Few retail experiences stir up as much passion as a Costco run. People don’t just shop there – they have opinions about it. Strong, loud, sometimes surprisingly personal opinions. Whether it’s over a $4.99 chicken or a calzone that nobody asked for, the debate never really stops.
In 2025 and into 2026, a wave of changes hit the beloved warehouse, and shoppers are not staying quiet about it. From swapped soda brands to membership scanners blocking the ordering kiosk, the debates online have grown surprisingly passionate. Reddit threads, TikTok comment sections, and Facebook groups have become digital battlegrounds. Let’s dive into the nine food deals currently dividing the Costco faithful.
Table of Contents
1. The $1.50 Hot Dog Combo: Sacred Ground or Outdated Anchor?
Here’s the thing – very few deals in American retail history have stayed frozen in time the way this one has. The iconic $1.50 hot dog and soda combo has defied inflation since 1985 and remains one of retail’s best bargains today. That’s not a typo. Four decades, same price.
The Costco food court hot dog is a quarter-pound hot dog and a 20-ounce drink for only $1.50 – one of the best deals on hot dogs around. The debate, though, isn’t about the price. It’s about whether Costco is quietly undermining the experience around it. Critics argue that membership scanners, standing tables, and soda brand switches are chipping away at the casual magic this combo once represented.
Costco vigorously guards its food court prices. Costco’s ex-CEO, Jim Sinegal, was so impassioned about the $1.50 hot dog combo that he once famously told a colleague he would kill anyone who raised it. That level of institutional commitment is rare. Honestly, it’s almost funny how serious the company is about this – but shoppers love them for it.
2. The $4.99 Rotisserie Chicken: Beloved Bargain or Troubling Trade-Off?
The price of the Costco rotisserie chicken is technically $4.99. In fact, it has been $4.99 since the year 2000, with a very brief sojourn to $5.99 during the financial crisis of 2008. But Costco brought that price right back down to $4.99 in 2009. Few other grocery items can claim anything close to that kind of price stability.
Reuters reported that Costco sold more than 157 million rotisserie chickens worldwide in 2025. That’s an almost incomprehensible scale. Costco’s chicken processing plant, LPP, has received a Category 3 safety rating from the USDA – the lowest level – 92% of the time since it opened in 2019, meaning it has had a chronic contamination problem and has failed year after year to clean up its act. That revelation, first reported by the nonprofit Farm Forward, sparked a fierce new round of debate.
Despite economic pressures, Costco has kept its rotisserie chicken at $4.99 – a price unchanged for over a decade, and this is no accident. The rotisserie chicken is the very definition of a loss leader – a product that a store sells at a super low price, usually less than what it costs the store to make, in an effort to get more foot traffic in the store. Still, for millions of families, the value-versus-risk argument continues.
3. The Food Court Pizza: Worth the Grease or Overrated?
The $1.99 pepperoni pizza slice is still a crowd favorite – big, cheesy, and satisfying. Yet it’s also one of the most divisive items on the entire menu, with vocal camps on both sides. Fans swear nothing beats it after a long shopping haul. Detractors point to quality concerns they say have gotten worse.
The pizza is super greasy. The melted mozzarella looks fine at first, but a thick layer of oil covers the top, which is why the slice feels heavy and unappetizing. When the cheese is pulled back, there’s very little sauce underneath – only on the top third of the slice. The rest is dry. That said, at under two dollars for a slice that can feed a small child on its own, the price-to-size ratio is hard to argue with.
During the first quarter earnings call, Costco CFO Gary Millerchip reported record pizza sales on Halloween, up 31% from the same day in 2024, with 358,000 whole pies served. Love it or hate it, the pizza is clearly still moving. Numbers don’t lie.
4. The New Combo Calzone: Bold Addition or Pricey Overreach?
Not everyone was thrilled when Costco decided it wasn’t enough to sell pizza by the slice. As of May 2025, there is a new Combo Calzone on the menu for $6.99, stuffed with pepperoni, sausage, cheese, tomato sauce, onions, peppers, olives, and mushrooms – but at $5 more than a slice of Costco pizza, shoppers pay a premium for the extra ingredients. That’s a steep jump in the Costco universe, where even a dollar feels significant.
In 2025, the food court came out with a new flavor. Or rather, flavors, since the combo calzone includes a bunch of different pizza toppings: cheese, mushrooms, olives, onions, peppers, pepperoni, and sausage. There’s truly something for everyone in there, all wrapped up in a portable pastry pocket. The pro-calzone crowd sees it as an upgrade. The skeptics think it’s just a pizza wearing a disguise at double the cost.
I think the calzone is genuinely a solid product – but the debate reveals something deeper. Costco shoppers are fiercely protective of their low-price identity. Anything that creeps above a few dollars gets scrutinized under a microscope no other retailer faces. That’s actually kind of a compliment, if you think about it.
5. The Kirkland Bacon: Still a Deal or a Shrinking Shadow of Its Former Self?
In recent years, Costco shoppers have noticed that its Kirkland bacon has gone downhill. Some people have designated the decline of its protein as occurring post-COVID, but there’s been a definite shift in the quality of Kirkland Signature slices in 2025, which customers now report is thin and stringy. This is a complaint that has spread from Reddit into mainstream food coverage.
The Kirkland Signature Sliced Bacon you’ll get at Costco these days really puts the “slice” in sliced bacon. “So paper thin I can’t even hold it up without it falling apart. And this is with me being very, very careful when removing it from the package,” one frustrated Redditor wrote. Meanwhile, the price hasn’t exactly stayed humble either.
Bacon prices in general have been climbing steadily across the country, hitting an unprecedented $6.70 per pound in January 2025 for raw, uncooked meat. So there’s really no escaping the markups regardless of where you shop. Some shoppers accept that reality. Others still feel Costco’s quality slide is a betrayal of a product they once trusted completely.
6. The Almond Croissants: Undisputed Win or Overhyped Pastry?
Another welcome addition to Costco’s 2025 bakery lineup has been its almond croissants. These pastries are similar to ones you’d find at a pâtisserie, with their flaky outer layer and sweet almond paste filling. The difference, though, is that you can pick up a dozen for just $6 as opposed to paying a couple of bucks per piece as you would at a bakery. That value proposition is almost absurd when you compare it to what a comparable item costs at any coffee shop.
Almond croissant fans note they taste much better re-baked before serving. Although the pastry is a bit denser than expected, the filling has a pleasing light sweetness. Not everyone agrees, of course. Some shoppers feel the texture falls short of a real patisserie version, and the debate over whether warehouse-baked pastries can ever truly compete with artisan ones is alive and well on food forums everywhere.
It’s hard to say for sure whether the almond croissant will achieve the cult status of the rotisserie chicken. But given that it delivers patisserie vibes at grocery-store prices, it’s hard not to root for it. The divide usually falls along one line: people who have reheated them properly, and people who haven’t.
7. The Kirkland Lasagna: Comfort Food Classic or Shrinkflation Scandal?
Few Costco items carry as much nostalgia as a big tray of ready-made lasagna shoved into the oven on a Tuesday night. Simple, cheap, feeds the whole family. At least, that’s how it used to feel. A price rise from $9.99 in 2020 to $17.99 in 2025 has got to sting. Not only that, but while your family may have been getting larger, the size of the Kirkland Signature lasagna was allegedly shrinking by 25%, at least according to a Reddit user.
This is what people mean when they say “shrinkflation.” The price goes up, the size goes down, and suddenly what felt like a genius family meal deal feels a lot less genius. Due to a combination of inflation, tariff fears, and the lasting impact of COVID-19, supermarkets have had to reassess suppliers and how they make their items – and this has meant some fan favorites have suddenly felt less appealing.
Let’s be real: $17.99 for a ready-made family lasagna is not outrageous in 2026’s grocery landscape. The debate only burns hot because people remember paying half that price. Memory is a cruel thing at the checkout counter.
8. The Chocolate-Covered Almonds: Irresistible Treat or Price-Swing Nightmare?
Although Kirkland Signature’s chocolate-covered almonds are clearly a luxury treat and not a daily staple, a move from $14.99 to $21.59 between 2020 and 2025 seems almost untenable. One Reddit user said they refuse to buy them now, while another still purchases them, but only as an occasional indulgence. Whatever the case, Costco’s chocolate-covered almonds are decidedly more expensive nowadays than they used to be. This is perhaps the result of a double-whammy: both almonds and cocoa have become more expensive in recent years.
If you’ve bought these recently, you’re probably familiar with the pricing pendulum. Costco can’t seem to stick to one price point on these. A Reddit thread from late 2024 notes that prices came down from $18.99 to $14.99 for a 48 oz bag, but another thread showed a receipt dated June 2024, showing them priced at $17.99, just six months earlier. That kind of inconsistency frustrates loyal shoppers who plan their budgets around these purchases.
Number crunchers at Costco had accounted for a 200% spike in cocoa costs in 2024 compared to the year prior. That meant bags would have to be sold at a price point higher than the closest competitor – over $1.50 more, in fact. Even so, for a bulk bag of genuinely good chocolate almonds, most loyalists keep coming back. Grudgingly, but they come back.
9. The Kirkland Chicken Tortilla Soup: Comfort in a Can or Recipe Ruined?
Sometimes Costco’s biggest debates aren’t about price at all. Sometimes it’s about a recipe change that nobody voted for. In November of 2024, the Kirkland Signature Chicken Tortilla Soup was ranked the best Costco soup among popular options. About a year later in November of 2025, customers noticed that the Chicken Tortilla Soup was utilizing a new recipe. Unsurprisingly, the updated formula had fans of the previous version lamenting the change.
Foremost among the alterations was the addition of cilantro – those with an aversion to the herb could no longer enjoy the soup whatsoever. Alleging that Costco changed which supplier it used to produce the item, some customers also found the new version spicier but less flavorful overall. Certain Costco members even described the new recipe as straight-up gross.
There is something genuinely emotional about a warehouse soup becoming controversial. It’s like changing the ending of a movie people love. In the fairly recent past, Costco replaced its beloved churro with a chocolate chip cookie and swapped out the popular strawberry banana smoothie for a frozen strawberry lemonade. In each case, the company encountered pushback from members accustomed to their go-to orders. The Chicken Tortilla Soup situation proves this pattern isn’t going away anytime soon.
The Bottom Line: Why Does Costco Spark Such Strong Feelings?
Honestly, the reason Costco arguments get so heated is because the stakes feel personal. A LendingTree analysis found that bulk purchases can reduce costs by an average of 27% across 30 everyday products, including essentials such as paper towels, bottled water, and batteries. When savings are that real, every change to pricing or quality feels like a direct hit to the household budget.
Costco enjoyed a 92.2% membership renewal rate in the U.S. and Canada during the first quarter of 2026, as the company reported on its last earnings call. That figure says everything. Despite all the arguments, all the Reddit rants, and all the complaints about thin bacon and pricier almonds, people keep renewing. Despite controversy and fee increases, 68.3 million people held individual memberships by the end of fiscal 2025, an upsurge from 63.7 million in 2024 and 58.8 million in 2023, according to Costco’s annual report.
The debate is, in a strange way, a form of loyalty. You only argue this passionately about something you care deeply about. Costco has built a community around food deals – and communities argue. What’s your most controversial Costco food take? Tell us in the comments.