Agggm wrote: ↑Mon Feb 12, 2018 7:12 pm
I ended my membership years ago because it's annoying to shop at Costco.
+1
I essentially got paid to get a Costco membership through one of the LivingSocial promotions and did not even think of renewing. The place is deliberately annoying.
They do not carry the same stuff all the time, deliberately keep moving stuff around and do not label the aisles to force you to go through the whole store to find your stuff.
They only carry one kind of any item so they do not have to manage a large inventory. A typical Costco only stocks about 4,000 different items, a small fraction of the 50,000 at a typical supermarket or the 100,000 at the average Wal-Mart .
This is really annoying. Some examples:
unscented moisturizing lotions NA
non-whitening Colgate toothpaste NA
non-sweetened bite size shredded wheat NA
As to price, you can easily beat them if you shop the sales.
examples:
top sirloin steak: Costco $8/lb Safeway $5/lb
whole chicken: Costco $1.29/lb (must buy 2 or 3) Safeway $0.99 /lb for one chicken
blueberries: $4/lb must buy 2 pounds--Sprouts $2/18 oz
almond butter: Costco $8/lb in 2.5 pound jar. Trader Joe's $5.99 for one pound jar. (nut butters are fatty and get rancid fast)
eggs: Trader Joe's always beat their price and you only have to buy a dozen at a time.
As to Costco Travel again you can easily beat them. For example on rental cars, shop carrentalsavers.com or priceline.com to get the lowest price. Can be cancelled at any time. Enter your price into Autoslash.com and they will notify you as lower prices appear.
We do not drive much except on vacations when we rent cars so gasoline and tires do not affect us.
I will say Costco has great PR. Like the nightclubs with no signs and perennial long lines they convince people that they are a great deal by seeming to be exclusive.
edit: as to their vaunted $5 rotisserie chicken, we have a Sclemmertopf clay baker. Just rub one of the aforementioned 99 cents per pound Safeway chole chickens with salt, put it into the oven, turn the oven on and in 2 hours you have a perfectly cooked, juicy bird that is not super-salty or greasy like the Costco chicken.