Yes, it’s a bit silly

Most people won’t, and that’s fine, the same is true of every creator with a tip jar. Some will, the way some people leave a tip on a counter with no tip jar. We’re counting how many, in public, for years, and that count is how we keep score. If the answer is “not many,” we’ll publish that too.

Every word, photograph and receipt on this site is free and stays free, paid or not. What you get is a supporter number, issued in the order the money arrived, yours permanently, signed so you can check it’s real, with a page of its own that shows what has happened since you joined. A card you can save, or print at postcard size. Your first name on the front page, if you want it there. And if your number lands on one of seven (1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000) you get a real card in the post, written by hand from the road. Mostly, though, you’re saying our wild little project is worth the price of a hot dog. That’s still the whole transaction.

No. We’re a family. We make this, we give it away, we ask for a buck fifty if you liked it. It’s not tax-deductible and we’re not a nonprofit. We keep the money, and the books explain that at length.

Partly, and here’s which parts.

The cartoon hot dogs are AI. We can’t draw and we’re not paying an illustrator out of a tip jar.

We use AI to help write and check the site, too. Four of us, two with homework, one with a day job, 648 warehouses to get to.

Not AI: the trips, the photos, the price signs, the boards, the receipts. Those came off a phone at a Costco we were standing in. Every stop page has the food court receipt with the order number and the time on it. If a number looks wrong, check it against the receipt and email us. We’ll fix it and say we fixed it.

The boys’ faces are covered because they’re kids. They’re real.

No. We’re members who like the food court, and that is the whole of it. If Costco ever asks us to change something, we’ll change it and post the letter.

No. A million is how many people we’re asking, not hot dogs. “A buck fifty at a time” is how you describe 648 Costcos without anyone’s eyes glazing over. It is not a rule about lunch. We order one at a lot of stops and something else at plenty of others, because the board has too many good things on it to eat the same thing 648 times. What we do at every stop is photograph the board, keep the receipt, and write down what we found.

Constantly, and the whole menu is here with what each thing costs. The chicken bake is great, the pizza is the size of a manhole cover, and the sundae changes often enough to be worth writing about. The hot dog is how we count. It’s not what we live on.

Yes. 29 of the 648 have no food court, being home showrooms and business centers, and we go to those too. The project is every Costco in America, not every Costco food court. 10 more are announced and not open yet; they join the list the day they open. Puerto Rico has five and they are not in the 648. If we get there we will write them up like anywhere else, but we are not counting something we have not promised. The number comes out of the data file the map is drawn from, so if it moves, everything moves with it.

The best idea on this whole site, and Jes’s. Inside the warehouse the refills are on the house; out here it means backing us on repeat, a hot dog a year, a month, a week, or a day, all at the same $1.50. Pick a schedule and it renews on its own until you say stop, and stopping is one click from any email we send you. We’ll write to you before every renewal saying exactly what’s about to be charged. The daily one is the exception: a day’s notice on a daily charge would land after the charge, so that one gets a friendly note once a week instead.

Maybe. Name a warehouse when you chip in and it turns red on the map, growing as more people put money behind it. The leaderboard shows which cities are pooling money and where we may go next. Five dollars, ten, a hundred, whatever you want behind it. It doesn’t buy a promise, and we’ll never pretend a stop was our idea when it was yours.

Then the plan changes and we say so out loud, in public, before spending any of it. What we won’t do is quietly pocket it and keep posting hot dog photos. The books are the whole deal.

Every stop page has the food court receipt with the order number and the time on it, the menu board photographed that day, and the warehouse number Costco prints on the receipt. And the four of us go together; that’s the whole idea.

Our favorite accidental game. Costco never announces that an item is on its way out, but the shelf sign tells you anyway: a small asterisk in the top corner means this warehouse isn’t getting more of them, and a price ending in .97 is a markdown. Nobody keeps that record, so we keep it. The same steam iron turned up at five warehouses with the sign reading $59.99 at every one. Then the register took $15 off at the sixth sighting, and $20 off three weeks later, back where we started: $39.99, and we’d already bought one. Spot one yourself and send us the photograph; we’ll put it up with your first name on it, or without.

Because they started it, and it’s much funnier than a posed photograph. No photograph of anyone’s face goes on this site, so instead of being left out of the pictures entirely, Carter and Mathew began covering theirs with whatever the aisle had, a storage bin, a plush animal, a Halloween pillow, a steam iron. It’s now the format. Both of them were asked, both said yes, and either can pull any picture of himself at any time, no reason required.

By card, on the board. You get a checkout that lists every item by name and price, which is the part we care about: it’s what lets the ledger be exact to the cent, and it’s much harder to be shady with than a number typed into an app. A refund is one email.

Years. Two jobs and a school calendar set the pace: a handful of long weekends, two or three longer trips, and Saturdays for whatever is within a drive. Against 648 that comes to eight to ten years, said now instead of a date we made up and missed. If it goes faster, good, and we’ll say so. Costco also keeps opening warehouses in the United States, so the list grows while we work.

In practice, yes. The scanner is at the door, and the food court is inside it. Nearly every food court sits inside the warehouse, past the entrance, and Costco has been scanning membership cards at warehouse entrances since 2024. Nobody’s asked us for a card at the kiosk yet; where the door has a scanner, it’s already been scanned on the way in. The rule Costco announced for April 8, 2024 matters most at the handful of warehouses with an outdoor food court you could reach from the parking lot without going inside; those ask. So the era when anyone could walk up for a $1.50 hot dog is mostly already over, and we’re recording what is left of it, warehouse by warehouse.

Yes. The shop has tees, hoodies and hats, in adult and kids sizes, $30 to $50 with shipping included. Not one with somebody else’s brand on it, though, everything there carries this project’s own name and artwork, which is both the legally sane choice and, honestly, the better shirt. Buying one is an ordinary purchase and not a contribution: it doesn’t move the counter, and it shows up in the ledger as merch, on its own line.

Our newsletter, and it’s free. One email after every stop: where we’ve been, what was on the menu board, what it cost, and whatever caught our eye in the aisles on the way through. One confirmation email when you sign up, then one per stop, and every issue has a link to stop. Your address is used for nothing else, ever.

Yes, for any reason, for a year after you give. Email billing@buckfiftyproject.com with the name on the card. We won’t ask you why.

Rich and Jes read all of these. Send us a note about a warehouse we should not miss, a correction, a sponsorship, or a question this page didn’t answer.