A $65 Costco card is now a hot gift for the 19-year-old headed off to school. Not a hoodie. Not cash in a card. A membership to the warehouse store that sells 96-roll toilet paper packs and rotisserie chickens the size of a football. Kiplinger makes the case that Gen Z has decided bulk-buying is cool, and the college crowd is asking grandma to sign them up.
The pitch: cheap gas, cheap groceries, the $1.50 hot dog that hasn’t budged in price since 1985. A dorm room full of roommates splits a $9 case of ramen and everyone eats for a week. Kiplinger says it beats the usual back-to-school gift because the kid actually wants it. Whether the average freshman fits a 30-pound bag of quinoa in a mini-fridge is a different question.
A $65 Gold Star membership feeds a broke 19-year-old for a semester, and Costco’s own numbers say the kids are signing up: memberships hit 79.6 million households last year. If you’ve got a college grandkid, that’s a gift that beats a check because it pays them back every grocery run for the next four years. Watch the price, though. Costco bumped the fee in 2024 for the first time since 2017, so lock it in while it’s still $65.
Sources: kiplinger.com
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