Food and Cooking

On March 18, Ron Vachris became the first CEO in recent memory to go viral for something positive. That day, he was featured in a 41-second Instagram video he took on his lunch break. In it, he orders one of his company’s signature $1.50 hot dogs, sits down at a food court table, unsheaths the quarter-pound-plus frankfurter, and takes a huge bite.

While he’s polishing off that famous Costco weiner, he looks into the camera and says, “The hot dog price will not change as long as I’m around.” The clip piled up nearly 9 million views in a single day.

As soon as the post went up, Vachris started receiving messages. Most of them, he tells me over email, went something like this: “It looks like you have enjoyed many hot dogs over the years.”

The overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to the video surprised Vachris, who started at Costco as a forklift driver. “This was done with a cellphone in a warehouse,” he says. “And that’s us, no frills!” He knows the truth: The flowers were not for him. “The Costco hot dog is the star,” he says before dressing up his zinger with a little extra mustard. “I was just along for the ride.”

That might sound like cheeky corporate propaganda, but Vachris is right. There is no fast food item as beloved as the Costco hot dog. For a buck fifty—the price has stayed the same since it was introduced in the ’80s—you get an all-beef dog and a fountain soda (or now, a bottle of water). In the 2025 fiscal year, the warehouse club reportedly sold 245 million of those combos. There’s a reason why Julia Child herself used to eat two Costco dogs at a time with mustard and sauerkraut.

The fact that the Costco dog is inflation proof doesn’t hurt its case, either. “It costs $1.50, and it doesn’t taste like nuclear waste to most people,” says Jamie Loftus, author of the book Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs. “Because there are other $1.50 hot dogs out there. They’re very, very rare now. But even rarer is that you would recommend them to someone or eat them out of anything other than a need for survival.”

In a world where the McDonald’s Dollar Menu is long gone, a 7-Eleven dog costs over $2, and it’s a challenge to stay on budget at Taco Bell, the Costco frank stands alone. It is America’s greatest hot dog. And the country’s last great deal.