For press

Press kit

Everything you need to write about this without emailing us first. If you do want to talk to a person, press@buckfiftyproject.com reaches Rich directly, and he answers.

The facts

Costco has 648 locations open in America and has announced 10 more. All 648 open ones are the list. 29 of them have no food court, the home showrooms, and all but two of the business centers, and those are stops as well, without a hot dog. Announced locations join the list the day they open. Which locations exist, and their numbers, cities and formats, all come from the sitemap Costco publishes for crawlers; map positions are from OpenStreetMap contributors.

Is a million plausible?

The number sounds enormous until you put it beside Costco’s own. It’s the question every reporter asks second, so here it’s with sources.

Membership and cardholder counts are from Costco’s Form 10-Q and earnings release for the quarter ended May 10, 2026. The hot dog figure is the one Costco gave at its January 2026 annual meeting, widely reported at the time. It is not in a filing: Costco does not break the food court out in its 10-K. The same figures, with the same sources, are on the front page.

Who they are

Rich

Had the idea, keeps the ledger, drives.

Jes

Decides how all of it looks and runs everything that goes out on social.

Carter

Older brother. Comes on the trips.

Mathew

Younger brother. Comes on the trips.

On the children: Carter and Mathew are credited by first name, but no photographs of their faces are published. This is deliberate and not negotiable. Please don’t ask for one, and please don’t use one if you find one. Drawn portraits of all four are on the crew page; those are illustrations, and they’re not part of this kit.

What is on the site

• The stops. One page per Costco: the menu board, the receipt, what it cost, and photographs. Where there’s a food court, a visit needs all four of them present, all four, or it’s just a trip to Costco.
• The map. All 648 open locations drawn as one static SVG, no tiles and no API key, green for visited. /stops#map
• Send us to your Costco. Name a warehouse when you chip in and it turns red on the map and climbs the route. Money moves the order; it never changes the write-up. No drawing and no chance, deliberately, prize plus chance plus payment is the legal definition of a lottery in most states.
• Refills. The same $1.50, recurring at whatever interval you pick: a hot dog a year, a month, a week or a day. One click to cancel, from any email we send.
• The asterisk. Costco marks a shelf sign with a small asterisk when a warehouse isn’t restocking an item, and a price ending in .97 is a markdown. Nobody keeps that record, so this is the record. /watch
• The bit. No face of either child is published, so instead of being left out of the pictures they hide behind whatever the aisle has, a frying pan, a steam iron, a plush animal head. Their idea. /bit
• The books. Every dollar in, every fee, every expense and every tax payment, posted as it happens. /money

What this isn’t

• Not affiliated with Costco. No connection, no endorsement, no sponsorship, no contact. They just like the hot dog.
• Not a charity. No nonprofit status, contributions aren’t tax-deductible, and the money is income to a family business on which tax is paid.
• Not a paywall. Nothing is ever gated. There’s no membership and nothing behind one.
• Not the first to visit Costcos. Susan and David Schwartz visited more than 250 Costcos in 46 states and 13 countries and wrote The Joy of Costco. This is a different thing, every single one in the United States and Puerto Rico, with the accounts published.

The nearest familiar thing

Buy Me a Coffee, and the difference is the point. Nobody wonders whether people will support a creator they already follow, they do, and that question is answered. This one asks whether a million people will, for a family they’ve never heard of, a buck fifty at a time.

The numbers, as data

archive.json is every stop we have made as one file: the warehouse, the town, the date, how far it was, who came, the weather, what was ordered and what it cost, what each of us thought of it, what we found on the shelves, and how far through each state we are. It is written from the same files the pages are built from and refuses to publish if it disagrees with one of them. Free to cite with a link.

Images you may use

These are cleared for editorial use with credit to The Buck Fifty Project / buckfiftyproject.com. Photographs of the family’s faces aren’t available.

• Share card, 1200×630 PNG
• Primary lockup, SVG · stacked · two-line tight · reversed for dark
• One-line lockup for wide slots · dual-domain for footers
• The lockup carrying buckfiftyproject.com, for anything where the name and the address should match. That domain redirects here; buckfiftyproject.com is the address.
• The pin mark, SVG · tile, for avatars · 512px PNG
• The “Chip in $1.50” button, SVG · PNG, for anyone who wants to link here from their own page.
• The funding counter, SVG, rebuilt from the live figures on every publish, so it never shows a number we didn’t receive. PNG for posts, 2160×1100, rendered on demand.
• The map, screenshot freely

Lines you’re welcome to quote

“So you keep it? What the road doesn’t spend, yes. It’s on the money page in the same size as everything else, under a heading that says so, because burying it would be the only way to make it look like something to hide.”

“If one person supports us, that’s a buck fifty, enough for the combo. If a million people support us, that’s $1.5 million. The gap between those two sentences is the whole project.”

“Books that skip the bad rows aren’t books.”