Brr. Not clothing this time… ๐ฅบ So you definitely won’t find anything fancy in this post. But still, I wanted to share my first Costco Wholesale visit with you, as for me it was a kinda cool experience. ๐ค๐ป
Costco Wholesale
We visited Costco Wholesale, located in North Miami Beach. This is a multinational corporation that operates a chain of membership-only warehouse clubs, being the second biggest retailer in the world and having 795 warehouses and about 105,5 million members.
Only Walmart is a bigger retailer, and the biggest difference between Walmart and Costco is that Walmart has about 140,000 distinctive products whereas Costco has only 3,700.
Costco membership
When Walmart is opened for everyone without having to be a member, then in Costco you have to be a membership-card owner to buy from there. (*Well there is a way that you can buy Costco’s gift card /also known as Costco’s Cash/ and you can use it in the checkout*).
But otherwise, Costco has two membership-cards:
1) Costco Gold Star member – which is $60 per year (plus taxes). It includes that you can shop in-store and online, and you will have two cards (for you and someone in your household).
2) Costco Gold Star Executive member – which is $120 per year (plus taxes). Additional to regular Gold Star membership, it also has – 2% annual Reward (up to $1,000), and more benefits & discounts on Costco Services.
The prices
I have visited the US a couple of times before. And one thing that I always remember, was that ‘healthy’ food is pretty expensive and junk food is cheap. But well, I have lived in the US for over a month now, and actually, I can say that when you are buying for the family then the price per shopping cart is approximately the same as in Estonia.
It is cheaper to buy things in bulk – that is for sure. But if to think about the average wage in Estonia and the average wage in the US, then it is definitely more expensive to eat well & healthy in Estonia. ๐ค (*PS! In that case, talking about shopping & cooking at home. When going out then the prices are higher, plus here the tipping policy is different than in Estonia).
When overall looking around in stores, then the biggest difference between example to Estonia or Latvia is that so many more stuff here are sold frozen, not refrigerated. Example chicken nuggets, burger patties, meatballs, etc.
Shopping in Costco
Besides the endless shelves of food, Costco also had huge piles of clothing, beach stuff, books, games, flowers, luggage, mattresses, furniture, electronics, and so on. ๐ฎ And of course – many of those items also had the ‘bulk buying’ thing – meaning that if you don’t want to buy in bulk, then sorry, you can’t buy it. But many items just had amazing deals, compared to the regular shops.
And as you can imagine, then the best deals of this choice was of course for the clothing stuff. But there were like very regular T-shirts, socks, underwear etc – so just basics.
The cashiers
As the shop itself was huge then there were many cash registers also. The regular ones and also the self-checkouts. Although the lines were long they were moving very quickly! One reason was probably that over there they still had one person who was at the register and another person who was helping to put the stuff on the register and back in the cart. And believe it or not – they don’t have plastic bags. Thank god! ๐
As only I and our pumpkin went to the store (dad was in the car, as he hates shopping ๐ ), then we wanted & tried to do quickly… ๐ค๐ And this was our shopping cart – lots of fruits/vegetables/greens, paper, 0 calories sparkling water, orange juice, salmon, regular and almond milk, some frozen stuff, porridges, coffee, etc. And the price for the whole cart was about $160 which is about 130โฌ. And there are so many things that will last longer, so I think it was a very decent deal!
Triinu in Miami โ
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