Miscellaneous

Costco hot dog bourbon sells out in hours

Limited Rare Character release priced under $90 resurfaces online near $1,000, scarcity turns membership cap into resale premium

Images

'Absolutely massive' Easter treat has Costco shoppers 'stopping in their tracks' 'Absolutely massive' Easter treat has Costco shoppers 'stopping in their tracks' foxnews.com
At left, Costco customers lining up at food court under signs including advertising $1.50 hotdog combo; at right, man holds bottle of limited-edition whisky with combo featured on label. At left, Costco customers lining up at food court under signs including advertising $1.50 hotdog combo; at right, man holds bottle of limited-edition whisky with combo featured on label. foxnews.com
Costco shoppers wait in line at the food court, where the Twisted Churro appears on the menu. Costco shoppers wait in line at the food court, where the Twisted Churro appears on the menu. foxnews.com
Costco hot dog seen with Pepsi soda cup and slathered in mustard and ketchup. Costco hot dog seen with Pepsi soda cup and slathered in mustard and ketchup. foxnews.com
Employee preparing famous Costco Hot Dogs in kitchen, Costco store, Palm Beach, Florida. Employee preparing famous Costco Hot Dogs in kitchen, Costco store, Palm Beach, Florida. foxnews.com

Costco’s $1.50 hot dog-and-soda combo has become a kind of retail folk symbol, so it was predictable that someone would try to bottle the joke—and then sell the scarcity. Fox News reports that a limited-release bourbon called “I Got That Dog in Me,” featuring Costco’s food court combo on the label, sold out within hours at a Washington, DC-area Costco and quickly appeared online with resale prices reaching around $1,000.

The bottle was a Rare Character single-barrel bourbon, priced at $85.99, listed at 126.1 proof and aged 11 years and four months, according to photos shared on social media and details confirmed by the brand. The release was limited to one bottle per membership and, according to online posts cited by Fox, some shoppers said it was gone by mid-morning the next day. Others complained it never appeared in the Costco app, which matters because visibility—rather than taste—often determines who gets to the shelf first.

This is a small, clean example of how secondary markets are created. A capped quantity plus a low official price produces a built-in spread: the buyer isn’t just purchasing bourbon, but an underpriced option on resale demand. The rationing mechanism is not a higher sticker price but time, attention, and luck—queueing, store-hopping, and monitoring social media. The “one per membership” rule doesn’t eliminate arbitrage; it simply increases the number of intermediaries required.

Rare Character’s co-founder Pete Nevenglosky told Fox News Digital the barrel was a one-off for the DC team, though the company has done similar Costco-region bottlings in Los Angeles and wants to expand. The label, he said, originated with Costco’s DC team. Online reaction focused less on the liquid than the packaging: Reddit users called the branding “genius,” while some buyers insisted the whiskey was genuinely good and, crucially, did not taste like hot dogs.

Costco’s hot dog remains $1.50. The bourbon that borrowed its image was $85.99 at the register and four figures on the resale listings.