This is why I've always appreciated Costco - they substituted out shopping bags for cardboard pallet cases. So the waste that walks in through their front door walks out with customers and is put to a productive use. Rather than being performative and de-packaging items before a customer sees them they actually do an effective job at reducing waste by reusing items that would otherwise just go straight to recycling.

Costco does sell some items in unnecessary blister packs. Not sure why they do that.

It just pushes the recycling onto the customer. It’s not like those containers disappear. They don’t give out bags and don’t guarantee a box anyways.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it to save on labor and garbage pickup costs of breaking down and hauling away all those boxes.

Recycling is great but it's the least effective of the trio of actions if you recall the triangle of arrows: "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" - Reducing is the best option but by the time goods leave a factory they're already plastered in packaging. While costco can work with suppliers to reduce packaging (and I think it's pretty clear they do by buying special bulk sized options) - there's a decent chunk of material flowing into their locations. That leaves two options, recycle and reuse - if we were to immediately recycle we'd spend a lot of energy recovering the raw material from the box and reforming it to a new good, before we do that if we can get another use out of its current incarnation then that's awesome - we essentially get a brand new box for "free" because we're not spending energy to break it down, remold it, repaint it and do other crap. And then it goes home to the customer - this may vary based on location but where I am in Canada there are extremely accessible recycling curbside pickup options, so I'd wager that a fair majority of those boxes end up getting reused anyways.

And sure, there's a cynical view you can take on how much money the company is saving but hey - if they're saving that money while reducing their environmental impact all props to them.