GoKawiilThe price of a Costco hot dog has gone up
Costco sells an all-beef quarter-pound hot dog and bun, with free refills on Coke products, for $1.50. The price has not changed since 1984. This price point is so sacred that Costco co-founder Jim Sinegal reportedly told then-CEO Craig Jelinek that he would kill him if he ever raised it (Today).
As prices have gone up in the US across multiple spending categories, has Costco kept that promise? I bought two hot dogs at the same Costco three years apart. Both times the price was $1.50, exactly as promised. But the second hot dog bun looked smaller, enough so to raise the question: if the sticker price has not moved in three years, am I paying the same amount for less hot dog?
The sausage is the ruler
Conveniently, I had photographed both hot dogs (Figure 1) so I could, in principle, measure the size difference of the bun. But the two photos were taken from different distances, at different angles, and—importantly—without a ruler. But, luckily, I didn't need one because the sausage is the ruler.
I treated the sausage as unchanged at 8 inches long, giving me a known length I could use to register the two images. I first located the two ends of each sausage. I then used the camera focal length and the dog's assumed 1-inch diameter to estimate how far each sausage pointed toward the camera. A simple pinhole-camera fit put the 2023 dog at about 13 degrees out of the image plane and the 2026 dog nearly broadside. I then rotated and scaled the images to the same 8-inch reference line while correcting the measurements for perspective.*
Figure 1: Costco hot dogs photographed in 2023 and 2026, before and after scaling to the same 8-inch reference line. The blue line marks the 8-inch tip-to-tip reference. Cyan and magenta outlines trace the two bun halves; the vertical bars mark their separate visible widths.
The buns are smaller
The Costco hot dog bun lost about 0.8 inches of length and 0.87 inches of combined width across its two halves. I modelled the bun as two rectangular prisms (angle-corrected length x mean visible width x a constant 2-inch depth) to estimate the total volume loss. (Note the sausage partly hides one bun half in the 2026 photo, so this estimate may be slightly overstated.)
Table 1: Angle-corrected bun-half dimensions estimated from the registered images. Measurements are rounded for display; areas, volumes, and prices were calculated from the unrounded values.
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