How is the quality of CostCo’s eyeglasses?
They are good. But, my vanity got the better of me and the Costco ones lately are not as stylish as Zenni…
I have costco glasses for many prescriptions and loved them. Last year my insurance didn’t cover costco glasses so I had to go to another eye doctor and get glasses somewhere else. They did let me use my old costco frames, but then the lab broke them (cut the lenses too large, and when you try to force lenses into a plastic frame…snap). I took the frames and shaved down lenses to a repair shop and they fixed them.
I love these frames. (I also love the sunglasses frames I got at the shop that sent my frames to the lab that broke them, but they cost a LOT more than the costco ones)
@Mjkacmom …Goskid2 is a Clemson grad…had a great time at Graduation–hope you do as well.
We often reserve a car via Costco…and then check back (some sweet spots seem to be two months out and two weeks out). Sometimes we find a further savings by re-booking the car and then canceling first car. Easy peasy. (DO NOT check daily—the algorithms will then think there’s lots of interest…and prices go up!) Did this with above mentioned recent trip to FL…original price $336…re-booked at $254. When we initially tried direct thru Budget, it was $448.
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I generally buy 2 or more pairs of glasses at a time. I currently have about 3 regular and the prescription sunglasses. I finally decided since I will be wearing glasses until possibly I get cataract surgery in the future, I might as well have several pairs.
Costco generally has coupons so you get a discount when you buy 2+ pair with same Rx. For kids, they had great prices, which was helpful because my kids eyes Rx changed often.
My S buys glasses online but I prefer buying where I know the opticians, especially since they’re great about servicing the glasses, pretty much till they fall apart.
I can’t tell you the times I’ve found it useful to have a 2nd pair of glasses, even on the plane! (haha—yep have misplaced them).
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We’ve been very happy with eyeglasses at Costco. I wear my glasses all the time, so my glasses are usually in pretty good condition because they’re either on my nightstand or on my face. My spouse, however, keeps his in the car all year long, including during the blazing hot summers when the car feels like a humid oven when you open the door. His previous (non-Costco) glasses warped and looked terrible. He’s had the same Costco pair for over a decade and they look brand new.
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Multiple pairs of glasses means you can change your glasses to go with the day’s outfit and don’t always need to have neutral glasses…you can get some with more personality!
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We’ve been members since the first one opened in Seattle, decades ago now.
I do most of my grocery shopping in two locally-owned stores, Costco, and Trader Joe’s . (I refuse to set foot in Safeway or Fred Meyer unless I absolutely have to.)
We have a Costco visa & executive membership and get a lot back in $$ each year. Our rebate on the card this year was $971. I don’t know what we got from the exec membership.
I did a big shop there today. Savings on the bagged salad I have for lunch every day $9 for 2 bags. They’re probably $6 each at a regular store.
Pure Vanilla extract - $9.99 for 16 oz. $3-6/ oz is typical
Some booze, some wine, butter, batteries, deodorant, laundry detergent, BlueDef for the truck, cheerios, apple juice, meat.
We’ve bought outdoor furniture, lawn mowers, garden tools.
My husband’s wardrobe has a lot of Costco in it. Underwear to outerwear.
Travel - rental cars
Prescriptions
Vaccines
As with any store, you have to check prices, but Costco definitely comes out ahead on an awful lot.
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Honestly, I don’t save anything by shopping at Costco. I like to shop there to get foods I can’t get at regular grocery stores. It’s a treat to have some different meals. But I definitely don’t save any money by doing so.
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Any money I save on items is quickly gone with impulse items, but I love supporting a store that has a good number of employees who have been there since they opened 20 years ago here. They treat their employees well and it shows.
I have no shame - I have eaten a $1.50 hotdog on vacation in Hawaii when we stopped to refill the rental car. Saved on a meal and gas!
My secret pet peeve is that they are too kind with taking returns. I feel like I am absorbing those costs in the prices I pay when someone returns a worn out couch or bouncy house they don’t want to clean at the end of the summer. I just can’t look at the things people will be unloading out front sometimes.
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I like the ready to eat things for a change sometimes—lamb shanks, Italian cold cuts, even meatloaf and mashed potatoes. It’s nice to have different things sometimes and it’s a 5 minute or so drive from our home. The workers at the Costco closest to our home are VERY nice!
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I forgot.. we get our dog’s prescriptions there too!
I used to represent Costco when I was in private practice and had the privilege of a couple of actual conversations with Jim Sinegal himself, and I still know a good number of their in-house people. The “treasure hunt” is a well documented intent on their part, but the other reason that things appear and disappear is vendor negotiations. They insist pretty aggressively on thin margins. Costco may or may not always have the lowest price on this or that, but sometimes the reason the competition does is because they’re using a product as a loss leader or they’re trying to get rid of excess inventory. Costco tends to not be in that position as often as the more retail grocery stores. The reasons that they are, in fact, the cheaper option is the obvious and easy stuff, which turns out to be true: (1) nobody squeezes vendors harder than Costco (vendor suits / disputes keep counsel busy); (2) the size of their products and the “let me scan your receipt and draw on it with a marker” check-out system results in Costco having a small % of the shrinkage that other stores experience (this was especially exaggerated during the pandemic); and (3) most obvious of all, when they carry something for a vendor, they sell a lot of it because of the volume purchase.
I’m not the guy who is going to blow half a day examining whether I am truly getting the absolute best price for ketchup in the Seattle area if I were willing to shop at three different places on the day I need it, but my general glance at the “per unit” cost typically puts them over the competition for a lot of things unless one is willing to manage coupons and drive around. Not always, but more often than not. And, yeah, putting out more money for a 4 month supply of ketchup means you’re losing the float on the incremental amount of absolute dollars spent. But I weigh that against driving to multiple places, burning gas and wear / tear on my car, and my time and effort. Some things, like garbage bags, laundry detergent, shampoo, vitamins, are almost always clear winners. With garbage bags, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything close in the grocery stores.
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The podcast I referenced above goes into detail about the things you mentioned in your post. Additional reasons their shrinkage is so much lower than their competition are a) their typical customer is affluent and also wants to protect their membership, so far less likely to shoplift, and b) their employees are so loyal that they also do not want to risk their jobs by walking off with product. Extremely low rates of shrinkage help keep their margins low (margins are capped at a max of 14% but they aim for 11% for most products.) As for vendor negotiations, the podcast explained that because Costco carries far fewer items (SKU’s) than their competition, their buyers have fewer vendors to work with and are very knowledgeable about the products they buy (or they take the time to do their homework.) The example given is if a seller of a chocolate product increases their price because the cost of cocoa has gone up, the Costco buyer will verify that data before agreeing to a price increase. And then - they will continue to monitor the price of cocoa and if it drops, will go back to the buyer asking for the price to be now be lowered. Very tough but fair is how the podcast describes their vendor negotiations and relationships.
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Costco is the closest grocery store to our home by over a mile. We shop there frequently. Do we save money? On individual items on the shopping list, gas, and services (rental cars and optical), yes, we do. Overall though, adding in the impulse buying and snacks we might not get if we never went there, probably not.
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Funny costco story—I was in line at cashier once a few years ago and the guy in front of me was staying at a vacation rental. He was buying a huge pack of kitchen garbage bags, foil & other items. After he checked out, he asked me if I’d like some of them because they wouldn’t ever use all of them. He gave me a portion of the foil and garbage bags & I gave him like $10 or something. Many years later, I still have some of the foil & garbage bags, that we are slowly trying to use up! We were both happy.
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Forgot to add that, yes. The membership requirement tends to filter for people who, at least at the time of granting membership, are employed.
My experience is you can trust that Costco will be a good price on the specific product they sell, which I expect relates to negotiating good deals and selling at a low margin. This can reduce the benefits of comparison shopping elsewhere. If you buy it at Costco, it will almost certainly be a good value. And if you find something better value elsewhere later, you can return most products at any time for any reason. However, Costco isn’t always the lowest price alternative. Sometimes other options can be tremendously less expensive. Reasons include:
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Costco sells a very limited number of versions of particular products and often targets the higher end or premium version. The basic version may sell for far less than the version Costco sells. For example, I regularly buy frozen pink salmon. My target price is ~$5/lb. This is the sticker price for frozen pink salmon at discount grocers, like Walmart and Aldi, and the approximate sale price at regular supermarkets like Vons or Kroger. However, Costco price per lb is more than double everyone else for their lowest cost option frozen salmon. I expect the primary reason is Costco only sells Atlantic salmon rather than pink salmon. Costco also sells farm raised rather than wild caught (not sure why farm raised would be more expensive, but it is a difference). Costco doesn’t sell the lower priced version I want, so I’d end up paying far more if I shopped at Costco. It’s a similar idea for Costco only selling organic versions of certain products or only selling higher end versions of many electronics.
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As cquin85 highlights, many grocers and other sellers use a different model from Costco where they have a high sticker price items on most items and a few sale prices to get customers in to the store. The business may have a loss on the sale items, but expect to make a net profit with the other items the customer buys during the shopping trip. Wanting to clear inventory can also relate to which items go on sale. For example, during Black Friday 2023 I bought a big screen TV. I compared comparably quality options at different sellers. The best deal was at Walmart. Costco’s BF TV offerings weren’t even in the same ballpark. There were several other sellers besides Walmart that also had better BF TV deals than Costco for comparable quality.
My experience is that I can usually get a better overall deals at other grocers than at Costco, sometimes by a wide margin. However, doing so often takes more effort. I need to only buy when there is a sale or stock up to Costco-sized volume when there is a sale on particular items while only buying bare minimum of other items when there is not a sale. I may vary which grocer I visit in a particular week, depending on which one has a sale on the items I buy.
As an example, my most recent grocery purchase was as follows. This was an Instacart delivery from Walmart. Without the slow delivery discount, the total was $24 for the shopping list below, which is less than half of sticker price of Walmart. Costco can’t compete with this level of discount with their strategy of pricing slightly above their buying price. In this example, Instacart is knowingly taking a loss with their 40% off ($20 off $50 purchase) as an attempt to increase their customers base, with hope of getting customers to use their service in the future – short term loss, with hope of increased future market share. I expect it’s a similar principle to why they chose to give a generous $24 discount for order being late. They know they are losing money on this 1 order, but don’t want to lose long term customer for years in the future. Being a more mature company with smaller margins, Costco is less likely to take a short term loss to increase market share like this, although they did offer a similar type of $15 off Sameday delivery purchase of $50+ deal earlier this year (Sameday is higher sticker price than in store, negating most of this $15 off). I expect Costco also has more sticky customers who are not going to abandon their paid membership after one subpar experience.
Walmart Order via Instacart
2lb frozen salmon
1 rotisserie chicken
3 cans Starkist Tuna
half-gallon skim milk
3 gallons water
4 packages frozen broccoli
2 packages frozen brussels sprouts
1 package frozen california vegetables
1 package frozen mixed vegetables
1 jumbo cantalope
3 bananas
1 Post shredded wheat and fiber
1 dried pinto beans
1 Dreyer’s chocolate chip ice cream
Sticker Price = $50.02 (Instacart does not mark up Walmart sticker price)
Additional Charges = $5
$20 Discount off $50+ Purchase Instacart Coupon = -$20
$5 Discount off Dreyers $5+ Purchase = -$5
Total = $30
20% Instacart Gift Card Discount (purchased at Costco) = -$6
Total = $24
Future credit for frozen items (at sticker price) due to slow delivery = -$24
Total = $0
I dont find Costco to have the best deals but you’re getting a fair price.
I keep my Costco membership for multiple reasons including:
- Rental car prices (mentioned earlier)
- Car purchase leverage (use the “Costco price” as a starting negotiating point).
- Unique items - They have some food items that most traditional grocery stores dont carry.
- Discount gift cards on Uber, Door Dash etc that my D uses at college
- Certain Kirkland brand products
- Cheap gas and very convenient Air filling station
I’m not a bulk purchaser and only buy specific items at Costco but it’s enough to keep me as a member.
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I gave up my Costco membership a number of years ago. The only items I purchase in bulk are: toilet paper, dish soap, Method cleaning supplies, paper towels, etc. I get these from a local grocery chain (that’s much closer to me than Costco) and the items are often cheaper. I have purchased liquor at Costco for parties, but I can borrow my daughter’s card if I do want to purchase for a party.