Bad news if you’re mooching off of someone else’s Costco membership: The retail giant is cracking down.
When you enter Costco, you need to show your membership card to an employee to shop. Costco membership cards are non-transferable, but the company allows members to give a second household card to one other person in their home. Anyone with a card can bring up to two guests to the club during each visit, the company stipulates.
But Costco has noticed that non-members have been sneaking in with membership cards that don’t belong to them — particularly since Costco expanded self-checkout.
Costco recently started asking for shoppers’ membership cards along with a photo ID at the self-checkout registers, the same policy as regular checkout lanes, to crack down. “We don’t feel it’s right that non-members receive the same benefits and pricing as our members,” Costco said in announcing the change.
And now, Costco is testing out a system that requires members to scan their membership cards at the store entrance — instead of just flashing the card to employees. Shoppers have spotted the new scanners at a store in Washington State and posted photos on Reddit.
This bullshit started with self checkouts. We need to widely reject self checkout, they cost people their jobs and just create more corporate bullshit. If these corporations want to avoid shop lifting and other issues, hire staff and get rid of self checkouts. I refuse to use them and shake my head at the employees when they direct me to an open self checkout.
My closest Costco doesn’t really have self check, since they always have someone there doing the scanning for you. Effectively the self check is a weird looking Express Lane that they only sometimes enforce the item limit on.