Feudal Japan had a measurement called the "koku", which is roughly the amount of rice needed to feed a person for a year: about 330 lb. You can now buy 50 lb. of rice at Costco for $30, which is a few hours of work at minimum wage.
To me, that is a modern marvel. I don't want people to buy things that they don't need, and I also don't like the crowds, but I can't help but feel grateful for a stocked grocery store that is accessible to basically everyone—isn't that the dream?
I wish Costco were accessible to basically everyone. Among some poorer people I've got to know in the SF Bay Area, having the card and confidence in the means to use it are a mark of the middle class, an aspirational thing.
Membership is an up-front cost. That excludes those who can't part with the cash for no immediate benefit. Depending on what you buy, and what else is available around you, breakeven can take a good part of the year and a sizable number of purchases. Basically, you have to have the cash flow to play with money over time, even over a short timeline like an annual membership cycle.
Costco also sells many if not all items in relatively large quantity, so membership makes more sense for those who can afford to pre-buy and store more than they need. It's the inverse of something like a so-called dollar store, which is too often where poor people get stuck buying smaller than grocery-standard quantities at higher per-unit costs.
Of course, sometimes it makes sense to pool funds, buy together on one membership, and break packs. That costs coordination. Corner stores in poorer areas where I live often do this, with business memberships and resale certificates. At a margin, of course.
I can't pretend to truly understand what it's like not being able to afford Costco. But I've had some opportunities to hear people who see it as out of reach. And to make some trips with "guests".
I dont understand this. All Costco memberships are functionally $65 at most. How is this beyond literally anyone in America? Am I so out of touch? Why would corner stores have to pool together to get a membership when they absolutely negate the cost of the membership from the cashback? You only have to spend roughly $6,500/year for the executive membership of $130 to cost zero. That seems like something a corner store in any neighborhood wouldn't have much issue doing. As for the non store owners... $65 is the cost of one or two fast food meals. I don't believe this.
To maybe add some framing, 37% of Americans don’t have enough cash to cover a $400 unexpected expense. Obviously $400 > $65 but I think it puts some perspective on how tight cash flow is for a good chunk of the population.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/sheddata...
and what iphone model do these americans have?
I would be very very surprised if there were not adjustments that could be made that would significantly uplift these peoples situation
> and what iphone model do these americans have?
A smartphone is not an optional component of modern life. You need a smartphone to apply for many minimum wage jobs now
> enough cash to cover
You don't need to buy the membership with cash. Credit card, pay off $3-5 a week with your food savings, you'll barely pay any interest.
Also not having $400 would have to be the number after buying food with your paycheck, right? If you get the membership as part of your first food purchase, including that nice bag of rice, you'll be okay.
> You don't need to buy the membership with cash. Credit card, pay off $3-5 a week with your food savings, you'll barely pay any interest.
I’m guessing you don’t know many lower income people.
Not only are credit cards generally not part of the picture for these folks, but often they don’t even have bank accounts.
You’re not mathematically wrong, but you assume that everyone has a rational disciplined approach to their finances, and a reasonably stable income behind that.
And for buying in bulk (which is basically what Costco offers) to work, you need a larger amount of available cash up front, and a home with sufficient safe space for storage.
And of course you need some sort of transport to bring your bulk purchases home from the Costco, often built on cheap land away from dense housing.
As someone who has shopped at Costco using public transportation, that’s where your IKEA bags come into play. And you avoid bulk liquids at all costs.
You’re probably a professional with a good wage. The working poor are too poor to have much and too rich to be poor and get benefits. They are cashflow constrained.
When I coached little league, we had parents who walked miles to games because the bus fare (1.50) for 3-4 people would push them over the edge. Vulture companies like dollar general exist because they sell consumer staples in smaller quantities at a slightly lower price, but much higher unit cost.
Costco uses an upfront membership to allow you to buy large units of products at a consistently good price. The consumer needs excess cash flow for it to work. Saving on toilet paper doesn’t work if I can’t make my car payment.
Why are the dollar stores “vulture companies”? Costco and Trader Joes only puts their stores in or on the border of higher income neighborhoods. At least Dollar General is willing to locate their stores near poorer people.
Dollar General now has a similar profit margin to Costco:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DG/dollar-general/...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/profit...
Dollar Tree is slightly higher but much more volatile:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DLTR/dollar-tree/p...
Shit I guess I'm out of touch lol
No, you are not out of touch. Functionally everyone can afford a Costco membership and buy staples in bulk at a higher upfront but lower unit costs. The GP's comment about a family of four walking miles to a Little League game because they couldn't afford the bus fare is an extreme outlier.
There's a large overlap between people who cannot "afford" to shop at Costco and people who spend hundreds of dollars a month on scratch-offs. Whether or not someone shops at Costco is mostly a function of preferences and behavioral choices, not dollars.
It’s a banana, Michael, what can it cost, $65?
Family and neighbors shared Costco memberships when I was growing up. It's still accessible today to anyone who wants it
These are not out of luck people if this is a long term Problem. These are people who are chronically bad at allocating resources.
Even if they could afford the 65$ membership (yes anyone car). They couldn’t afford the per package goods. Is this even alluring to them? They demonstrate poor basic economic understanding.
> $65 is the cost of one or two fast food meals.
Okay I'm really curious, where do you live and what are you eating for a "fast food meal"? That's at least 10x what I pay for a fast food meal, and although I know California and other places are expensive, I wouldn't have guessed they are that expensive.
> $65 is the cost of one or two fast food meals.
You mean for a family... I hope?
$65 is just the cost of one or two minutes of fuel for a private jet
I've had friends homeless recently, Costco was the basis of the best choices of their poverty finance even when living out of a car.
I think it's accessible to even the poorest people who work in the US, but it doesn't mean it's cheap for them or worthwhile without a home/reasonable commute.
Time is a major commodity for people working 2 or more jobs and an hour and back commute to Costco is often not worth it.
> How is this beyond literally anyone in America?
not only is the membership cost up front, but because you're buying in bulk, the cost of the food is also up front; that doesn't work if you're literally living 2-week paycheck to paycheck. Nearly 40% of Americans have less than $500 in savings.
> $65 is the cost of one or two fast food meals ... Am I so out of touch?
yes
You are out of touch
In San Diego, we have a discount store called GTM that buys Costco closeouts and scratch-and-dent items and resells them for less. It has a loyal base of bargain shoppers, and it feels a bit like a treasure hunt.
You can buy normal or even individual quantities, like a single roll of paper towels, with no membership required. I imagine other big cities have similar stores, probably in lower-income areas, that fill a similar role.
In many cases that is the desired effect:
Cashflow constraints are a good predictor for problematic behaviour.
Example: Being poor is not the reason for drug addiction, but drug addiction will make you poor in the long run.
The one good thing about this is: As low liquidity is often used as a classifier to gate access, a single kickstart payment can sometimes do wonders.
A security deposit for a flat and money for a Costco card can change lives.
And thereby it is necessarily impossible for Costco to be available to everyone. The spending dynamic you've described is Costco.
Costo makes almost no money on food sale, and almost all of its profit from the membership fee. It's required for their business model, which is VERY friendly for its employees. This is an example of capitalism done right.
Historically speaking is that "enough food to keep someone alive for a year" or "the amount of rice one person eats in a year"?
There's 1655 calories in a pound of uncooked rice, so with 330lbs you are sitting at ~1500 calories a day for a whole year.
You wouldn't starve to death, but you'd absolutely want to supplement (both for more calories and probably for vitamins). But also you'd be eating that rice every single day pretty much, how else are you getting through that much rice?
Wouldn't you also need at least a little protein? and some lipids? For example, there is a lot more in Soylent than just rice flour. Oh, are we talking brown rice or white rice? That seems like it might make a huge difference, not only in nutrition, but also pooping.
For commoners in Feudal Japan, it would’ve been unpolished/brown rice, refining rice was labor intensive/expensive. When accessibility of white rice spread due to automation making it much cheaper, in the 1800s, it caused a huge epidemic of beriberi, which had once been a rich man’s disease, and killed a huge number of people.
There are famous stories of prisoners in Japanese prisons during the World Wars being healthier than their captors because they ate refined, white rice instead of the brown rice for the prisoners.
the biggest problem with white rice is the lack of fiber, the somewhat high glycemic index, and it has the same problem all processed grains have: lacking potassium, iron and magnesium. these days though white rice and other processed grains all come with added b-vitamins (before that started at the turn of the century, there were massive b-vitamin deficiencies popping up everywhere). white rice has less protein than most grains but at 9% of calories, that's still not bad though some variety wouldn't hurt.
don't get me wrong, white rice isn't the worst thing in your diet but i think it's great to diversify with some whole grains and lots of beans (a real superfood), many of which can be had for 2$ to 3$ per 2k calories.
The lameness is that brown rice is more expensive than white rice because it is a healthy choice.
I know, price is what the market will bear blah blah. There is just something that feels fundamentally wrong about a product cheaper to produce being sold at a higher price purely because its the better choice for your health.
Another cute principle in that category is convenience pricing. The 0.5L cola bottle with resealable twist cap is more expensive per liter than the 0.25L cans, purely because the bottle is more convenient to use on the go.
I don’t think it’s because brown rice is the healthier choice. I assume it’s because people buy it less and it spoils way, way faster.
And because people want it more. Economy of scale is off the charts for white vs. brown rice.
Isn't it also because white rice is more shelf stable?
> There is just something that feels fundamentally wrong about a product cheaper to produce being sold at a higher price purely because its the better choice for your health.
You just described almost all food sold in the US. The cheapest stuff is pure garbage. The more you try to escape the preprocessed garbage and get back to the raw, unprocessed, untreated, food, the more you pay. Insane, but true. (And then we wonder why Americans are so unhealthy.)
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...
Lack of thiamine will get you first but you can switch to Brown rice which has both
Err (150kg)(3500kcal/kg) = (5.25E5 kcal/E_koku)/(365 days) = ~1500 kcal/day. So not great working in the field or fighting for the average guy. But I feel like this is one of those things where the average lord didn't count how many fish you caught or what have you. So I bet if you had miso, fish, and like some vegetables from the outside your house, you would probably survive alright.
EDIT: the actual point is that it's probably not literal. Ease of quantifying and transporting dried rice over long distances without refrigeration probably had a lot of how they ended up with a Koku as useful measurement.
That much brown rice will have around 12 grams of fat and 35 grams of protein.
How much protein do you want for "at least a little"?
Supplement with the 50lb bag of beans that sits 20 feet away from the rice at my Costco and you are pretty much there.
rice and beans is a complete protein
weevils
I interpret as the latter:
> As a rule of thumb, one koku was considered a sufficient quantity of rice to feed one person for one year.
I assume "sufficient rice" means it needs to be supplemented, and this is supported by the footnote as well:
> Apparently 1.8 koku (1 koku and 8 to) was actually required for nourishment by a man each year, according to the conventional wisdom documented in a "home code" (kakun [ja]) of a certain merchant family in the Edo period.
Sometimes I do that and figure out how much time I work for something. For many, that is only one or two days of work to get a year of minimum calories.
If I decided to go full homestead and grow and process this myself, how long would that take? Way, way, WAY more than 2 days. Scale and specialization has done some amazing things and this is a great example of it.
That's about $200 a koku at Costco
Rice is not created equal. Don't you need brown rice for the nutrients?
Too bad in Japan that it's about 30USD for an 11 lb (5kg) of bad of rice. Japanese rice, in Japan, is nearly 5 times more expensive.
(Note that last year, 5kg bags were as much as 8000jpy for standard rice, prices have come down a bit, but not a lot.)
That’s because the rice sold in Japan is generally the highest quality, so it makes sense that it costs more than the rice exported overseas to places like American supermarkets and Costco. The rice you see in US stores is usually a lower grade than what stays in Japan, though not necessarily “low quality.” Japan has historically been pretty selective about what gets exported versus kept for domestic consumption.
There’s also been a rice shortage/crisis in Japan recently, which has pushed prices up even more. See here → https://www.borgenmagazine.com/japans-rice-crisis/ and here → https://old.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/1kthwmr/e/
I would guess that rice is also a lot better quality
Surely also restaurants and larger vendors have ways to buy rice in bulk in Japan - maybe they just don't have the American version for of this for consumers ? Sort of like how in the US people can go to a restaurant supply store (but often dont)
tariffs made Japanese rice farmers lazy.. just drop it and Japan will go back and eat rice
https://x.com/patrickheizer/status/2051972462414307659
> I don't want people to buy things that they don't need
What? This is 100% of 100% of us.