Welp, I’ve pretty well decided that I’m done with Costco. The reasons: various. They range from the microscopic — personal experience, mostly — to the macroscopic: the plague and the cost of gas.
Let’s start with the last…
Costco shut down its centrally located store some time ago. This means that everyone who lives in the North Central, mid-town, Encanto, and Coronado districts has to drive halfway to Timbuktu to get to a store. There’s one store that’s sort of central, at Grand and about 33rd Avenue, but that’s a LONG way from my house, and it’s in a dangerous part of town where I would prefer not to drive at all, to say nothing of getting out of my car and walking across a gigantic parking lot. Plus it’s a “business” outlet, leaving one wondering how much of the regular housewifely products are available there. The two stores that I’m most likely to visit are equally remote from the North Central area: one in Paradise Valley and the other up the freeway halfway to freaking Prescott.
Driving in Phoenix, as I’ve no doubt groused here more than once, gets more and more miserable as the roads get more and more crowded. The place is Southern California Redux, only drivers here don’t drive as well as California drivers do. Every time you get in your car, it seems, you watch someone do something breathtakingly stupid — and they’re aggressive about it. Road rage is commonplace, apparently because so many people drive around hopped up on drugs. And, no doubt, because driving in the Phoenix area is an intensely frustrating activity for everyone, stoned or sober.
For that reason, driving halfway across the city’s increasingly crowded, annoying, and dangerous roads to buy a few household and grocery items grows increasingly counterproductive as the days go by.
Driving gets increasingly expensive, too — as it no doubt does everyplace else. This morning we’re told the average price of gas here is $4.44 a gallon. A month ago it was $5.04. At that rate, it’s prohibitive to drive outside your neighborhood for errands that can be accomplished locally. Personally, I don’t think you save all that much in buying at Costco — in fact, sometimes you probably spend more there than you would at other stores. But when you add in five bucks a gallon for the privilege of fighting your way across the city, the drive alone becomes prohibitive.
So the question arises: why drive halfway to Timbuktu when you can buy the same or similar products at the Sprouts, the Walmart, the Safeway, or the Albertson’s right in your neighborhood? Or order the stuff online?
For that matter, you can order Costco merchandise online, thanks to a local shopping service called Instacart. Set up an account with them, and all you have to do is go to their website, pick out the loot you want, upload payment, and voilà! Within a couple of hours, a runner shows up with the loot you ordered — and they’ll even haul it into the house for you.
For the nonce, I’ll probably keep my Costco membership and order through Instacart. This will allow me to continue to buy tires and the like there…maybe. Most everything else, though, will be purchased closer to home, at Sprouts, Albertson’s, Safeway, Walmart, and AJ’s.
The immediate cause of my rage at Costco just now is the fact that they suddenly decided to decline my debit card.
Costco won’t accept American Express, my credit card of choice; Instead, they force you to use Mastercard or Visa. I’m not interested in juggling any more mailed-in statements and payments than absolutely necessary, so I use ONE charge card. And that card is AMEX, because of the superior service they provide. Mastercard will drive you bonkers just trying to reach a human being, and the effort will get you nowhere. American Express hires, at least for the time being, actual humans who know what they’re doing.
So when I’m in Costco, I have no choice but to use a debit card — or, I suppose, to write a check.
But I no longer carry a purse around, largely because of the risk of theft in the parking lots at shopping centers near my house, and because hauling a purse from place to place is a damn nuisance. I carry a metal case of cards that will fit in a pocket. Period. Since women’s clothing generally has minimal pockets, hauling a checkbook and a pen everywhere I go is next to impossible.
So: don’t take my card, and you don’t take my money. How hard, dear Costco, is that to understand?
The last time I was there, I killed an hour roaming around the store, dodging crazed fellow shoppers and filling up a shopping cart. Waited in line at the checkout (and, as usual, waited and waited and waited and waited). Finally got up to the checkout. Forked over my debit card, and was told it doesn’t work!
Huh????
They threw me out with no purchases, all that time utterly wasted.
Furious, I drove straight to the credit union, which happens to be on the way toward my house from that far-flung Costco outlet.
The CU staff studied my debit card, looked it up, and said nothing was wrong with it. They had no idea why Costco would reject it.
So, apparently there’s not a thing I can do to fix that.
Other, of course, than buy merchandise elsewhere, thankyouverymuch.
And, though it’s going to be a nuisance to buy things I normally buy in bulk (such as paper products) at places like Sprouts and Walmart, the truth is local stores do carry most of the products I habitually get at Costco.
And then some. Sprouts has freshly prepared meals — mostly made with real, whole foods, not canned and frozen junk. The Walmart Neighborhood Store has the paper goods and cleaning products. AJ’s carries the dog’s food as well as top-of-the-line fresh produce and gourmet items. The Safeway has everything else, albeit at premium prices.
I may keep the Costco card so that I can send Instacart runners to pick up the (very few!) things I can’t get elsewhere. But that won’t last long. You don’t really know what Costco carries unless you visit the store fairly often. So within a few weeks or months, Instacart won’t be an effective option for buying there.
While Costco has more than enough customers to keep itself in business even after I quit spending vast oceans of money there, one does wonder: what is the point of deliberately driving buyers away? Why make it hard to buy from your stores?
“Why make it hard to buy from your stores?” Arrogance and ignorance. Thinking they’re the only, or best, game in town. As long as they’re keeping the shareholders happy, who cares about the customers?
It’s $60/year for a membership, but I can get my son in on mine, so that cuts the cost in a way. However, if you’re not running out there to buy gasoline every time you turn around, that would hugely cut the number of Costco visits per year — because what happens, as a practical matter, is that every time you traipse out there to buy cut-rate gas, you go in the store. If you don’t need gas but you do need, say, a package of frozen potatoes or a bottle of Lysol, you incline to buy the food and the household supplies closer to home.
So it seems to me that if you were buying gasoline at the neighborhood QT, you might not spend that extra $60 bucketing-around cost, because you’d be shopping at the grocery stores in your neighborhood and so not consuming anywhere near as much gas.
Now, would you spend ONLY $60 more at nearby grocery stores, over the course of a year? Unclear.
It’s not clear to me that the prices in local grocery stores are that much higher, especially if you use coupons or watch for deals.
What about the ecstatic joys of bulk buying, so richly facilitated by Costco’s lifetime supplies of everything?
Well, why couldn’t you make one bulk-buy trip, right? Say, in January you run over to Walmart and buy six months’ worth of toilet paper and paper towels. These you stash in a garage cabinet. But instead of waiting to run out of the stuff before buying more, what if you simply replace it as you use it, at the local Walmart or grocery store? This would mean you’d always have your Survivalist Stash on hand, but you would need to buy in bulk only once. Come July, you’d still have approximately the same supply on hand.
And…you wouldn’t have paid sixty bucks for the privilege…
Now, there’s one fly in this genius ointment: that is, Costco’s tire and mechanic department is damn hard to beat. When I got that nail in my tire on the way back from the Mayo, the Costco crew were WONDERFUL to me. They fixed the tire and the threw in some incidental service with no extra cost.
But again: to get access to that service we don’t need a membership for me and a membership for my son. We only need a membership for one of us. He and I could split the cost of a membership. At least until such time as we find an in-town mechanic’s shop to take the place of Chuck, who retired.