Ask CMAR About Costco

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Tale of Heineken wreckage at bottom.


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since you need a Coscto card to check out, why do they put someone at the door to check your card when you come in?


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To emphasize the "club" nature of the experience, to direct non-members to membership to get signed up, and to keep out kids who show up just to steal cigarettes. I busted many of those in my day.


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(Hey, I'm doing this from memory)


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And doing very well. I completely forgot about "roadshows". Especially when they were furniture.



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What's more is people with Executive Memberships would often bring their non-member friend's shopping, ring the friend's purchase through on their membership and pocket the 2% cash back!


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I saw this many times. A group of two or three couples would come through a line with 3 or more carts, and they would use the same card for all the transactions. Some of the supervisors were hardliners about this, but the cashiers for the most part didn't care.


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Why is Costco > Sam's Club? Will Sam's Club ever pass Costco?


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Costco is just generally a nicer shopping experience. Take a walk through both, you'll see what I mean. BJ's is at the bottom of the heap.




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How do you get in w/o a membership?


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Go to the membership counter, say you are interested in trying them out, and they will give you a free daily pass which the cashier will confiscate when you check out. Repeat.


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So as a retail store manager in another company applying at Costco for Management would generally be a waste of time correct?


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I wouldn't say it would be a waste of time, but they generally promote from within and move management around from store to store to get experience while on the management track. Wouldn't be impossible, but it would be tough since you are competing against known commodities.


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When you enter the warehouse, check the box situation at the cash. Sometimes, particularly when it's busy they'll be running low on boxes. If they are, try and pick up some empty boxes as you shop (If you have to empty a packing box to use it just be neat about stacking the product - We did this all the time ourselves). It'll save you scrambling for a box when you checkout, or winding up with a crappy box or no box at all.


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This is easily the best tip I know of for Costco - I know they want to keep their margins low, but I don't think that the management every really understood just how pissed off the customers would get when their purchases were just set back in the cart, unbagged, because we ran out of boxes and the front end manager didn't want to break out the bags.

One of the things that "boxers" would do is go on "box runs" which means they walk around the store looking for items that have been heavily purchased, and pick up the empty boxes and bring them back to the cashiers to box up customer purchases.


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I did and it ruled. Was a driver at Costco for about 18 of my 36 months in mid-90s. During that time I:

relocated the photoshop about 8 inches northwest
put a fork thru a widescreen TV
busted the dry-wall over the bathroom
broke my ankle pinning it between the lift and the steel


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Ah, let your foot hang out of the lift, eh? So much more comfortable to ride that way. I had a number of close calls, but never injured myself. Well, not badly, anyway.


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you haven't lived until you've dumped 4 pallets of shrink-wrapped soda.


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I will see your 4 pallets of soda and raise you an entire pallet of Heineken - 8 layer ties. From the top steel. During business hours. Into the next aisle. Luckily, no injuries. I was spotting the guy who did this. We cleaned up the glass for months. The guy's name was Marvin. After that fiasco, we called him MRvin until he quit. That was something like 2000 bottles of Heineken, may they rest in peace.

MR = Merchandise return. If a piece of merchandise breaks or gets dented or otherwise becomes unsellable, it is called an "MR", and taken to an MR area where it is stored until it can be inventoried to be counted in the shrinkage/losses for the warehouse.

I have so many stories like that it's ridiculous. Haha, ah good old MRvin, haven't thought of him for a while. He also dropped multiple 27" Panasonic and Sony TVs from top steel. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]


If I haven't answered your question, it's because I didn't know the answer, or CMAR answered it well enough and I had nothing to add. Pay special attention to CMAR's tips, they are all extremely solid.


Oh, the other solid thing about being a forklift driver is that come inventory time, you never had to count anything, you just drove the counters around in little people baskets that attached to the forks, and raised and lowered them up in the steel so they could count stuff without having to take all the pallets down.

[Cry Me A River]

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relocated the photoshop about 8 inches northwest
put a fork thru a widescreen TV
busted the dry-wall over the bathroom
broke my ankle pinning it between the lift and the steel


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You are my new hero.

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I sure as hell annoyed customer after customer with the horn. cuz i could.


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Seriously? We had an absolute prohibition against lifts on the floor while members were in the warehouse.

You 'Mericans really live life in the edge!

[Corey]

The Costco's I've been to in California all bag/box your purchases. The Costco's I've been to on the East Coast (Northern VA/DC Metro Area) leave bagging/boxing up to the customer, and you implied the same is true at your store. Why this difference? Is there a corporate policy on this?

[Cry Me A River]

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My mom bought a piece of furniture at a costco near her house for $399, then saw it at a neighboring costco for $200. She went back to the first costco to get a price adjustment and couldnt. Maybe just an anomoly.

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Very strange! She should have just returned it (you can return items at any warehouse, doesn't have to be the one you bought it at) and rebought the cheaper one.

It may be that they dropped the price between the time your mom bought the first one and saw it again at the other warehouse. They'll do that sometimes on seasonal items at the end of season though usually not by 50%. Maybe the second one was a display mark-down?

[Cry Me A River]

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The Costco's I've been to in California all bag/box your purchases. The Costco's I've been to on the East Coast (Northern VA/DC Metro Area) leave bagging/boxing up to the customer, and you implied the same is true at your store. Why this difference? Is there a corporate policy on this?

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This varies by warehouse. Ours was very good about having a packer for ever cash (except when we'd get slammed then packers would open up more cashes). However the "main" warehouse in our city usually had something like 1 packer per 3 cashes. This surprised a lot of our members who were used to having to pack their own carts at the old warehouse.

Actually, it wasn't unusual at times for us to have 3 employees per cash - One to unload carts onto the belt, the cashier and the packer.

It's probably a matter of local/regional management preference, budgets, etc.

I suggest getting boxes while you shop because even though there may be someone there to pack your cart for you, they may not have any boxes available. It's up to whoever's running the front end (lead or supervisor) to send people out on periodic box runs. That can fall by the wayside if it's busy (or it may be so busy that boxes are just going out faster than can be replaced).

The only bags we had at all were for the meat (clear, no handles).

[TER]

Is there a staff discount on merchandise?

How often do competent employees get raises?

[octopi]

Does anyone remember doing one of these threads for Home Depot? Maybe I should do one... this thread was great. I love 'seeing' other jobs or finding about things 'behind the scenes'.

I do have a question though; what are they looking for when they highlight your receipt? Big ticket items that 'accidentally' made it onto your cart? Multiple items? I know loss prevention guys get paid a lot there, does much actually get stolen? Seems hard to do.

[Cry Me A River]

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Is there a staff discount on merchandise?

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No margins are too tight, however you do get a free Executive membership (so effectively a 2% discount on purchases).

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How often do competent employees get raises?

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I don't have my employee handbook anymore but wages are on a set scale based on time served. There is no deviation there whatsover, at least not until you get into management type positions. I believe it was every six months. It was way better than pretty much any retail, unless you worked somewhere commission and were good at it.

Promotions are based on seignority+competance. If you're on the ball there's tons of opportunity particularly if you're willing to relocate. There's always new warehouses opening and they staff from within first.

[Cry Me A River]

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I love 'seeing' other jobs or finding about things 'behind the scenes'.

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Cool, glad you've enjoyed it.

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I do have a question though; what are they looking for when they highlight your receipt? Big ticket items that 'accidentally' made it onto your cart? Multiple items? I know loss prevention guys get paid a lot there, does much actually get stolen? Seems hard to do.

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What they're really looking for is cashier screw-ups. Yeh, it's also about limiting theft but given the safeguards that are in place "user error" is a much bigger concern and checking the receipts isn't going to catch people shoving merchandise down their pants.

There are lots of ways the cashier can screw up, particularly if there are two people handling your order (cashier and packer).

And it goes both ways, there were always times when someone would get to the door and something had accidentally been scanned twice. Or the packer accidentally put the last couple items in the next member's cart. Or something small got left on the counter. When you're processing 50+ members per hour through your cash, [censored] happens.

It's also really easy if someone has a pile of, say 10 cases of pop to only put through 9 particularly if the cashier leaves them in the cart or on the flatbed.

Or stuff gets left underneath the cart and not scanned or left in the seat.

The average sticker price of an item at Costco is much higher than say a grocery store. So if an employee stops even one or two $50 or $100 items from walking out the door unpaid per hour, that's a huge savings to the store. Yeah, there's some theft deterence there but it's primarily a doublecheck that the cashiers aren't screwing up.

It's also a big deterance to employee theft. Anybody in retail will tell you this is a HUGE issue. ie: My buddy/coworker comes through my cash and I only charge him for half the items he's "buying".

[Tony_P]

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you haven't lived until you've dumped 4 pallets of shrink-wrapped soda.


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I will see your 4 pallets of soda and raise you an entire pallet of Heineken - 8 layer ties. From the top steel. During business hours. Into the next aisle. Luckily, no injuries. I was spotting the guy who did this. We cleaned up the glass for months. The guy's name was Marvin. After that fiasco, we called him MRvin until he quit. That was something like 2000 bottles of Heineken, may they rest in peace.

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at my local costco, when they are lifting a skid from the top shelf, they rope off the aise and the next one with caution tape. i had always wondered why they did that. although thinking about it it should have been obvious.