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By Alan SiegelJuly 2, 10:30 am UTC • 10 min

Food<br>America’s Greatest Hot Dog<br>The price and quality of the $1.50 Costco frank haven’t budged in 40 years. It’s the last—and best—deal in the country.

FoodAmerica’s Greatest Hot Dog<br>The price and quality of the $1.50 Costco frank haven’t budged in 40 years. It’s the last—and best—deal in the country.

Conal Deeney, conaldeeney.com<br>By Alan SiegelJuly 2, 10:30 am UTC • 10 min

On March 18, Ron Vachris became the first CEO in recent memory to go viral for something positive. That day, he was featured in a 41-second Instagram video he took on his lunch break. In it, he orders one of his company’s signature $1.50 hot dogs, sits down at a food court table, unsheaths the quarter-pound-plus frankfurter, and takes a huge bite.<br>While he’s polishing off that famous Costco weiner, he looks into the camera and says, “The hot dog price will not change as long as I’m around.” The clip piled up nearly 9 million views in a single day.<br>As soon as the post went up, Vachris started receiving messages. Most of them, he tells me over email, went something like this: “It looks like you have enjoyed many hot dogs over the years.”<br>The overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to the video surprised Vachris, who started at Costco as a forklift driver. “This was done with a cellphone in a warehouse,” he says. “And that’s us, no frills!” He knows the truth: The flowers were not for him. “The Costco hot dog is the star,” he says before dressing up his zinger with a little extra mustard. “I was just along for the ride.”

That might sound like cheeky corporate propaganda, but Vachris is right. There is no fast food item as beloved as the Costco hot dog. For a buck fifty—the price has stayed the same since it was introduced in the ’80s—you get an all-beef dog and a fountain soda (or now, a bottle of water). In the 2025 fiscal year, the warehouse club reportedly sold 245 million of those combos. There’s a reason why Julia Child herself used to eat two Costco dogs at a time with mustard and sauerkraut.<br>“What’s not to like?” says Simpsons writer turned professional foodie Bill Oakley, the man behind “Steamed Hams.” “I mean, it’s the archetypal hot dog.”<br>“The thing is, it’s so good,” says Nick Wiger, cohost of the long-running chain restaurant review podcast Doughboys, “it’s hard to even call it fast food.”<br>Wiger and his cohost, Mike Mitchell, have spent the past decade experiencing the decline of some of their favorite national chains. Costco is an exception. “So much of the food quality has dropped and the price has gone up, but that hot dog has stayed pretty consistent,” Mitchell says. “I’ve got to give it to them.”<br>The fact that the Costco dog is inflation proof doesn’t hurt its case, either. “It costs $1.50, and it doesn’t taste like nuclear waste to most people,” says Jamie Loftus, author of the book Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs. “Because there are other $1.50 hot dogs out there. They’re very, very rare now. But even rarer is that you would recommend them to someone or eat them out of anything other than a need for survival.”<br>In a world where the McDonald’s Dollar Menu is long gone, a 7-Eleven dog costs over $2, and it’s a challenge to stay on budget at Taco Bell, the Costco frank stands alone. It is America’s greatest hot dog. And the country’s last great deal.

Julie BoneBob Collins eats a hot dog almost every day. That’s just life as Costco’s director of food court operations. “We’re doing our own quality checks all the time,” he says. When we talked in June, I asked him what he thought made the $1.50 combo so popular.

“I’ve asked myself that quite a bit,” Collins says. “I’ve been in the food court since 2000, so 26 years. And I’ve learned a long time ago that the food court really isn’t ours. It’s our members’. And it’s very special to the members.”<br>The Costco hot dog is special because these days it seems rare: It’s low cost and high quality. Even if you’d need to eat an unhealthy number of them to fully offset the cost of the store’s $65 base annual membership fee, it’s a perk that makes joining the club feel worth it.<br>“It’s a goodwill builder,” Oakley says. “The thing about Costco is that for better or worse, it feels like they care about your patronage. As opposed to every other store, from Target to Walmart to Ross Dress for Less. They couldn’t give a shit if you come in or not.”<br>There’s also the obvious nostalgia factor. “Even in indoor food courts, we still have umbrellas up,” Collins says. “It’s something that people look for. And our menu boards haven’t changed a whole lot. And I think it’s just a throwback.”

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