Sam’s Club (never been to a Costco) has self checkout that is really quick and simple. There is also an app you can use to scan each item as you put it into your cart.
I’ve been a Sam’s Club member for a long time. Haven’t used a cashier in a few years.
I’ve never been in one - the closest one to me is about 30 miles away. In the past I’ve had memberships in Sam’s and BJ’s depending on where I lived, but honestly, neither one impressed me all that much.
Going back even farther, when I was still in the Navy, I remember people going thru the Commissary with 2 and 3 carts loaded to overflowing, something I never saw in a regular grocery store ever. I personally never saw anything that made it worth it to me to shop in a place like that - even if the milk was a dollar cheaper a gallon, my time in line was worth more than a dollar.
I don’t know - maybe I’m missing something, but I just don’t get the appeal or advantage of shopping clubs. Each to his own, I guess.
They do glance over the receipts which takes some measure of time greater than zero. I can confidently say that I have never spent ten minutes waiting on the process. I would dare say that I never spent five real minutes on it. How much some podcast person may complain about it may depend a lot on their location, time of day in visiting the store, personal threshold of patience for waiting in line and how much they value accuracy over entertaining hyperbole when making their podcast. “Ten minutes” is a pretty generic way of saying “Long enough to be an inconvenience but not long enough to say fuck it and leave”.
But that is because the dependas were shopping once a month bulk, and if they shopped any more frequently it was tied to the paydays - twice a month at best. [Though I will point out you can use the NEX card at the geedunk over by the Gungywamp Navy Fed Cred for between shopping fresh dairy and very limited frozen stuff …]
And yes, as a dependa even though I worked a civilian job and got paid weekly, we still did our shopping based on the Navy payday - though to be perverse we shopped the alternating Tuesdays because we could do that. No passle of screaming kids eating us out of house and home so we menu planned =)
[I remember mrAru bringing home a paper check before they went to direct deposit, and I remember paydays when they would haul a few chests of money to a pay window to cash the checks for the guys, they always had a couple marines standing guard =) Deely center was interesting =)]
You’re not a member, so how have you experienced the checkout line at Costco?
As for me, my Costco doesn’t have bad lines, and checkout is fine. People seem to have absolutely no idea how to maneuver their cart once they step foot inside, though. My wife and refer to it as the “Common Courtesy Distortion Zone”. It’s considerably closer to our house than Sam’s Club, so it’s not a decision based out of brand loyalty (though we usually avoid Walmart if we can - my wife has done work for them, and hates giving any of their money back).
If you pay for a Costco membership, then you’re motivated to do the bulk of your shopping there, so you’re more willing to wait in line to get to Costco rather than go to the next grocery store without a line.
We had Costco membership for a year. It was always busy and chaotic inside. Pretty much like a slightly higher class WalMart but requires you to pay to get in.
We let our membership lapse as we weren’t getting our money’s worth.
At Costco everything is satisfaction guaranteed. A prompt, no hazzle refund.
Membership discount associations do have some kind of psychological effect. Part of it is wanting to get your value out of it, but I also think part of it is wanting to prove that it was worth a chunk of money to begin with. In that way it’s a little like someone who buys a very expensive gadget and feels the need to talk at length about how great it is.
Oh wait, were we talking about Costco? I was looking for the Amazon Prime thread, sorry.
(I say that is a longtime member of Amazon Prime)
Why do some people go nuts for Apple iPhones? They’re just smartphones and not particularly better or worse than other well-built smartphones. What’s the deal with Starbucks? It’s just coffee. And what’s up with some others deliberately avoiding Starbucks for any other coffee shop?
With well-known brands, signaling identity has personal value. Justified or not, Costco’s brand perception is “fairness”, “treating employees and customers well”, “not taking additional profits simply because you can”, etc… Unsurprising that such a perceived value system has meaning to some folks.
I was a member for six months and my experience was very similar to the OP. Heard people saying how great it was and then when I actually went there it was a disappointment. Huge portions that would barely fit in my refrigerator or pantry. Some good deals but the lines were always long and slow moving. Shopping there was a frustrating ordeal so I cancelled my membership ASAP and have never thought about going back.
I’m not a member but my parents are so when I visit, I either go with them or borrow their card and go on my own. And I’ve also bought stuff off their website for mail order delivery. The website says that the prices are different, and in-store prices might be better but some stuff is cheaper on the website than Target or Amazon, even without using a membership number. So that’s a way to take advantage of their buying power without paying for the membership. (Because I have the same objection to Costco that I do to Amazon Prime; you are paying them money for the privilege of shopping there.)
That’s the one thing I dislike about Costco. It’s a browsy type store, deliberately set up that way (no aisle distinction signs, items get moved around the store, new stuff popping up here and there all the time). Browsing isn’t so bad when you’re at a department store like Macy’s with no cart, but when everyone has a huge cart full of stuff plus 1-10 family members in tow plus bottlenecks where they’re giving out samples and everyone is looking at the product on the shelves/stacks, ignoring the people around them, it makes for a fairly neurotic shopping experience.
When you go to the regular grocery store everyone kinda follows the same flow. There’s not too much shelf-scanning…you go to where the thing is that you want (and probably bought 20 times before) and pick it up and move. Yeah of course sometimes people are standing there reading labels or scanning the shelf for the right thing but even then, the people moving around them are watching traffic.
I’m not saying that the people who shop at Costco are mouth-breathing gawpers. It’s really how you’re supposed to shop there. I walk around slack-jawed when I shop there too, for the same reasons I mentioned. It’s really not relaxing for me to shop there because I feel like I’m always in someone’s way. I’ve not been able to go when it’s not busy…I just tag along with my mom some weekends.
I really like Costco otherwise, for all the reasons mentioned already. And I like that damn pizza. I don’t prefer it to other pizza but for the price I can choke it down!
I’ve read that moving stuff around is deliberate, in that it gives them more flexibility to add and remove items. Yes for aisle blockage - in mine there are some people who think the way to shop is to browse while putting your cart perpendicular to the shelves.
I suppose part of getting low prices is dumping products which won’t hit their price point, but it is annoying to find stuff you’d buy every visit vanish.
Plus no one has mentioned: their travel agency. I always rent cars through Costco now. Great deal and very flexible. I haven’t tried air bookings.
Not at the one I go to, it tended to only have 1 car in front of you in line generally.
As a guess, Costco has several things going for it that I’m guessing makes it appealing to their middle class/upper middle class audience.
[ul]
[li]They pay their workers well. They offer a living wage and benefits, something most other grocery stores do not which makes people feel more comfortable shopping there. [/li][li]They required facemasks before other stores, and there are videos of people being kicked out for protesting the facemask policy. I could see this being appealing to the pro-science crowd. [/li][li]Shopping at costco has a level of prestige you don’t get from shopping at walmart. Its more a middle class/upper middle class store. There is a reason there is no website called peopleofcostco.com[/li][/ul]
Although many of the comments are about Costco during COVID, and here I have noticed there’s more waiting on line than other stores for the same or less availability of particular stuff in short supply. It’s still worthwhile to go for the normal values, but the Costco public’s reaction to COVID has made it a little less attractive than normal.
If I’m being honest I don’t really care about that. If it’s a Walmart in Middle of Nowhere, USA there probably isn’t a Costco. Whereas our Costco is across the parking lot from a Walmart, but the Walmart people could just go to work for Costco, eventually, if it’s really a matter of Costco being nice to people by paying them more, as opposed to hiring better, therefore more expensive, people. Probably a worldview difference, not to derail things, it just doesn’t have much to do with my view of Costco. I know it does for some people.
Again I don’t care, my wife does to some degree.
Walmart in particular often has non-grocery goods which are special items/models of particularly low quality even from name brand manufacturers, ‘exclusive to Walmart’. We’ve no interest in such items. Factory packaged grocery stuff is the same, but meat, produce etc I agree typically superior at Costco, and non-grocery items are an albeit limited selection of good stuff at good prices, much less junk.
We are empty nest couple, but for example I just bought a new set of pretty expensive ‘ultra high performance’ summer tires for my car $200 better all-in at Costco than Tirerack.com which typically has excellent prices. Included in Costco’s prices for us is always paying with Costco Shop Cards I buy online to get 5.25% cash back on the credit card I use, then 2% back from Costco (with annual ~$120 membership, the cash back often comes to >$120 for us in a given year, always > $60, covering the difference between $120 membership and the basic $60 one which doesn’t give you the 2% cashback).
Last year we bought an international package trip from Costco: great price, which make it a shock how upscale the hotels turned out to be.
If you add on stuff beyond basic grocery or Target type small general non-grocery purchases, Costco gets even better.
It’s in the OP, my friend is in the Cult of Costco so thus I wind up accompanying him some of the time.
Hard disagree. The fact that Costco, unlike a number of stores, took a hard line on trying to reduce COVID transmission - reducing the number of people who can come in on a card and requiring masks in particular - made them a much more attractive place to shop, IMHO.
The irony that they’re a much more attractive place to shop thus everybody should shop there and not shop at the much less filled other stores.
Just to note that one big reason why Costco has a more affluent customer base than Walmart, even though the average price per unit can be lower: Poor people can’t afford the upfront cost of membership and can afford to buy in bulk, which are the factors that allow Costco to offer better rates. That’s a factor generally in the economy that makes being poor suck–you end up paying more for things than affluent people pay.