People Are Finding Friends — Community — and Even Love — at Costco
Wil Cid has been a Costco member since 1988, back when it was still called Price Club. He visits three to four times a week. Employees know him by name. When he came back from vacation, staffers stopped him every few feet asking where he'd been. Friends text his wife Vivian to report sightings.
"I tell them I'm not surprised," Vivian said. "He's there all the time."
She likes Costco too, she clarified. Just in "an average, normal, healthy way."
Wil is not an outlier. He's a symbol of something sociologists are paying genuine attention to — the quiet transformation of a wholesale warehouse into something resembling a community hub. For millions of Americans navigating a loneliness crisis that has hollowed out traditional social spaces, Costco has become an unlikely answer to a very old human need: somewhere to belong.
The Third Place Problem
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the concept of the "third place" decades ago — the spaces beyond home and work where communities actually form. Think parks, barbershops, libraries, church halls, neighborhood bars. Places where you showed up without an agenda, encountered people different from yourself, and built the kind of casual, low-stakes social fabric that holds communities together.
Those spaces are disappearing. Sprawling suburbs built around cars rather than walkability leave little room for organic gathering spots. Church attendance and civic club membership have been declining for decades. Face-to-face socializing has plummeted — federal data shows Americans now spend just 35 minutes a day connecting in person, down 15% from a decade ago. And the hours that used to fill parks and barbershops are now filled with screens.
"They're typically physically accessible, relatively low-cost, low-pressure hub/hangouts, socially welcoming to a diversity of folks, and multigenerational — all key third place attributes," said Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Commercial Spaces Have Always Done This
Costco isn't the first business to accidentally become a town square. It's the latest in a long line.
In the 1950s and 1960s, suburban malls were deliberately designed as community cornerstones — food courts, movie theaters, arcades, shops meant to draw people in and keep them. Fast food chains like McDonald's became low-cost social refuges where seniors lingered over morning coffee and students gathered after school. Starbucks built an entire brand identity around the third place concept — comfy chairs, free Wi-Fi, ceramic mugs. After a pandemic-era pivot to drive-thrus and mobile orders gutted that atmosphere, the company is spending enormous resources trying to get it back under its "Back to Starbucks" strategy.
Costco arrived at the same destination from the opposite direction. Nobody designed it to be a community hub. It just happened.
Love in the Frozen Food Aisle
When it comes to romance, Love Island has nothing on Costco.
Margot Schein, a self-described "Costco nerd," was browsing a dating app when she spotted Jules Parris's profile — which listed Costco as a favorite. Intrigued, Schein reached out. They met at a San Diego warehouse. They spent hours strolling the aisles, grazing on samples, and eating in the food court. Parris admits she forgot almost everything on her grocery list because she couldn't take her eyes off Schein.
After a cross-country move for graduate school, the couple returned to that exact San Diego store on the third anniversary of their meeting — and got married there. With the warehouse manager's blessing, they exchanged vows under an archway by the checkout stands.
They still do their Sunday morning shopping ritual together. "Costco literally brought us together," Schein said. "People are like, 'You must really love capitalism,' and I'm like, 'That's not it. I love this one store.'"
Robert Bonilla's story began with a similar twist. Days before Christmas in 2013, he was navigating a crowded frozen food aisle when he locked eyes with a woman in cowboy boots. Years later he proposed in that same aisle, attaching a marriage proposal note to a package of frozen shrimp. They eventually married after-hours inside the store while employees drove forklifts and restocked shelves around them.
The marriage didn't last. His relationship with Costco did.
Now single and still a regular at his Santa Maria, California warehouse, Bonilla hasn't ruled out a sequel. "You never know," he laughed. "I shop there all the time. In fact, I'm going there today."
How a Warehouse Became a Gathering Place
Part of what makes Costco work as a social space is structural. The stores are enormous but predictable — regulars develop routes, favorite sections, standing patterns. The food court prices haven't changed meaningfully in decades, making it genuinely accessible across income levels. The sample stations are the closest modern retail comes to the social ritual of sharing food with strangers. The sheer frequency with which dedicated members visit — multiple times a week for some — creates the kind of repeated casual contact that turns acquaintances into friends.
Vivian Cid's decision to throw her husband's 68th birthday party at the Costco food court wasn't a joke. It was the most honest location she could have chosen for a man who considers the warehouse his happy place.
There are Costco-themed Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members. Friends organize shopping trips together. People list Costco membership on dating profiles as a personality indicator — shorthand for frugal, practical, family-oriented. The joke version of this has enough cultural traction to be covered in podcasts and lifestyle pieces. Whether or not someone is serious, the underlying sentiment is real: shared values express themselves through where you shop, and Costco communicates specific ones.
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