Costco Comes to Harlem

Most retailers that aren’t Macy’s or Duane Reade approach Manhattan with trepidation. It’s an island full of cliff-dwellers, renters and non-drivers, with an extraordinary mix of backgrounds, ethnicities and religions, the full economic spectrum. The richest, the smartest, the most successful, the most artistic, the most aggressive – a real Darwinian specimen collection of the fittest.

Everyone’s picky, everyone has limitless choices and everyone’s impossible to impress. So how do you make an impact and stand out amid a 23-square-mile sea of competitors? It may have worked in California, Illinois and New Jersey, but will it work here?

I just read that this summer, Target will bring its cheap chic to the city and hope it's both cheap enough and chic enough. Last fall, Costco took the plunge, opening in a shopping complex on East 116th Street. It’s kind of a corridor area, with Harlem above and the Upper East Side below, The Bronx across the river and Columbia University across the island. So who would they attract? And what should they stock? Kosher food? Organic food? Latin food? Perrier?

Costco isn’t the first to wonder. When Home Depot opened a Manhattan store on 14th Street, it wondered how people without cars would haul away tools, lumber and the like. What it found was that New Yorkers fixing up their co-ops, accustomed to the limited selection of corner hardware stores, loved the opportunity to browse Home Depot’s aisles. And the retailer offered delivery for the lumber people bought.

When Whole Foods opened in Columbus Circle, it wondered whether food shoppers would venture out of their neighborhoods and if they’d take an escalator down to the lower level of the Time Warner Center. What it found was that people loved the offerings of high-quality vegetables, premium coffee and prepared foods in a sophisticated setting. Many people just use the store as a lunch counter for their tandoori chicken, tacos and rice or white bean chili.

What they’ve all found out is that (cliché alert) people are people. New Yorkers seem to love Costco’s prices and their merchandise selection as much as anyone else does. So what do they stock? Everything. Rob Coope, the store’s general manager, told The New York Times that the big packages of Bounty paper towels have been the store’s most popular item. The store sells 76,000 eggs a week. Then again, it also sells more buffalo mozzarella than Polly-O mozzarella.

What about the large quantities? Well, it seems New Yorkers are finding room to stuff all that paper towel and boxes of macaroni and cheese into their pantries, the same way people do in Cincinnati and Des Moines. And many New Yorkers are apparently buying items not only for their places in the city but also to stock up at their places in the Hamptons and the Vineyard.

Okay, so New Yorkers aren’t always like everyone else.