Toilet paper and detergent are prices that my wife watches like a hawk and then buys in bulk with BOGOFs or othet offers. They have incredible markups otherwise.
I trust Costco to have appropriate price/quality ratios. Not so low that manufacturers are cutting quality, and not so high that it would be a good use of my time to research elsewhere.
I dunno if this is still true, but it used to be the case (10+ years ago?) that Costco's pricing model was transparently "charge X% over cost", with X constant over all items.
This meant some items at Costco were expensive relative to what you could find elsewhere on sale, but it also meant it was phenomenally useful to figure out what items other retails were making obscene amounts of profit on.
You put a lot of trust in multinational corporations. Given the history of price fixing, cutting corners, etc to make an extra buck, I'm not sure I'd be so trusting.
If your assertions are correct, then competition is unnecessary since costco or any company would have the appropriate price/quality ratios. So we should only have 1 monopoly in every industry.
What's the point of having other large warehouse retailers when Cost is going to have the right price/quality? It's just redundant and wasteful.
I didn't mention any company other than Costco. They have built their trust with me over a few decades of consistent service and objectively cultivating better working environments than other similar establishments.
I also know all of their net income comes from membership fees, which means the margins for their products is likely going into essentials (I haven't heard of their organization indulging on lavish pay and parties and whatnot).
Of course, as a buyer, it is in my interest to have multiple vendors around to keep them competing. Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to go to other wholesalers also. However, technology does tend to reward the most efficient with all of the gains, so we seem to be inevitably going towards a future with fewer competitors and at most 2 or 3 businesses dominating each field. I don't know how to solve that problem, since as a buyer, I greatly benefit from the conveniences the efficiencies of scale afford me, but I know in the long term, the tables can turn and the seller can gain power over the buyer.
