How to Make Costco Work For You
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. For more details, please see our disclosure policy.
Want to save this post?
Enter your email below and get it sent straight to your inbox. Plus, I'll send you time- and money-saving tips every week!
Awhile ago Tammy posted an excellent treatise on how Costco can be a frugal (and delicious) option. She was “spot on” about her pricing and her quality analysis, particularly which are the best things to buy at Costco.
We have always found Costco to be a great resource. In the rare event that something hasn’t been quite right, we’ve taken it back, no questions asked. That’s their policy.
Some people make the faulty assumption that if Costco sells it, it must be a screaming deal. Au contraire. You can’t just go in there, fill your cart, and come out with great deals. It doesn’t work that way.
But, there are a few tricks to making Costco work for you.
1. Know Your Prices – If you know the going rate for groceries at regular grocery stores and what the current sale prices are, you will be able to make sound, educated decisions. Unless you don’t want to make another stop, avoid buying something that you know costs more at the warehouse.
For instance I know that I will find fresh blueberries for as low as $0.69/pound this summer at my local health food store. So, to buy fresh blueberries at Costco for $2.50/pound or frozen for $1.50/pound, just doesn’t make cents – unless I absolutely have to have them, today.
However, I know that milk at the grocery store will be around $3 a gallon. Compared to Costco’s hormone-free milk price of $1.90 per gallon, I know I’m going to opt for Costco’s milk every time. These are sold in pairs, so I usually buy two boxes to last us about a week. (Readers were correct a few weeks ago in saying that the hormone-free marking is on the box, not on the bottle. Thanks for pointing that out!)
2. Stretch Your Bulk Purchases – One of the defining characteristics of Costco is the bulk packaging. Unless you truly are feeding an army every day, you’ll want to break these larger packages into smaller, easily stored sizes. Repackage bulk hamburger into one-pound chubs or precook it and freeze. Portion out the monster jar of pesto and freeze.
I buy the 3-pound block of cream cheese, cut it into 6 portions, wrap each portion in plastic wrap and freeze those that I won’t use within the week. A 5-pound bag of shredded cheese is portioned into meal size bags for pizza and taco nights.
3. Don’t Buy Too Much at One Time – It can be so tempting to fill your cart with all the truly great Costco deals. But, be prepared for a heart attack when you see the bill. Buying in bulk can result in a good case of sticker shock. Try to rotate your stocking up.
For instance, this week I bought 2 large bottles of olive oil. They are huge. And $20 for olive oil seems like a lot, but these bottles will last me 3-4 months. A large package of organic pasta runs about $8 or $9. But, it lasts about two months. I try to spread out my purchases so that I’m not restocking our shelves with everything at one time.
Overall, we love Costco. Do I sometimes pay a little more for something? Sometimes. But usually that’s because I don’t want to make a trip elsewhere for that one thing. Costco definitely works for us.
We just moved to South Orange County and live near a Costco for the first time. We have been doing the “grocery tour” as we call it, trying to get a feel of prices and where to shop. We are just a family of 3, so I am not sure how beneficial it is to shop in bulk–and we don’t have a ton of extra storage.
Thanks for the helpful information! We’ll have to check Costco out!
I am not opposed to buying in bulk @ a place like costco, it just isn’t practical for me. We are a BUSY, 1-car family & it takes everything I have to line up my price matches, coupons, & get the car to go to 1 store (occasionally 2), let alone take the time to drive & shop somewhere else. When there’s a good deal at the grocery store I do stock up. For example today I got 10 packages of beef sausage for $1.49 each (regularly $2.50 each)…
We have a Sam’s membership (although I want to look into a Costco one when this expires as they seem to have more organic foods). It works very well for us! I do not buy most my groceries there as many things are cheaper elsewhere, but the things I do buy save us quite a bit. I bake a lot of bread, and I calculated once that I save the cost of membership per year just in yeast. If we lived closer, I’d buy all my gas there, which would make it work even better for me.
which milk do you get? because when we get it, i think it’s much closer to $2.50 per gallon at costco. Maybe slightly less, but definitely not $1.90. I think 2 gal is just under $5 for us.
(we mostly shop at the morena costco, although i may switch to mission valley because they have a larger store & variety.)
Shopping at any warehouse club requires knowledge about prices and a bit of strategy. I shop at Sam’s about once a month and I know exactly what is cheaper there. With our large family, the bulk is an added bonus for me, but sometimes the big packages are illusional. We think because it comes in a big box that it must be cheaper per unit. This is not the case!!
I find that many cereals are significantly cheaper at Sam’s, about 12-15 cents per oz! That’s a great buy! Additionally, I find that their meat is reasonable priced.
Another item to consider and ask yourself is this….are you saving enough to recoup the cost of the membership? Ouch! Until you save at least the membership fee, you haven’t saved anything yet.
http://www.themorristribe.com
We are also a small family, and don’t use Costco for stocking up on food items. We primarily have used our membership for things like diapers and wipes, shredded cheese (I also portion it out and freeze it) and some of the fruit snacks/granola bars (but only if I know it’s a good price – some of them are great, others not so much).
Yum to carmalized onions! What do u do afterwards, freeze
?? We do a lot of our shopping there. Happy to see that they are adding more and more organics. I have to be careful with how much produce I buy or it spoils before we can eat it (and we don’t have extra frreezer room for frozen. We also buy other stuff there- tires, glasses and soon- Two Brenda plantation shutters! Yay. Also bought our stone kitchen countertops. 😉
i live alone and don’t have a costco membership but i go along with my mom maybe once a month. i usually get meat (better quality than anywhere else around here), toilet paper, contact solution and maybe some snacky items like popchips and stuff like maple syrup, vanilla, and yeast when i need them because they’re so much cheaper at costco than anywhere else
We love getting big bags of onions and caramelizing them in the crock pot. Yum!
I frequent Sam’s, mainly because its a lot closer to me than Costco. Being a two person family in a pretty small household, I don’t do a ton of bulk shopping, because of storage issues. They can have great prices and there are several things I buy there on a regular basis. Sometimes I think some of the best deals there aren’t on food, but on electronics, books and other things. Earlier this summer, I found a compost bin at Sam’s that I’d had my eye on at Lowe’s, but the Sam’s price was $30 less. Same with a camera my daughter wanted for Christmas, we’d done our research, it was a Consumer Reports Best Buy, and I’d shopped around. The lowest I found it anywhere was for $250, then I found it at Sam’s for $175. And just this week, my daughter had saved her money to buy the Elipse Movie Companion book, it was $20 at the bookstore…but $12 at Sam’s, so we got it there. None of those things were a result of a specific trip there to get that specific item. Although they were all planned purchases (meaning they were budgeted in, but I was still shopping around) I just knew the general prices of the items, and checked those sections while I was there anyway. The end result being that I got the three items for a total of $113 less than I would have paid elsewhere. The warehouse stores can be a GREAT resource if you know your prices.