The Dinner Party table is set for two guests tonight, which technically makes this less of a party and more of an unexpected dinner date.
A pop star who got a city ceremonially renamed after her for a weekend. A warehouse that sells a treasure hunt of super-sized proportions and hot dogs at a price frozen in time. Put them in a room together and your first instinct is to laugh.
Taylor Swift sells out stadiums in minutes. Costco sells mayonnaise by the gallon, and if you peel back the layers of the metaphorical onion, they’re both running a very similar business.
Host’s Note
I started concepting this Dinner Party pairing in an unserious way in my notes app and it refused to leave me alone for a very long time.
So here we are.
It came about during a spontaneous post-work Costco run. (BUCK’s New York office is two blocks away from a Costco, which is a gift for someone who grew up going there as a “family outing.”) After a long day, despite the vastness of the industrial warehouse-turned-store, walking in felt like entering a safety net. An institution that large has no business making me feel that safe, and yet it has held my trust and loyalty from childhood into adulthood.
I grew up on Costco. In 2001, my parents moved our family of four from Mumbai to New Jersey. As a young family starting out in the US, Costco was the crème de la crème for the best deals, bulk-buying, sampling, and countless hours of wandering, testing, buying, re-buying, and falling in love with specific products.
All of this to say: despite its scale, Costco has created memories, discovery, value, and long-term devotion. Not just for me, but for many.
So who else builds long-term devotion, curated abundance, and fandom at this scale? I ran through the usual suspects and kept landing on an unusual one. Of all people, Taylor Swift.
Table Setting
As an Art Director and Designer, I spend a lot of time building visual systems and brand “worlds”: core principles that run deep through every single touchpoint. Think of it as designing distinct character traits and values into a living, breathing person.
The hard part isn’t the logo or the fonts. It’s making those principles feel distinct and scalable on the back-end, then almost invisible on the front-end, until the brand stops being a thing people look at and becomes a world they can exist inside of.
Which is the long way of saying: I notice the machinery. And lately, I keep returning to the machine humming underneath two completely different surfaces.
The question for tonight is a little more nuanced than “what do Taylor Swift and Costco have in common?” That’s a semi-boring listicle.
Both of them figured out how to make millions of strangers come together, feel like insiders, repeat that feeling for decades, and build a moat around it.
How do you do that on purpose?
Meet the Guests
Taylor Swift needs almost no introduction, which is exactly the point. The Eras Tour became the highest-grossing tour ever recorded, generating $2 billion in revenue and roughly 10 million attendees across 5 continents. She refers to her fanbase, only half-jokingly, as a “nation.”
She turned heartbreak, catalog ownership, easter eggs, and stadium architecture into a living mythology wrapped up as emotional storytelling.
(Full disclosure: I could never call myself a Swiftie. I don’t stream her daily, I didn’t spend an arm and a leg on Eras tickets, and I definitely don’t have the stamina of her investigative journalists fans. I just admire her work ethic and mastermind approach to creativity and business.)
Tonight, she arrives first, greets everyone by name, references something you said weeks ago that you forgot you said, and drops one small comment at the start of dinner that she’ll absolutely circle back to by dessert. Everything is foreshadowed. She plans her clues years in advance and keeps PDF files to track them. She’s basically a project manager in a glitzy, probably symbolic, sequined dress.
Costco runs roughly 900 warehouses for over 140 million cardholding members, decorates none of them, and still gets treated like a destination. Its inventory spans most items under the sun: you can buy an engagement ring, a kayak, a gold bar, and a casket in a single visit if you wanted to. It’s basically a magical realm disguised as a bulk-buying warehouse, where you walk in for one thing and emerge with a heavily discounted month-long supply of many things you didn’t know you wanted.
With a membership, Costco sells you the right to shop for products that run at near cost. Its private label, Kirkland Signature, now does around 86 billion dollars a year and has quietly become one of the largest consumer brands on the planet. (According to WSJ, it’s now a bigger brand than Procter & Gamble and Kraft-Heinz.)
Costco shows up for the dinner party in a fleece jacket, carrying far too much food, and does not introduce itself. No small talk. It just starts feeding everyone, refilling your plate before you’ve asked, vaguely confused about why you’re thanking it. It hands you a freshly baked croissant, a hot dog, and a pizza slice that each cost less than they should, and lets you draw your own conclusion .
On paper, these two shouldn’t even be able to hold a conversation. One communicates in five layers of subtext at once while the other won’t put signs in its own aisles.
And yet, somewhere between the greeting and the first course, they clock each other. Taylor compliments the hot dog pricing as “a forty-year era, honestly iconic.” Costco, in response, hands her a free soda to go with it.
They own two different worlds, but with the same underlying system.
They acutely understand what most brands only dream of manufacturing: people don’t just want to consume, they want to belong in the consumption. The product is just a cover charge. What you’re actually buying is membership to a world that feels like it’s been waiting for you.
Palate Cleanser
This isn’t about celebrity or scale or commerce. Plenty of people have all three and inspire nothing but indifference.
The genius of these two guests is the ability to build infrastructure that breeds loyalty through selective curation.
A typical Costco stocks around 4,000 products. A Walmart carries something closer to 150,000. That’s its whole strategy: fewer choices ruthlessly chosen and then retailed at volume, resulting in better prices, more trust, and repeat return. The editing is the product.
Taylor curates eras. She doesn’t release everything she records. She withholds, sequences, re-records, hides, and then re-emerges using numerology to leave hints that track milestones and time announcements.
They both monetize the exact same emotion: the thrill of discovery.
Costco calls it a treasure hunt. A chunk of its inventory rotates constantly, there are no aisle signs and no map, so a quick stop for toilet paper becomes an expedition and whatever you leave with feels like a reward.
Taylor calls them easter eggs: clues planted in outfits, elevator buttons, and liner notes years in advance, waiting for whoever is paying close enough attention.
Different shelf, same architecture. Neither of them lets you simply receive the curation. You have to go find it. And the discovery bonds you to a world in a way a purchase never will, because now the finding is partly yours.
In both cases, the curation is the structure holding the whole thing up. It isn’t a surface layer or an after-thought. When it’s sustained long enough and through consistent value-filled discoveries for an audience, this curation converts into loyalty at a scale that paid media simply cannot buy.
As a designer/brand-builder, this is the part that makes me sit up. Clients usually come to you with a list of deliverables that aim to solve an existing problem. Usually, solving that problem is a short-term goalpost without lasting impact. It may not even be the right problem to solve. Actually, the entire system needs to be surgically analyzed and massaged into strategic → creative → executed constants that recur seamlessly and invisibly.
Side note: Some other great examples that succeed at this are Ralph Lauren, Rhode, A24, Love Island, but more on those another time. (Or read A24 x Love Island’s dinner party here!)
Appetizers
1. Membership is a feeling before it’s a model.
Membership begins when someone recognizes themselves in the world.
The ability to make people feel seen within a broader community is an act of becoming a member in it. Riding for its joy, disbelief, growth, setbacks, and staying anyway.
Turning fandom into a visible social interface that you can spot, trade, archive, and debate isn’t an easy task. But Taylor and Costco do it impeccably well.
People see Costco’s membership card and think the feeling comes from the fee to entry. I think it’s the other way around. The card only works because the feeling already exists inside, outside, before, and after. The smug little strut of being a smart shopper, of sampling before buying, of being in on the pricing strategy, of belonging to the club of people who know that you can write your will for $100.
Taylor obviously doesn’t have a literal membership plan. For her audiences, identification and recognition can be tiny. A phrase, an object, a color palette, a lore. She uses visible cues that say: this place has etiquette and you might have heard about it.
The small, visible signals of Swifties are friendship bracelets, the coded language, the inside jokes, the miniscule details about industry feuds. Through a reciprocal relationship of meaning-making, these tiny cues of belonging produce outsized loyalty which often results in shared experiences. We usually feel loyalty before we can name it. (Or as Swifties would do, speculate, theorize, and construct the meaning behind the name for it.)
Psychologist Russell Belk’s concept of “the extended self” suggests that our chosen possessions become part of who we are, or who we hope to become. I’ve been thinking about an “affiliative self”: the part of belonging that shapes our identity not only through what we own, but through the communities and cultural worlds those things allow us to enter.
The lesson: you create visible cues of belonging first. Spaces, rituals, inside jokes, objects that signal membership without anyone even having to announce it. When the feeling comes first, the struggle to strategize towards it later disappears. The model folds into everything after that.
2. Both are trust businesses built on repeat behavior.
This appetizer has two layers.
Layer one: pre-purchase trust. Before the ticket or the cart, there is already a relationship asset. It’s the well-oiled-machine of feeling that the audience-member-customer belongs inside a well-run world.
Layer two: never betray the regular. Underneath the fandom and the fanfare, these are boringly reliable, durable, and credible machines. And they get rewarded by sticking to that.
Let’s dig into that layer more.
Costco’s membership renewal rate sits around 93 percent. When their costs drop, they drop your price instead of pocketing the difference, which would probably be the more sound business model. Founder Jim Sinegal once explained why they refuse to creep prices up even when no one would notice: “It’s like heroin,” he said. You do it a little, they want more. So they built a wall against their own short-term greed. Their reward: a trust reserve so deep that when they raised the fee for the first time in seven years, almost no one left.
Its membership model, pioneered by Sol Price in 1976 as a revolutionary approach to warehouse retailing, guarantees a steady revenue stream through annual fees ($65 for basic, $130 for executive) which account for 92% of Costco’s net income. Ultimately, these fees drive customer loyalty and repeat visits and in turn, members get low prices, Kirkland Signature products, and free perks like in-store sampling, thereby building a relationship rooted in trust and value.
Taylor’s trust currency is the next era. You buy in repeatedly because she’s earned the belief that her next iteration, your interpretive participation, and the shared experience of it all will be worth it. And when the system around her failed the regulars, she made sure everyone knew which side of the counter she was standing on.
When The Eras Tour presale broke Ticketmaster in 2022 and locked millions of fans out, the rage flowed almost entirely at the platform instead of towards her. She publicly called watching it excruciating, but years of banked trust decided exactly where the blame landed.
Attendance for The Eras Tour literally influenced local economies. Funnily enough, Costco also influences local economies: a YouTube channel about microeconomics coined the term “Costco Effect” to explain the phenomenon that boosts local wages as companies aim to compete with Costco's higher pay.
And then there’s my favorite rhyme between these two. At some point, both of them pulled the same move: they put their own name on the product.
In 2020, Taylor began re-recording her first six albums as “Taylor’s Versions” and asked people to re-buy music they already owned. They did, in unprecedented numbers that no re-release ever has, because the ask was framed as reclaimed ownership rather than money extracted.
Costco has taken top-tier manufacturers’ products, stamped “Kirkland Signature” on them, and priced them below the national brands. Since its conception in 1995, the house label is now more trusted and loved than most of the brands it quietly replaced.
Same instinct, opposite aesthetics: your name on the jar is a promise, and if you’ve never broken one, people will continually reach for the jar with your name on it. (See: my obsession with the Kirkland pesto.)
The actual asset is repeat behavior, habitually sustained over years.
Main Course
The juiciest part about these two isn’t that they’re “power players” or “unexpected icons.” Lots of people are powerful and unexpected and still forgettable. The real convergence, the thing that struck a chord during my research, is this:
Both are elite operators in the business of making scale feel personal.
Taylor starts her mega sold out stadium shows simply by saying “Hi, I’m Taylor.” She casually turns massivity into intimacy. You could be one of thousands in the crowd, and by the end of the show you’d still feel like you just read her diary while crying along with strangers.
She’s also unusually brilliant at making a huge personal success feel handwritten and communal. Her official letter about buying back her catalog, despite it being an enormous financial and legal achievement, pulled at millions of heartstrings because of its emotional directness.
Her mastermind mechanisms are all invitations. She brought fans into her strife for years. She re-recorded her catalog and made the fight communal. She built a record-shattering tour around sharply authored “eras” and scattered easter eggs the whole way. Each move made us feel in on the mission, chosen for the messages because we paid close enough attention to catch them. And the genius is she kept it optional. As she put it once, you don’t need to do math if you don’t want to. The intimacy is there for whoever wants to reach for it, which is, of course, what makes everyone reach.
Similarly, Costco turns industrial logistics into member care. Behind the curtain, it’s forklifts, ruthless supplier negotiation, extensive background checks on companies they shelve, and sales-velocity spreadsheets. But none of that is what shoppers feel. We feel the $4.99 rotisserie chicken, the huge discounts on electronics, pharma, car rentals, you name it, and a return policy so forgiving that I sometimes treat it like a dare. There’s this quiet sense that somebody back there is fighting to keep your costs down (while also treating their own employees incredibly well). The experience is someone looking out for you.
Taking something enormous and bending it until it feels like it’s leaning toward one person. That intersection feels far more attainable than fame, money, or fandom on their own. Which, again, is exactly what any creative, not just me, chases when building a brand system. Make the scale feel ownable, make the seams disappear, and build for millions to feel like it was built for you.
The unshakable part is how well it works on me even when I can see the wires.
Dessert
So why do most brands try this and faceplant in slow motion?
I think there’s a few very evident patterns.
They build the model before they build the feeling. They launch with a loyalty program, points, tiers, an app, and then get baffled when no one seems loyal. The harsh reality is that you really can’t financialize belonging that was never there.
You can bring value in the short term, but our long-term attention is fleeting and our search for meaning is deeper. The card has to come after the club.
They confuse access with belonging. An Instagram channel and an influencer event is not a devoted nation. Access is a door and belonging is what makes you want to stay in the room. It’s built and earned gradually through rituals and language, not switched on at launch and expected to stick.
Speaking of language, I’ll also blatantly call out brands manufacturing inside jokes instead of earning them. Some do it well (Duolingo, Ryanair) and some just fall flat (Pepsi, womp). Real fan vocabulary grows from years of attention. The corporate version reads like a brand trying to use slang it learned in a meeting last Tuesday.
And the big one: they extract trust instead of banking it. They raise the price the second they can, quietly shrink the product, or take the easy margin. Costco’s whole point is that every one of those moves spends down a reserve most brands never bothered to build.
Trust is the only thing here that genuinely cannot be faked or fast-tracked, because the entire substance of it is time and restraint. It’s a steadfast willingness to leave money on the table this quarter simply to keep the relationship still standing in a decade.
That’s the uncomfortable bill at the end of the meal. The shared truth that makes Taylor and Costco work is the one thing you can’t shortcut.
Check, Please
There’s still one nagging issue at the back of my mind.
Belonging is being sold to us harder than ever right now. Every brand wants to have a story, a community, a world, a nation. Maybe the question isn’t how they accomplish this, but rather why we want it this badly, from these sources, and what we’re agreeing to in exchange.
The intimacy Taylor manufactures is, from another angle, a parasocial bond with someone who will never know your name. The care you feel at Costco is wrapped around buying six pounds of something you probably didn’t need for your cramped apartment.
I don’t have a tidy answer. What I do know is that the contradictions also keep things intriguing.
Earlier I admitted that all of this works on me even though I can see the wires. I’ve spent this entire essay taking the machinery apart, and not one gear stops me from feeling like an insider every time I walk through those warehouse doors or catch a reference. Honestly, that might be the highest compliment I can pay either guest: the trick keeps working on the person who sees right through it.
As for tonight: the plates are cleared, and it turns out Costco quietly paid the check an hour ago and now looks genuinely confused that it’s being brought up. Taylor left the 103% tip and we’re still decoding it, but early theories suggest it’s the release date for Reputation (Taylor’s Version).
So I’ll leave the last question to you, the way any good host would. A product, an artist, a place that’s taken you from childhood into adulthood; everyone has one. What’s your Kirkland pesto?
If you’re new here, hi!
Each issue of The Dinner Party is a cross-disciplinary thought experiment where two to three different people, brands, or cultural concepts are seated at the same metaphorical “table.”
We unpack their connective threads, commonalities in ideologies, and what they tell us about creativity, psychology, and culture today.
Bon appétit🍴🥂
This post was written & designed by a human. No generative AI was used.
I LOVED this! And you’re definitely a Swiftie. I’m in my sixties and feel exactly as you described. I wouldn’t change a thing.
absolutely love this piece! so thought provoking