CostSort

CostSort is a daily pricing puzzle about the Costco food aisle. Each round gives you six items and the six prices they sell for, laid out cheapest first. Your job is to work out which price belongs to which item.

The trick is that warehouse pricing rarely tracks the intuition you bring from a normal grocery store. Bulk packaging, loss-leader staples, and seasonal items all break the usual size-to-price relationship, so the item you assume is the priciest is often propped up by volume rather than cost. That gap between what a thing looks like it should cost and what Costco charges for it is where the puzzle lives.

Scoring counts the items you matched exactly right, out of six. Every correct match earns points, a perfect six earns a large bonus, and finishing at all earns a participation floor — so a bad round still counts toward your streak. There is no time limit and no penalty for thinking.

A useful strategy is to anchor the ends before the middle. The cheapest and priciest items are usually the ones you have a real opinion about; place those, then reason about the four in between relative to them. Swapping two placed items costs nothing before you lock in, so commit early and rearrange.

Prices are captured from a published Costco food price database at authoring time, with the as-of date on the source so you can check them yourself. Prices drift and vary by region, so each round is a snapshot rather than a live quote. The same puzzle goes to everybody who plays that day.

How to play

1. 1

   Read the six Costco items and the six price tags laid out cheapest first.

2. 2

   Tap an item to select it, then tap a price to place it there. Tap two placed items to swap them.

3. 3

   Fill all six slots, then hit Lock In to reveal what each item actually costs.

4. 4

   Every item you matched to its correct price scores. Six out of six is a perfect round.

Where the data comes from

Every CostSort puzzle is built from published, dated data, and each challenge links the source it drew its numbers from. These are the references we draw on:

• Costco Food Database