What Happened To The Costco Seafood Roadshow?

A visit to Costco may typically be centered on refilling the stock of bulk-sized staples on which the home kitchen relies, but there is always an element of unknown to the trip, a certain excitement to be had in perusing new arrivals to the shelves. Exploring the free sample carts at Costco is always a plus, but there used to be one occasional in-store event that brought even more of a thrill to the shopping experience: the seafood roadshow.

Long-time Costco customers will know all about this offering, an event that typically happened every few weeks in which the warehouse chain would, for a limited time, trot out ice chests filled with the fruits of the sea. To the joy of regular shoppers, when the roadshow was in town the store would be filled with a wide variety of different seafood options like fresh clams, scallops, lobsters, king crabs, whole salmon and red snapper, tiger prawns, and many other amazing offerings. It was a time when the already fairly ample selection of Costco seafood products was vastly expanded, offering good deals on oceanic delights.

Unfortunately, these intermittent events are no longer on the docket for Costco. During the height of COVID, when all businesses were mixed up — and even Costco's famous samples were temporarily nixed for safety reasons — the seafood roadshow quietly slipped away. While customers who enjoyed the event still bemoan its disappearance across the internet — as well as all of the deals they used to find there — according to staff, the store may actually be better off without it. "As a current meat department employee," writes one Redditor, "that seafood roadshow was the bane of my existence." 

This employee explained that the biggest issue was how time consuming it was to prepare and clean up the mobile ice chests each day. Indeed, the diversion of labor required for the event is often suggested as perhaps not the reason that the seafood roadshow was first canceled — that can likely also be put down to public health concerns during COVID — but as the real reason that it is not likely to return. Another voice on Reddit, a meat department supervisor for Costco, even shared that their store got rid of both the chests and the ice machine, indicating that a return is not in the cards.

The cancellation may have had to do with more than just labor, however. While the event was surely fun for customers, it also inevitably resulted in significant food waste. Using ice chests allowed the stores to temporarily expand their storage space to accommodate the additional product, but the low-tech option of storing the seafood on ice made it much more difficult to control temperatures. As nice as it is to have temporary access to a wider variety of products, no one wants to see the food end up in the garbage because of an inability to keep it within food safety parameters.

Those who had the chance to shop at Costco's seafood roadshow were a lucky bunch, having the chance to both explore a wider range of products and snag some excellent deals. Unfortunately, it does not seem like there is much, if any, chance of this event returning. We can't be sure — anything can happen — but for now customers are better off keeping their cravings focused on Costco's frozen seafood staples instead.