Costco put every US warehouse on DoorDash behind a membership check

A shopper who opens DoorDash, picks a local Costco and starts filling a cart hits the account screen before checkout. The order will not complete until a Costco membership is linked, and Uber Eats works the same way ^[4]. So the two newer channels are selling to households that already hold the card, where the Executive tier costs $70 more a year than Gold Star ^[17]. A non-member has Instacart, at what CNET reports are likely higher prices than members pay ^[8].

Uber Eats got there first by a day and by state count, moving from 17 states to 47, an addition of 30 states in one announcement ^[2][16]. DoorDash skipped state counts and said every warehouse in the country ^[1]. CNET dates the Instacart relationship to 2013 and calls it a partnership; the report does not describe it as exclusive ^[7][18]. The support for reading this as a change in Costco's approach is the membership link, which DoorDash and Uber Eats now enforce and which Instacart still lets a shopper skip.

DoorDash's stated reason for adding the US is search: "Costco" was among the most-searched retailers by its app users, and the company was already delivering Costco orders in Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Iceland and Puerto Rico ^[9]. The search signal is that people typed the name; whether a warehouse-sized basket arrives complete, and whether that household orders again a month later, is a different measurement. The figures in public are category-level: US online grocery sales grew more than 20% year over year for six consecutive quarters through March ^[10], and Placer.ai puts trips to Costco up more than 18% since 2019 ^[11].

Then there is the person carrying it up the stairs. Peter Schlactus, co-founder and executive director of the Association for Delivery Drivers, told CNET that "DoorDash and Costco should together ensure that driver treatment and working conditions meet the highest standards, enabling dedicated drivers to support themselves comfortably as they deserve" ^[13]. He also said: "In their haste to recruit drivers, many gig apps minimize what they ask of drivers and safety training is often a casualty. This puts both drivers and the public at risk, especially given the time pressures that this work entails" ^[14]. DoorDash's website says Dashers receive 100% of all customer tips, including those earned on DoorDash Drive orders ^[15].

A channel deal of this shape turns on whether the partner needs your customer credential to complete a sale, and on whether it sells at your price. DoorDash and Uber Eats both require the credential ^[4], and CNET's account has member pricing on the member side of that line ^[8]. Instacart requires neither, and has not since 2013 ^[7][8]. The quadrant with no credential and the partner's own pricing is where a retailer learns the least about who is buying, and Costco has left it occupied for thirteen years while adding two channels that check the card ^[1][2].

For the operator rolling something similar out, the cost of the open quadrant is that the repeat-purchase data lives in the partner's app. The only numbers you can quote back to your own board are the ones Placer.ai and Consumer Reports publish about the category ^[11][12].