I am baffled in a way by an entire family descending upon a store for the weekly shopping, when I was growing up, Mom did the shopping while we were in school after we were school age, before we were school age she arranged for a baby sitter to watch us for the hour or two that she was shopping. [preschool was 1960s, a shopping trip was much less of a deal, the grocery stores were tiny more like a small town IGA now. ]
Well, speaking personally as to why I bulk buy frozen goods - so I can dependably menu plan for a month at a time, knowing that the ‘fresh’ stuff availability is such that I can get fresh dairy weekly [dependably, half gallon half and half, a dozen eggs, a pound of butter, a head of lettuce, and a banana … you know, the usual basics that you get fresh because it isn’t good frozen or dehydrated] If I know I have 100 quarter pound burger patties, that is 50 meat portions sorted for 50 meals [husband and self, 1 burger each] and if you add a bag each of mixed veggies, chopped spinach, brocolli and cauliflower florets, brocccoli, cauliflower, snow peas, lima beans <you get the drift> all I need to do is decant 2 portions of each veg, add a starch and a fresh <veg or fruit> you have a classic 3 plop meal. That leads into the 50 pound sack of rice [though I get it in 10 pound bags, I get a really ultra long grain basmati rice from an Indian/Halal grocery and that is the largest size the have normally] and the 10 pound sack of taters that is my weekly buy, or the 50 pound sack of flour that is also a regular buy [breads, baked goods, pastas like gnocci]
As you can tell, places like Costco are great for people like us who prefer to self make the bulk of our foods =)
I would shop there just to avoid the Karens, I read Newest - Funny & True Stories | NotAlwaysRight.com all the time, and normally would disbelieve many of the stories, but had worked in customer service enough and been out in the world shopping enough to recognize many of these as common asshat behaviors.
Some people like Costco milk containers because they are thinner and take up less space in the refrigerator.
Lets not forget they also sell everything from furniture to toys to tools to clothes to live plants. Their dvd’s and books are usually a bargain. I’ve also bought camping equipment there.
BTW, I never go on a saturday. The place is SOOO crowded. Bumper to bumper carts.
Have you tried their frozen broccoli? It comes in a big bag of several small bags that are a perfect family size. Also their frozen green beans. Just take them out by the handful, boil them, and they are great!
If really ignoring the fact it’s 3 hrs away, would depend on your spending level and what you spend on, which isn’t entirely revealed by ‘retired single guy’ as it relates to Costco. We’re a retired couple and half what we spend there would make Costco still a complete no brainer. If we spend a lot of less, especially if we never spent on all the the non-supermarket stuff Costco offers very competitively (tires, electronics, appliances, vacations, a variety of other goods/services we haven’t happened to get from them), then conceivably it wouldn’t work.
To attempt a semi-objective quantification, Costco Shop Cards go for pretty consistent ~15+% premium to face value on Ebay (you can get in and use them without being a member). Part of that is perhaps general Ebay price strangeness, but probably gives a rough idea of the market value of a membership and makes $60 look pretty cheap: $400 spent per yr plus $60 puts you on even footing with market price of the card as non-member. Although there are also special situations like if a member friend would bring you there and not make you share the membership cost, and various state laws prohibiting Costco from excluding non-members from certain departments even without Shop Cards (pharmacy and/or optical in some states, gas here in NJ I think uniquely, etc).
As said, it may not be for you. Not everything is for everyone. But if you already buy stuff on-line from Amazon, Walmart or whomever, you might check prices at costco.com. Even without being a member, I’ve found some stuff at better prices there. (For example, nutritional supplements, Gillette razor blades and Oral-B toothbrushes and electric toothbrush heads. And I think I’ve bought all of that stuff without paying a shipping fee or a premium over store prices, but that might be unique to that class of goods.)
In Minnesota I’ve only seen the whole lamb and suckling pig at the Costco business center, not at a regular Costco. The one I go to also usually sells a whole goat, but cut down into eight pieces.
WRT to lines, I generally shop every couple of weeks on a weekday evening, and the store is pretty much empty. I’m told that stores are much more crowded when they open in the morning, because people want to get just-restocked in-demand products. Still, on my last trip (at 6:30 pm) I found toilet paper, paper towels, quart bottles of hand sanitizer, gallon jugs of Lysol disinfecting cleaner.
I can easily make up the fee in a few runs for organic vegetables vs. the price at a Kroger (plus the quality is generally better). Throw in some office supplies (e.g., paper for the office printer), paper towels, and a few bags of nuts or dried fruit, and I wouldn’t even need to buy aspirin or a 6-pack of garbanzos to have the membership amortized.
I think a big piece of why people like Costco is that your normal Costco store is more optimized for the retail consumer than their competitors (i.e. Sam’s Club). Sam’s is still substantially oriented toward the small business owner, with a lot of large-quantity items that wouldn’t ever get used in the home- bread, pastries, takeout containers, paper towel dispensers, 105 oz cans of crushed tomatoes, cash registers, etc…
Costco, on the other hand, has split most of that stuff out into Costco Business Centers, and the normal Costcos are aimed nearly exclusively at retail consumers. That’s not to say that they don’t have stuff like 25 lb sacks of flour at their regular stores, but their product mix is aimed predominantly at the retail consumer, not small business owners.
So people go to both stores, and think Costco’s better, because it’s more optimized. They have larger quantity packages of some stuff like USDA Prime beef than your gourmet grocery store, and so on.
And none of that is unique to Costco. The number of women trailing multiple kids through any grocery store on the weekend is seldom zero. In some ways, it is the 1960s in that there are fathers who simply will not watch the kids for long enough for their wives to get the shopping done - and not the 1960s in that you can’t leave your nine year old home alone watching their younger siblings while you do it.
Much has been said about the reliable quality of Kirkland products - I have an anecdote to add that supports the assertion that Costco guards the quality of anything they put the Kirland label on:
I am a bit of a vanilla snob and in the past would buy a 3-4 year supply of Massey’s double-strength or something similar. So when I ran out recently, I hadn’t bought vanilla in ages and wasn’t familiar with my local options. I grabbed a large, unmarked bottle at Costco, thinking it was “store brand” and no doubt acceptable.
Wow, was I wrong. Compared to the vanilla I usually use it is weak, and lacks the lovely complex notes I appreciate. So I looked more closely at the bottle - “why would Costo put their name on such a crappy product?” - and the answer is, they don’t. Nowhere on the bottle does it say Kirkland or any other brand name; it is completely generic. The fine print on the back says it was bottled by Costco, but the size and position of the text suggests they are not proud of this and would rather you didn’t make note of the fact.
I conclude that they keep the Kirkland name off of products that don’t meet their standards. And I’ll never buy that vanilla again!
How much did it cost? If it was actual vanilla extract, it should be upwards of $2.25/oz, and probably much more than that for high quality, like Nielsen-Massey.
I’m actually having trouble sourcing good vanilla right now - acceptable products are available on Amazon but they won’t ship to Hawai’i. (I’m having this problem a lot lately, it’s vexing.) So I ended up ordering a vanilla-vanillin mix that got good reviews. My impulse is to shun vanillin, of course, but I gather it holds up very well in blind taste tests against vanilla, so I’ll give it a try.)
I just had the very worst thing I’ve ever bought at Costco.
My wife sometimes gets sushi rolls from the supermarket - not great, but acceptable. She hasn’t lately since she was nervous about them being touched by human hands.
So she bought a sushi party tray at Costco this morning. Fairly cheap. And she got her wish - these things probably were never touched by human hands. Instead of rice there was a kind of rice paste.
If you accused a sushi chef of making these he would probably successfully sue you for slander.
They did not have the Kirkland name on them, btw. Yech.
I know, we deserved it for buying sushi this way.
To be fair, most sushi “party trays” are like that unless you go to an actual sushi chef and pay accordingly. Wouldn’t surprise me if the Costco sushi was made by the likes of Hissho, an industrial-scale corporation based out of that hotbed of quality sushi, Charlotte, NC, that makes a huge portion of the “grab and go” sushi found at gas stations and airports.
“Kind of rice paste” is an apt description. One of the very few things I ever returned to Costco was a sushi plate.
I was about to suggest that the pre-packaged “ready to cook/serve” foods didn’t come from Kirkland… but then saw that the ravioli lasagna I bought and cooked today does, in fact, say Kirkland on the computer printed label. Was good eating, too!
Also, no line to check out. There was an open register and I got rung out and left in minutes. This was at 1:45pm so it wasn’t all that crowded overall, your mileage may vary based on location.
I’m a single person who lives in a tiny house–with pets. Savings on pet food alone buys my membership a couple times over. Then there’s all the other stuff. I like a little chocolate in my coffee–2 lb bags of unprocessed cacao powder, $12, lasts me a year if I don’t do a lot of baking with it. Almond flour is ridiculously expensive anywhere that isn’t Costco so for those of us who do keto baking it’s a lifesaver. The bacon is very good and cheaper per pound than anywhere else. Really good cheese for decent prices. Organic eggs $2.50/doz. I like dried fruit–18 oz bags of dried tangerine slices, strawberries, blueberries, cherries for less per oz than anywhere else, and only Trader Joe’s has the dried tangerines, for about a third again as much. Real pure maple syrup in sizes that you’d expect syrup to be in, not those tiny little bottles you get elsewhere at liquid gold prices. Exam gloves, 400 for twenty bucks. Really good coffee beans, usually under six bucks a pound. Basically, excellent quality products for cheap crap prices. And I got my daughter a card on my account so that doubles up the savings.
Also, they have Geezer Hour and won’t let anyone under 60 in the store until general open, they require masks in every store and are doing a great job keeping people distanced.
We were in Marigot, capital of the French side of St Martin having dinner in the patio/tent at Le Marrakech, a Moroccan restaurant created by Restaurateur Toufiq Lahlou a few years ago.
I returned to our table & pillows from the men’s to find my gf missing. Then I saw her; she was in the alleyway leading to the street, in an area without lights, talking to a dreadlocked dude. The guy reached into his satchel and handed something to her and she put it in her purse. She then handed the man something, then returned to the table.
We had way more weed than I needed and besides that, she doesn’t know the ins and outs of buying drugs and would never, ever do it. When I asked her what was going on, she pulled what she’d purchased out of her purse. It was a few fresh vanilla bean pods.