Costco Sells More Hot Dogs Than This Glizzy-Loving Major League Sport

Costco entices customers for many reasons, with a not-so-secret selling point being the food court. Here, you'll find the beloved chicken bake, whole and sliced pizza, ice cream, as well as the iconic (and cheap) hot dog meal. Available since 1984, Costco's CFO has vowed to keep this time-tested frank-and-soda combo a permanent $1.50 fixture — so it's no surprise the retailer sells heaps of the food.

According to BizJournals, Costco sold just short of 200 million hot dogs in 2023, even exceeding rotisserie chicken sales that year. To put such a figure into perspective, Major League Baseball fans ate approximately 19 million glizzies in 2022 (per National Hot Dog and Sausage Council). For a sport with longtime strong ties to food, that's a hard-to-comprehend gap.

After all, some 71 million fans attended major league baseball games over the course of the 2024 season (per MLB), and they chowed down on the dogs: Los Angeles' Dodger Stadium alone averages a quantity of 2.5 million per season (per NHDSC). For a stadium with a capacity of over 55,000 people, that's quite a turnover of links. Still, Costco throws out a pace even the baseball league can't keep up with. Combine more than 70 million American Costco card members with more than 600 locations in the U.S. — most of which sell hot dogs day in and day out — and you get a tally in the hundreds of millions.

Ultimately, both Costco's and Major League Baseball's abundant sales volumes come down to the hot dog's chief advantage: practicality. Whether you're sipping a brew and spectating an inning or thinking about buying a microwave at Costco, a hot dog lends itself as tasty — and affordable — grub. Costco's $1.50 offering is hard to beat, but even at an MLB game, you can find hot dogs as low as $3 — not bad at all for a sports event.

In both contexts, hot dog availability traces back to the early days of operation. Costco debuted the hot dog combo only one year after opening, first selling all-beef Hebrew National sausages before switching to in-house production. Meanwhile, hot dogs already appeared at baseball games at the turn of the 20th century, emerging as one of the sport's first concessions (alongside popcorn). The league sold the food over a decade before its nationwide popularity, when the glizzy was made famous by the likes of Nathan Handwerker (of Nathan's Famous). So really, both Costco and the MLB were early adopters in their respective niches, evincing a curious snippet of utilitarian overlap.