Does Costco put their Halloween candy on sale after Halloween? How much of a sale?
I’m guessing yes. Everyone discounts their Halloween candy November 1, unless the package itself doesn’t have anything Halloween related printed on it, in which case it just goes back on the shelf (or gets returned to the warehouse for credit).
Call your local Costco and ask.
I was in Costco, shopping, on the evening of October 30. I didn’t see any Halloween candy for sale. Lots of Christmas treats, though.
Actually, I think they run out of Halloween candy around the 4th of July…
Generally I’ve found they put it on minor sale the week before, with the aim of running out before Halloween.
I recall one fellow where I used to live, was handing out chocolate Easter bunnies on Halloween. Walmart had marked them down to 3/$1 for 8-oz bunnies after Easter, and the guy must have bought up the lot and kept them in his freezer for 6 months. Generally, I don’t see Costco having “clearance sales” on items like other stores.
I would suspect that Costco has a deal with their suppliers. the cost of the leftover candy is probably negligible.
I’m not sure if Costco even sells candy marketed specifically for Halloween. You can get big bags of mixed “fun size” candy there year-round.
actually a lot of places send back the unbought holiday candy/food ect for credit and then that might get sold to big lots dollar tree or even repackaged for the next holiday
Our stores never buy too much of the "themed " wrapped stuff for any holiday except xmas which leads to shortages if something gets popular ……like the one year sour patch kids had a specific flavor that became popular cause of the internet/youtube ………. they had to order more ……
Wal-Mart will throw down on after Halloween candy. It will be 50% off today and 75% in the next few days. And Christmas candy goes on those shelves. It’s a racket.
I have once, in all my years of going to Costco, seen a section of items on Clearance. I’ve never seen anything marked as a sale otherwise.
I don’t know of Costco. Is it an outlet? Maybe they are about as cheap as it gets, anyway.
Wow, you really must live out in the middle of nowhere if you’ve never heard of Costco. FYI, it’s a membership warehouse store, for which you have pay an annual fee (of fifty or sixty bucks, I think) to join. Once you do join, you show the membership card to the employee at the entrance and can then wander through the warehouse. The stores are enormous and sell most stuff in large quantities. Think of things like a gallon jar of mayonnaise or a box containing ten Fuyu persimmons or a jar containing 425 Tylenol capsules or a box containing fifty rolls of toilet paper. The lures are the low prices and the high quality of the goods.
Costco is a “warehouse club” store. They sell bulk-packaged items at wholesale prices, things like six half-gallon bottles of orange juice shrink-wrapped in a box, or two 170-oz bottles of Tide zip-tied together. They also sell fresh items like bread, produce, dairy, and meat, also all in large packages, as well as home goods and electronics (no, you don’t have to buy a package of 6 TVs ;)).
I’ve found that most pre-packaged food items they sell are about $10 apiece, so if you have 10 items in your cart, you’ve got at least $100 there.
You can get baby grand pianos for $200 each, but you have to buy the three-pack. And the express lane is seventy-five items or fewer.
Yeah, I live in the outback of Arkansas. It’s like Sam’s club. I get it now.
I was in Wal-Mart today. Half the store was torn apart, and employees were busy putting up shelves and stocking them with Christmas candy!
No Costco’s in Arkansas. Wish there were, but obviously Walmart doesn’t.
I sold to Costco Canada & Walmart for many years including many seasonal items. Both retailers have very sophisticated inventory management systems and what you see in store in terms of inventory is usually very deliberate.
Costco will run out of items well before the season is over rather then have leftover discounted inventory at the end. Put another way, they will deliberately under-buy (and lose potential sales) rather than over-buy and discount. If they run out too early, then next year, they will adjust inventories upward.
This is very much part of Costco’s selling philosophy - they want to create a “sense of urgency” for you to buy. They try to train shoppers that “once it’s gone, its gone: better buy now”. They do not want to be perceived as a discount house.
Walmart, would rather have extra seasonal items and discount afterward rather than lose a sale. Their philosophy is to train shoppers that Walmart is the place to shop if you want cheap prices. Plus, seasonal items drives store traffic, if you know WM has lots of XXX, it becomes a destination.
In Walmart’s case, as someone pointed out, the branded manufacturers often provide price allowances back to WM for any unsold goods, so they may lose some margin, but they never (ever) lose money on the post season discounting. If it’s their own “Great value” brand, they just suck up the margin difference.
Costco absolutely has stuff on sale, they just dont use signage to mark it so - they don’t want to alert to the fact that it’s on sale. Google costco price codes for the lowdown, but pricing ending in .97 tends to be a sale item. Items ending in .00 also tend to be priced to move - I see this on the last orchids on the pallet sometimes. But clearly Costco doesn’t want you to ever feel you could buy stuff cheaper there some other time - they know you don’t shop there every day,week or month even, they want you to buy it NOW.
Plus, unlike many retailers, Costco does not make an effort to have everything. They carry what they can get/sell for a decent price, and when they can’t they stop carrying it. Some things they always seem to have, others come and go from the shelves fairly quickly. I had read once that they are used by assorted suppliers to create a demand, and then stop getting supplied the product with manufacturer hoping people will then buy it for a better markup at other retailers.
I was in Costco yesterday (Nov 1) and saw no Halloween candy on sale.