The Capital Region's Costco era has finally begun

We are a newspaper.

We're journalists.

Why is it important to cover something like this to the extent that we are covering it?

And I think that is a good question because, of course, there have been the critics who have said you're giving too much attention to Costco.

And First of all, what is too much? I don't know.

And I agree it does.

We are giving a lot of attention to Costco, but our job is to cover the news and cover what people care about.

So do we give too much attention to the Belmont when that's here? Or are we giving too much attention to something else when that's going on? No, because that is what people care about at the moment.

And the hard numbers show us that people care.

So first of all, they have had more than 16,000 people sign up to be members at this particular store.

It doesn't mean you can't use your Costco membership elsewhere, but it's the people are signing up for this location.

And over the course of this opening weekend, they expect that to go up by several thousand more.

And it's the largest group of signups ever in the Northeast.

So there's that.

Then we were there this morning.

At any given time, there were at least 1,000 people shopping in the warehouse.

And we witnessed this, right? These are not numbers that are being thrown at us that we didn't see.

And then the parking lot today.

So no employees were parked in the Costco parking lot.

There was not a single parking spot, like truly not a single parking spot.

And people were waiting for parking like it was Christmas at Crossgates Mall in 2004.

There was no parking.

You and I were parked down in Crossgates by Dick's Sporting Goods, along with a lot of other shoppers, meaning that also wasn't employees.

We were crossing the street with all these shoppers, people with overflowing carts.

There was the woman who insisted on bringing her cart back up when she emptied it out, and it was empty.