Why Costco is a bad deal for consumers.

Growing up, I remember going to Costco and Price-Club with my parents. There were good deals to be found and we would often visit both back-to-back, getting good prices on gigantic bulk quantities of stables (Food, Toilet Paper, ...). Then one day, they merged and competition in this market died.

Today, my wife, self, and 10 month old visited a Costco. We selected roughly $50-$100 of goods that were perhaps at a 10% discount over Target. Of course, we were waived thru the entrance with our "membership" card without even a glance or scan, but at checkout were asked for a $50 renewal fee. Are you kidding me?

Think about this for a moment. $50 / year = $4.16/mo, for the privilege of shopping at a store? I wonder how many people would choose to pay $50 to renew, if Costco told them the new price (and their membership status) at the door instead of at the register after an hour of shopping?

Reasons why I'm not going back:

• $50/year or $4.16/mo for the privilege of shopping somewhere is ridiculous.
• Amazon Prime is $79/year with unlimited 2-day free shipping.
• Lines for everything: Food, Cashiers, Leaving the store, etc...
• Even the tire center has long enough waits that we've never used them.
  
• Costco is almost always located in inconvenient areas, with bad parking.
• The deals aren't good anymore. At best, we saw a 30% discount on a toy. Most were ~5%.
• Bulk quantities are a burden on many of us. We really don't need a five year supply of Ketchup.
• The people. No matter how wide the aisles, you always get stuck behind slow people at Costco.
• Buying crap you don't need, and way too much of it. Do you really want to try that new "health-food" bar, in 96 count quantities?
• Shopping there is a serious investment in time. It's impossible to park, enter, shop, wait in line, pay, wait in line to exit (receipt inspection), and leave in under 45min.

Costco is currently the darling on Wall Street, with a P/E approaching some dot-coms and a market capitalization approaching Amazon's at $26 Billion. Doing a search for "costco sucks" on my favorite search engine found 553 results. Clearly, Costco is insulting it's most important asset: it's customers. Until today, I was a life-long customer of Costco (and before they merged, Price Club). After today, I don't plan to ever return.

I would state here how Costco could re-earn my business, but I think it's their failure to evolve that separated them and me as a business / customer relationship. Unless they figure out how to eliminate their membership fees and bring back the deals, I won't even consider going back. Even then, they would somehow have to convince me to do so, which is unlikely. Given that fantastic web commerce companies such as Amazon emerged with excellent deals and often free shipping, Costco has almost certainly lost this customer for good.