By Pete Williams

I’m a huge Costco fan. I spend much of my money there. I’ve purchased my laptop and Blackberry there, a lot of my clothes. Most of our food comes from Costco, along with a lot of our furniture, gas, tires, and household items.

I love the business model: sell premium merchandise at affordable prices. Costco pays its employees well – with full benefits – and keeps its profit margins low. It does twice the sales of Sam’s Club with half the stores, as well it should. Sam’s Club is just Wal-Mart with a cover charge.

Costco is everything that Sam’s/Wal-Mart is not, which is why Wall Street hates Costco. It doesn’t matter. Costco stock moves up slowly but steadily, even in the Great Recession.

Everything you need to know about the Costco demographic can be summed up in this sentence: Costco is the nation’s biggest seller of wine and the fourth-biggest book seller.

Costco has an uncanny knack for putting the right products in front of customers. It constantly rotates merchandise, creating a treasure hunt effect. This being the start of baseball season, my Clearwater, Fla., Costco has had a table of Tampa Bay Rays gear for the last month or so. Many of the shirts, not surprisingly, have a No.3 and “Longoria” on the back.

That’s why I was stunned last night to see half the table now devoted to New York Yankees gear. Granted, the Yankees are headquartered just across the water in Tampa. But this Costco is less than a mile from the Philadelphia Phillies spring training site. (The Phillies have trained in Clearwater since 1947.)

Obviously the Yankees have a huge presence in Tampa, where the Steinbrenner family has lived forever and where the Yankees have trained since 1996. The Yankees are forever encroaching on the Rays by broadcasting their games on local radio.

But if there’s one demographic that doesn’t get Costco…it’s New Yorkers. As much as New Yorkers love to think of themselves as hip and up-to-speed on everything, they’re generally clueless when it comes to Costco, even though they have stores in Brooklyn, Queens, and most recently in East Harlem. Loading up an SUV or minivan on a weekend afternoon just isn’t part of the New Yorker culture.

A book editor friend of mine, a middle-aged lifelong New Yorker, recently told me how she made her first trip to a Costco in a tone of voice that suggested she had visited her first farm.

You hear a lot of New York accents in the Tampa Bay area, but not in the Clearwater Costco. That’s probably no coincidence. As with most seasonal merchandise, the Yankees gear will disappear in a month, along with most of the Rays stuff.

I’m guessing the Rays stuff will sell better, as it should. The Phillies would have sold better than the Yankees gear. It’s too bad some Costco buyer is as clueless as magazine editors and television executives who still think the tired Yankees story is what best appeals nationally.

The few young people that follow baseball are more interested in Evan Longoria and Carl Crawford, Jimmy Rollins and Ryan Howard.

C’mon Costco, you’re better than this.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 11:10 am and is filed under Sports Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.