**Our Take: The Costco Price Problem Is a Data Problem, Not a Tool Problem**
When a small-business owner has to ask Reddit how to pull Costco prices into Excel for Mac, the real issue isn't a missing feature, it's that the spreadsheet experience itself hasn't evolved to meet their needs. This user knows what they want: track price changes quickly, without paying for third-party apps. And they've correctly identified that Power Query, the standard web-import tool on Windows, simply isn't available on Mac. That's not a knowledge gap; it's a product gap. And it's one that far too many spreadsheet users are left to solve on their own.
What this reveals is a deeper tension between the promise of spreadsheet software and the reality of daily work. Traditional tools like Excel were designed for static data entry and calculation. They weren't built for a world where prices change hourly and small businesses need real-time visibility. The user's request is practical, modest even: import a publicly available price list from a website into a table. But the workaround, manual copy-paste, third-party apps, or clunky scripting, adds friction that drains energy from the actual business task. That's not a user failure. It's a design failure.
The good news is that the solution doesn't require abandoning spreadsheets. It requires rethinking what a spreadsheet can do. An AI-native spreadsheet doesn't wait for you to find a workaround. It connects to the web, understands the structure of a page like Costco's, and pulls the data into your sheet automatically, no Power Query, no plug-ins, no manual steps. For the business owner tracking Costco prices, that means the time between "I want to check" and "I have the data" shrinks to zero. The spreadsheet becomes a live window into the market, not a static snapshot you have to refresh yourself.
This is what progressive data management looks like: tools that adapt to how people actually work, not the other way around. The user who posted this question is not looking for hype. They want a practical, repeatable way to make better purchasing decisions. That's a human-centered goal, and it deserves a tool that meets it head-on. Until that tool arrives in Excel for Mac, the workaround is still a workaround. But the path forward is clear: build spreadsheets that connect, not just compute.