不仅是停车难，还得费力寻找商品、搬运大件物品，以及排队结账。这与现代商业中通常备受推崇的“无摩擦”购物体验（即顺畅无阻）截然相反。然而，正是这些不便之处才产生了许多故事，人们也乐于分享关于Costco的购物经历——Costco也正因如此，比起广告，它更依赖顾客的口口相传。

Costco might have no more dedicated evangelists than David and Susan Schwartz, the authors of the 2023 book “The Joy of Costco,” a self-published compilation of company trivia and history. It abounds in raw numbers (“In 2022, Costco members bought over $300,000 worth of whole cashews every week”) and feats of operational savvy (using square rather than round containers “saved over 400 truckloads of shipping expenses in just the first year”). The New York-based Schwartzes visit Costcos all over the world; a few years ago, they flew to New Zealand, in part to see the Auckland warehouse, and Susan brought hard-boiled Costco quail eggs for the flight. These got her fined four hundred dollars at customs. “They were eight ninety-nine plus four hundred,” Susan told me. “So it wasn’t such a good deal.”

好市多可能没有比大卫·施瓦茨（David Schwartz）和苏珊·施瓦茨（Susan Schwartz）这对夫妇更忠实的拥护者了，他们是2023年出版的《好市多的乐趣》（The Joy of Costco）一书的作者，这本书是他们自主出版的关于公司趣闻和历史的汇编。书中充满了各种未经修饰的数据（例如，“在2022年，好市多会员每周购买了价值超过30万美元的完整腰果”）和展示其高超运营智慧的案例（例如，使用方形而非圆形容器“仅在第一年就节省了超过400卡车的运输费用”）。居住在纽约的施瓦茨夫妇走访了世界各地的好市多门店；几年前，他们飞往新西兰，部分原因就是为了参观奥克兰的好市多门店，苏珊还带着从好市多买的煮熟的鹌鹑蛋乘坐飞机。这些鹌鹑蛋让她在海关被罚款四百美元。苏珊告诉我：“它们（鹌鹑蛋）是8.99美元，再加上400美元的罚款，所以这笔交易就一点也不划算了。”

A cottage industry of Costco influencers has emerged in the past five years or so. There are accounts with millions of followers and a flock of smaller hobbyists, all posting near-interchangeable updates on what’s for sale. Claudia Chee was a burned-out ex-Google employee when she started uploading videos of herself trying on Costco clothes in the company’s Bay Area locations; she now has more than two hundred thousand followers as @costcoclaudia and calls the warehouse her “safe space.” Nadia Christensen, a nurse in Florida, posts under the name @costcoshares; her 2021 clip of an employee describing Kirkland margarita offerings took off. “It was my friend Robert,” she told me. “I mean, I don’t talk to him outside of Costco, but every time I see him there we chat.” Chee’s and Christensen’s attachment to Costco recalls a 2016 episode of the sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat” in which a Florida warehouse becomes the weekly haven of an exacting immigrant mom played by Constance Wu. “I feel so calm here,” she sighs. “Just knowing the bulk deals are waiting.”

过去大约五年，围绕Costco（好市多）形成了一个网红小众行业。既有拥有数百万粉丝的账号，也有一大批规模较小的爱好者，他们发布的商品促销信息几乎大同小异。克劳迪娅·芝（Claudia Chee）曾是一名身心俱疲的前谷歌员工，她开始在Costco（好市多）湾区门店上传自己试穿Costco（好市多）服装的视频；现在她以@costcoclaudia的名义拥有超过二十万粉丝，并称这家仓储式商店是她的“避风港”。佛罗里达州的护士娜迪亚·克里斯滕森（Nadia Christensen）以@costcoshares的名义发布内容；她在2021年发布的一段视频走红，视频中一名员工介绍了柯克兰（Kirkland）品牌的玛格丽塔鸡尾酒（margarita）产品。她告诉我：“那是我朋友罗伯特。我意思是，在Costco（好市多）外面我们不怎么说话，但每次在那里见到他我们都会聊上几句。”芝（Chee）和克里斯滕森（Christensen）对Costco（好市多）的依恋，让人联想到情景喜剧《初来乍到》（Fresh Off the Boat）2016年的一集：剧中，由吴恬敏（Constance Wu）饰演的一位严苛的移民妈妈，把佛罗里达州的一家仓储式商店当作她每周的避风港。她叹了口气说：“我在这里感到如此平静。只要知道那些大宗优惠商品都在等着我，就心满意足了。”

Last year, A. J. Befumo, a former independent pro wrestler, and his preteen son Eric found fame on TikTok by proclaiming themselves “Costco guys,” in a video that now has more than sixty-five million views. Since then, they have reviewed snacks on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and promoted a novelty single called “We Bring The BOOM!” In January of 2020, TMZ published a photo of Mark Zuckerberg browsing electronics at the Mountain View warehouse. “This man can have anybody buy his flat-screen TV,” Christensen told me. “But he was, like, No, I’m going to Costco.”

去年，前独立职业摔跤手A. J. Befumo和他的青少年儿子埃里克（Eric）在TikTok上自称“Costco死忠粉”，一个如今已获得超过6500万次观看的视频让他们一举成名。此后，他们登上了《吉米·法伦今夜秀》（The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon）点评零食，并推广了一首名为《We Bring The BOOM!》的趣味单曲。2020年1月，TMZ发布了一张马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）在山景城Costco门店浏览电子产品的照片。克里斯坦森（Christensen）告诉我：“这个人完全可以派任何人去给他买平板电视，但他却说，不，我要自己去Costco。”

A warehouse’s selection often reflects its surrounding community: shoppers at the Brooklyn Costco can find whole halal lamb, kosher chickens, and cases of swallow-nest soup. The company’s term of art for its shopping experience is the “treasure hunt,” a nod to the pursuit of the limited-quantity luxuries that wash up on its shelves—Louis Vuitton Speedy handbags, say, for just under seventeen hundred dollars each, about three hundred less than the market price. My brother, who has shopped Costcos in San Diego, Denver, and Tukwila, Washington, said that he found the term misleading; the whole point is that you don’t really know what you’re looking for. We were talking while wandering through the Manhattan Costco, where, in the meat department, 16.62 pounds of boneless rib eye caught his attention. It was $15.99 a pound—$265.75. “Well priced,” he said, appreciative even if he wasn’t looking to buy steak for thirty-three.

一家仓储店的商品选择通常会反映其周边社区的特点：比如，在布鲁克林的开市客（Costco），顾客可以找到整只的清真羊肉（halal lamb）、犹太洁食鸡肉（kosher chickens）以及一箱箱的燕窝汤。该公司将这种购物体验称为“寻宝”，这指的是人们追逐货架上那些数量有限的奢侈品——比如路易威登（Louis Vuitton）的Speedy手袋，每只售价不到一千七百美元，比市场价便宜约三百美元。我的兄弟曾在圣地亚哥（San Diego）、丹佛（Denver）和华盛顿州图克维拉（Tukwila）的开市客（Costco）购物，他认为“寻宝”这个词具有误导性；因为真正的关键在于你根本不知道自己到底在找什么。我们在曼哈顿的开市客（Costco）里闲逛时聊天，在肉类区，一块重达16.62磅的去骨肉眼牛排吸引了他的注意。这块牛排每磅15.99美元，总价265.75美元。“价格很划算，”他说，尽管他并没有打算为三十三个人买牛排，但他仍表示赞赏。

There is an easy comedy of bigness to Costco. It’s a vein of humor that Barack Obama tapped in 2014, when he praised the company’s employment practices in an address at a Maryland warehouse. “Before I grab a ten-pound barrel of pretzels and five hundred golf balls,” Obama said, “let me just leave you with something I heard from Costco’s founder Jim Sinegal, who’s been a great friend of mine.” The line Obama went on to quote—“We did not build our company in a vacuum. We built it in the greatest country on earth”—came from a speech that Sinegal, who served as Costco’s C.E.O. for nearly thirty years, had given at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. In such rhetoric, Costco could represent a culmination of twentieth-century American liberal ideals: it promised bounty, equitably and efficiently distributed—the good life, albeit one trailing all the detritus of twentieth-century American consumption. The jokes about gallon jars of mayonnaise perhaps obscure the company’s true power. When Costco began sourcing most of its farmed salmon (six hundred thousand pounds per week) from Norway rather than Chile, it caused upheaval in the global fishing industry.

好市多（Costco）的“大”本身就带着一种天然的幽默感。这种幽默感在2014年被巴拉克·奥巴马（Barack Obama）巧妙地利用，当时他在马里兰州一家好市多（Costco）仓库的讲话中赞扬了该公司的雇佣制度。奥巴马说：“在我买下十磅重的椒盐脆饼桶和五百个高尔夫球之前，我想和大家分享一句我从好市多（Costco）创始人吉姆·西尼格尔（Jim Sinegal）那里听到的话，他是我的一位老朋友。”奥巴马随后引用的那句话——“我们不是在真空中创立我们的公司。我们是在地球上最伟大的国家创立的”——出自西尼格尔（Sinegal）在2012年民主党全国代表大会上发表的讲话，他曾担任好市多（Costco）首席执行官近三十年。在这种言辞中，好市多（Costco）可能代表了二十世纪美国自由主义理想的顶点：它承诺提供丰富、公平且高效分配的商品——一种美好的生活，尽管这种生活也伴随着二十世纪美国消费主义的所有“副产品”。关于加仑装蛋黄酱的笑话，或许掩盖了好市多（Costco）真正的力量。当好市多（Costco）开始将其大部分养殖三文鱼（每周六十万磅）从挪威而非智利采购时，它在全球渔业引起了轩然大波。

Growing up involves learning that certain things are specific to your family, and certain things are more like general conditions; Costco clearly falls into the latter category. Still, being a child of California in the eighties and nineties offered a front-row seat to the rise of a retail juggernaut. Costco opened its first location in Seattle in 1983; five years later, it had some fifty stores, concentrated on the West Coast; today, there are more than nine hundred Costco warehouses around the world. (Seventy-one per cent of the population of Iceland are members, according to one survey.) Worldwide, in terms of revenue, only Amazon and Walmart are larger retailers. The Kirkland label, introduced in 1995, now generates more revenue than Nike.

成长的过程让我们认识到，有些事物是家庭独有的，而有些则更像是普遍存在的现象；好市多（Costco）显然属于后者。不过，作为在八九十年代成长于加州的孩子，我们亲眼目睹了一个零售巨头的崛起。好市多于1983年在西雅图开设了第一家门店；五年后，它已拥有约五十家门店，主要集中在美国西海岸；如今，全球好市多仓储店的数量已超过九百家。（根据一项调查，冰岛71%的人口都是好市多的会员。）从全球营收来看，只有亚马逊（Amazon）和沃尔玛（Walmart）是比它规模更大的零售商。1995年推出的科克兰（Kirkland）自有品牌，如今创造的营收甚至超过了耐克（Nike）。

But what exactly makes Costco Costco? This is a question that interests Maggie Perkins, a corporate trainer at the company who travels the country to instruct employees in its ways. Perkins posts about her job on TikTok, and she has noticed something in people’s replies: “They say ‘my Costco.’ ” The loyalty of Costco’s following—at latest count, it had a hundred and forty-five million members globally—is an existential matter for the company. “The most important item we sell is the membership card,” Ron Vachris, the current C.E.O., has said. The company’s low prices are possible because membership fees account for much of the profits. “For Costco, culture is a business strategy,” Perkins told me. Its success requires being a place where people want to belong—and, for all Costco’s hard-nosed pursuit of low prices and high quality, such a desire has rested on an elusive sense of the company as a force for good in the world. But that world and its values seem more fragile than they used to. “As the global landscape changes,” Perkins said, “as retailers change, as the way that people do business changes, if Costco’s culture changes in a way that consumers do not appreciate, then Costco could lose who it is.”

但到底是什么让Costco成为了Costco？这是玛吉·珀金斯（Maggie Perkins）很感兴趣的一个问题，她是Costco的内部培训师，常年在全国各地指导员工如何工作。珀金斯会在TikTok上分享她的工作，她注意到人们在回复中常常说：“我的Costco。” Costco顾客的忠诚度——根据最新统计，它在全球拥有1.45亿会员——对公司来说是一个关乎存亡的问题。现任首席执行官（C.E.O.）罗恩·瓦克里斯（Ron Vachris）曾说过：“我们销售的最重要的商品就是会员卡。” Costco之所以能提供低价商品，是因为会员费贡献了其大部分利润。珀金斯告诉我：“对Costco来说，企业文化就是一种商业策略。” 它的成功在于它是一个让人们愿意归属的地方——尽管Costco坚定不移地追求低价和高品质，但这种归属感却建立在一种难以捉摸的认知之上，即这家公司是世界上的一股积极力量。然而，那个世界及其价值观似乎比以往任何时候都更加脆弱。珀金斯说：“随着全球格局的变化，零售商的变化，以及人们做生意方式的变化，如果Costco的企业文化发生消费者不认可的改变，那么Costco就可能失去其本来的面貌。”