It does feel like a case of the Costco hotdog going up to $2 followed by "grrrr. Thats it! I'm..... going to keep buying it because it is still damn cheap!"
I remember reading something about the Costco hot dog story, quite funny IMO, here's what I just found from 2018:
"I came to (Jim Sinegal) once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends.’ And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.’ That’s all I really needed. By the way, if you raised (the price) to $1.75, it would not be that big of a deal. People would still buy (it). But it’s the mindset that when you think of Costco, you think of the $1.50 hot dog (and soda)." [1].
Turns out Costco has a new CEO this year, and again the hot dog topic came to light apparently, lol. This article is from 2024:
"'To clear up some recent media speculation, I also want to confirm the $1.50 hot dog price is safe,' Millerchip said." [2].
Think about. Imagine they sell 100 hot dogs per hour. A $0.25 difference means $25/hr in a store doing many orders of magnitude more revenue each hour.
It’s nothing. The way they play it up in the media gets a lot of attention and builds goodwill, but it’s entirely meaningless to their bottom line.
It’s amazing that people eat these stories up, though. I’ve heard so many people repeating this story as if it’s some amazing secret.
When the price does increase, you'll know that there's a new CEO who's lost all connection to reality (in the same way that always happens when you put a person in front of an abstraction without obvious leaks).
It's not a loss leader. They still make a profit on the combo because the ingredients are cheap and it takes almost no labor to prepare on a per-dog basis.
And 1.50 is cheap now but was relatively expensive when the combo launched in 1985 (for comparison, a Big Mac combo with fries and a drink was 2.59, a KFC combo was around $3).
