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It seems everywhere I go, I hear the same refrain, "Oh, you can get it cheaper at Costco!" It's enough to drive somebody like me to sign up for a lifetime super-platinum membership. But I won't.  I don't shop there, and despite the throngs of Kirkland's Best cheerleaders that seem to surround me at nearly every gathering, I still don't want to shop at Costco. Even with my wife pushing me to bow to the enormous peer-pressure of every mini-van mommy friend of hers, I am not doing it. Here's 5 reasons why I don't shop at Costco and they have nothing to do with prices:
Time:
Nearly a decade ago, my wife and I had a Costco membership. We'd drive 10 miles through some of the most congested streets of Los Angeles, grab our cart and begin a lengthy shopping experience. The only place with worse traffic than Los Angeles is Costco. You'd show up on a Saturday or Sunday and consider yourself lucky to find a parking spot withing 500 feet of the entrance. We'd head up and down each aisle filling our massive cart(s) with every gargantuan jar of Mediterranean olives, twin pack of jumbo-sized Ketchup, and top it off with 10 pound packages of ground beef. When we finally finished loading our haul, we'd have to take our place in checkout lines that rivaled the lines at Disneyland. Add to the ordeal the commute back and the hour it would take to unload and pack away all the bounty, it would take four to five hours from the time we left until the last 24 pack of sandwich rolls was stashed away. Throw in the recovery time from a single Costco expedition and whatever day we shopped was written off. The time suck alone was reason enough not to shop at Costco.
Spoilage:
Costco is cheap, but it can get awfully expensive if you don't consume your groceries before they go bad. We have a hard time keeping a 24 ounce loaf of bread from spoiling, but a 24 pack of rolls? Half of them never made it to the part of their life-cycle where they turn into a sandwich. I distinctly remember getting a 15 pound jar of fancy olives only to have 13 pounds go to waste. It seemed like such a great deal when we bought it, but we probably paid more per pound for those olives than any we've ever bought since. Costco has only two sizes: Mega-jumbo and super massive. Unless you have 3 sons on the high school football team or meticulously plan every meal around your food inventory, spoilage is going to be a major issue if you buy perishables at Costco. Cheap food at Costco isn't such a good deal when 20% of it ends up in the garbage can.
Grocery Stores are for FOOD!
Maybe I'm strange, but when I go shopping for food, I like thinking about...FOOD. Once in a while, I get distracted by the flowers in supermarkets and fork over a few bucks to brighten the wife's day. But most of the time, I go straight for the food. One, thing I don't need is a weekly reminder of how cheap it can be to get buried in a Costco casket. There's nothing like strolling through the isles looking for Cheerios and finding them next to a display of Universal Caskets. I'll take a silver casket with my twin pack of milk please.
I also feel sorry for that poor guy that got his Costco card hoping to save a few hundred dollars a year on groceries only to shell out $8,000 for a "better" diamond engagement ring that his wife spotted at Costco. Yup, you can buy diamonds at Costco along with that casket. Is there anything more financially ruinous than routinely exposing your wife to prominently displayed diamonds?
Of course, these are the extreme thing examples, but the point is Costco is not a supermarket - it's a mall loaded with non-food stuff that can make your shopping experience incredibly expensive when you fall into temptation and pick up an HDTV while shopping for baby diapers.
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