The One Thing Fans Hate Most About Costco's Food Court Ice Cream

If someone with a sweet tooth were to rank every item at the Costco food court, the ice cream would probably make it to the top of the list. It's a great deal in the U.S.: $1.99 for a 16 oz cup of ice cream with the option to upgrade to a sundae with flavored syrup for just $.50 more. And though for now Costco only offers simple vanilla ice cream as the base (though it's supposedly testing out new food court ice cream flavors), one huge complaint some Costco shoppers have about the warehouse store's frozen treat doesn't have to do with the limited selection. It's all about how the ice cream is served.

One Canadian TikTok user posted a video captioned "POV: you want to eat your ice cream right away but they give you this gag worthy wooden spoon." It turns out that in some Canadian and Australian Costco stores — and some locations in the U.S. like San Francisco — customers in the food court are given wooden spoons instead of plastic ones. This is most likely for environmental reasons, but even so, not everyone is a fan. The TikTok video in question got more than 1 million views and has nearly 1,000 comments of people mostly standing in solidarity with the original poster's hatred of wooden utensils.

Wooden utensils are polarizing

What's so bad about trying to eat Costco's food court ice cream with a wooden spoon? According to many customers replying to the viral TikTok video, a lot. "I'd literally genuinely rather eat my own shoe that put a cold wooden spoon near my teeth," shared one commenter, while another gave an unconventional tip for the haters. "I soak the spoon in my mouth first, to get the taste out." You do you, creative customer.

Others shared that they don't mind the wooden spoons at the Costco food court, and some even professed to love them. "I love the taste of wooden spoons," shared one commenter, while another said, "they're fun to chew." Why do some people love this utensil style while others hate it? The tongue is an extremely sensitive organ, one that can even discern particle sizes in the foods we eat, which is part of why texture can determine if we like a food or not (for instance, preferring creamy mashed potatoes to grainy or gloppy mashed potatoes). But people have their own preferences, which is why to some, eating with a wooden spoon is "nails on a chalkboard" (via Reddit), while to others, they "taste and feel so good."

There's one tasty way to avoid the spoon debacle altogether. This Costco churro ice cream hack is what food court dreams are made of, because at the end of the day, it's hard to argue with using a churro to eat ice cream instead of a spoon.