Canada Costco: Cheap Pills AND Hotdog Combos!

Canada travelog #6
Toronto, ON · Sun, 24 Aug 2025. 11:30am.

"My mom wants to stop by a Costco before she leaves Canada," Hawk mentioned at sometime during the past 24 hours. That's all I needed to hear. Since then I've been trying to organize exactly when our Costco trip will be! 🤣

It's not that I'm some die-hard Costco shopper. It's not even that there's a particular thing I'm looking to buy at Costco— unlike for MIL, who wants to stock up on two of her over-the-counter (OTC) medicines there because they're apparently way cheaper in Canada than the US. Yes, the meme from years ago about US senior citizens buying their pills in Canada because they're cheaper is real. And while the current US presidential administration tells you, correctly, that the price disparity exists because of corporate greed, that same current US presidential administration is also all about deregulation. Deregulation because "government regulation is crippling American businesses". Well, it's literally government regulation that checks corporate greed in other countries and makes medicines cheaper virtually everywhere else in the world other than the US. 🙄

Anyway, I was talking about why I wanted to go to Costco. Two things. One, I'm just curious about seeing Costco in other countries. Two, I really wanted a slice of pizza this morning after an unfulfilling breakfast. 🤣



While Hawk and her mom split off to find and buy armloads of eye drops of something like that, I hit up the food court. Well, I tried to hit up the food court. My first attempt was 🙅 Access Denied 🙅... because I tried paying with a Visa card.

While Costco in the US takes only Visa, Costco in Canada takes only MasterCard! It turns out they do accept the US co-branded Costco Visa, but I didn't have that card on me. And when I went back out to the car to grab another credit card I wasn't sure about that so I grabbed a MasterCard just to make sure.

Another difference is the $1.50 hot dog combo. Yeah, sharp-eyed Costco loyalists will have noticed that already in the photo above. It's the same as the US, but also different. The long vaunted $1.50 hotdog and soda combo is actually cheaper in Canada.... It's cheaper because $1.50 here is 1.50 CAD, which at current exchange rates is $1.08 in USD. Canadians get cheaper pills and hotdog combos!

Easy Night, Easy Morning. Shifting Gears in Canada

Canada travelog #8
Mississauga, ON · Mon, 25 Aug 2025. 9am.

Today Hawk and I are shifting gears in Canada. We're done at this point with the family reunion. That finished yesterday. Her long-lost relatives are back to their regular lives— not that they'd really ever left their routines— and her parents, brother, and aunt and uncle who joined us out here have all returned home.

We could have gone home, too, already. I thought about that last night as we were relaxing in our hotel's hot tub. We stretched out this trip to be much longer because we figured arriving on Saturday morning via a Friday night red-eye from the west coast, then leaving 36 hours later on Sunday evening, would be too much travel relative to our time on the ground. But last night I felt that if we had decided to catch that 7:30pm-ish flight back to SFO it would've been fine. It would've been a good little weekend trip. Being able to sleep on the red-eye because we flew first class helped a lot with that.

But we didn't go home. We're here for the rest of the week. And our plan for the rest of the week is to go waterfalling. As in, visiting waterfalls. The area just west of here, around Hamilton, ON, has a ton of waterfalls. There's Niagara Falls, of course, and that's on our list. But there's also a geologic feature called the Niagara Escarpment over which dozens of streams in different places fall. We've got a few hikes on our list for today. After we finish breakfast and check out (we're staying closer to Hamilton for the rest of the week) we'll head out to visit them.