“Here’s what our front end looked like at 7:30 tonight,” Reddit user u/IchBinDurstig posted to the Costco subreddit page along with a photo of what appeared to be vacant checkout lanes. “It snowed pretty heavily and our last 4 door counts combined was 31,” they added. For those that don’t speak in Costco employee, door counts are a tally of the number of people that enter the warehouse within a 30-minute period (via Quora). This means that in the case of this Redditor’s Costco, the store only saw 31 shoppers come in during a span of two hours.
As you might imagine, the rare phenomenon of an empty Costco – which was dubbed “Costco nirvana” by Redditor OCR10 in the comments – sparked a bit of jealousy among cardholders. “Man, I missed the perfect day to shop!” one user wrote, while another said that the sight was “beautiful.”
Timing (and snow tires) is key if you’re planning a Costco trip around inclement weather. As demonstrated on Popville, going too early could land you in an even larger crowd than the one you’d have to navigate on an average day. However, when executed right, the snowy shopping experience that awaits could be one of the best, depending on whom you ask. “I have said it before and told others. The absolute best time to go to Costco is when it’s snowing,” a Redditor shared. “I’ve gone twice in such situations and it’s a ghost town.”
