A Costco Ran Out Of Food Court Hot Dogs And Reddit Is In Shambles

If you thought a price increase on Costco's beloved $1.50 hot dog and soda combo was the worst thing that could happen to the chain's in-house eatery, think again. On April 4, the food court at a Costco warehouse in Hawaii found itself in an unthinkable predicament that, unlike a hot dog price hike, even insightful words from Costco's co-founder likely couldn't fix. "Doomsday. Hotdogs are out of stock!" one Reddit user posted to the Costco subreddit on Thursday. This wasn't a delayed April Fool's Day joke, either. Along with their announcement, the user shared a photo of the food court menu at Iwilei Costco in Oahu, Hawaii, where stickers reading, "Out of Stock," had been placed over the menu's photo of the combo.

Unsurprisingly, other Costco shoppers on the subreddit were up in arms about the ordeal. "IT'S HAPPENING! Grab the pitchforks and torches, my friends," one user joked. "Just as the Mayans predicted," another quipped, while a third announced, "Life has no meaning."

A fourth commenter chimed in to suggest that since the same store was also out of ice cream products, the outages could be explained by a broken refrigerator. Others on the platform, however, suspect that something bigger may be afoot.

Back in 2021, another Costco member found that hot dogs were listed as out of stock on their local food court's ordering kiosk. We now know that the world did not end because of this; however, it seems that Oahu's April 4 hot dog outage wasn't just a one-off, as several commenters on the thread claimed their food courts were also out of the staple.

In yet another incident, X (formerly known as Twitter) user @GetRealJC, whose bio claims they're based in Nevada, shared on April 3 that their local Costco food court was operating without the $1.50 delicacy. Just three weeks earlier, on March 19, another Reddit thread cited the same experience at an undetermined location.

So, is this all just a coincidence, or is something bigger going on? One commenter on the March 19 Reddit thread suggested the latter. They claimed that their partner, an alleged fresh department manager at Costco, told them about a supply chain issue affecting the hot dogs' availability. "No new [hot dogs] getting shipped out for a least a couple weeks so whatever stores have in their coolers is it," they explained. Another commenter seemed to back this assertion but also claimed the shortage would only affect certain regions of the country. As of this writing, Costco has neither confirmed nor denied any hot dog shortage.