The Costco theory of the internet
STATUS // operational
Westenberg.<br>v1.0<br>2026
At FedMart, the discount chain Sol Price built in 1950s San Diego, you could buy a can of WD-40 in one size, the big one, and that was the end of the conversation. Anyone who wanted the small can went without. Price called it the intelligent loss of sales: carry one good version of a thing, refuse the other nine, and eat the customers you lose in exchange for the trouble you save everyone else.<br>Jim Sinegal, his mentee, carried that habit into Costco in 1983. A Costco warehouse stocks around 4,000 items; while a supermarket runs 30,000 or more, and Amazon runs into the millions. A Costco buyer looks after fewer than 200 products and spends the extra time that buys deciding which ones earn the floor space, killing the underperformers, and doubling down on the winners. By the time you push your trolley through the door, someone has already rejected almost everything that could have been there.<br>Most of the internet runs on the opposite instinct. Pile the shelf higher, add the SKU, take the margin, say yes to everything. And the people using it are worn out.<br>I'd bet the next decade runs the other way. People don't want infinite choice anymore; they want fewer decisions inside places where someone has already thrown out the worst options.<br>Call it the Costco theory of the internet.<br>For 20 years we built the internet around abundance: more products, more creators, more opinions, more newsletters, more podcasts, more apps, more tools, more marketplaces, more feeds. The founding promise was access: anything, from anyone, anywhere, instantly. No gatekeepers, no scarcity, no permission. The shelf went infinite.<br>For a while that felt like freedom.<br>And then it turned into drudgery...<br>Every ordinary decision now comes with a research burden. Buying a toaster means reading reviews, scanning Reddit, distrusting half the reviews, checking YouTube comparisons, searching for "best toaster no affiliate," then wondering whether the person recommending the toaster is paid, deluded, or defending the thing they already bought. Choosing project management software turns into a 6-week intellectual collapse involving Notion, Linear, ClickUp, Basecamp, Airtable, Todoist, Things, a whiteboard, a notebook, and some founder on X insisting that the wrong task app is why your company has no momentum...<br>The internet gave us access to anything, and then forced us to consume everything, and then made us responsible for sorting all of it.<br>The modern consumer has become a part-time procurement department. We audit quality, decode incentives, compare vendors, scan reviews, avoid scams, dodge subscriptions, read refund policies, assess creators, inspect screenshots, and attempt, against all odds, to tell actual expertise apart from people who bought a microphone.<br>This is considered normal behaviour now.<br>And it's deranged.<br>The sane response to all this is, I think, a form of bounded trust.<br>Costco never promised perfect quality or the best product in every category; and it isn't doesn't claim to be a temple of taste. It sells enormous muffins, bulk socks, patio furniture, protein shakes, car tyres, petrol, hearing aids, rotisserie chickens, appliances, and tubs of dip large enough to drown any and all sorrows.<br>But more than that: Costco sells a higher floor.<br>Their promise comes down to two things:<br>you probably won't get ripped off, and<br>you don't have to inspect 900 versions of the same item.<br>Costco doesn't necessarily take judgement away from you. But it does absorb enough of the evaluation that shopping feels sane again, limiting the shelf, buying with discipline, backing Kirkland Signature with its own name, keeping prices legible, and standing behind the lot with a return policy that assumes you're honest. You don't wander a marketplace full of fake brands, sponsored clutter, manipulated reviews, counterfeit risk, and algorithmic sewage.<br>Nobody walks into Costco believing every item is elite. They walk in trusting that the floor is higher than the open market, and they'll pay for that trust.<br>The internet doesn't need more curation in the precious boutique sense. It needs operators who cut fraud, noise, decision fatigue, and bullshit, and who clear the garbage off the floor before you arrive.<br>Amazon deploys abundance logic in soul-destroying reverse. It has everything, which by now means it has too much. You can still find good things there (or so I'm told), but you do the sorting, and it's very much a case of buyer beware - seriously, buyer fucking beware: parsing the brand names, the reviews, the images, the delivery dates, the sponsored placements, the counterfeit risk, and the chance that a product with 18,000 5-star reviews still singes off your eyebrows is down to you.<br>A world drowning in options will pay good money for someone else's refusal. Because refusal has become a premium service.<br>More results stop helping once the results are polluted. Reviews that...