Costco has some nice products, and usually has a good food selection, but there are times when they sell junk products as well. Their health and hygiene section can be hit or miss, and if you're looking for more natural products similar to what may be sold at Whole Foods then your best bet is Amazon.
Costco usually have a descent selection of organic foods cheaper than you'll find almost anywhere else.
One area that I'm disappointed in is their computer selection. Although you may be getting additional support and a cheaper warranty, they simply don't refresh their hardware enough. Almost all their computers are lower end and still expensive compared to what you'll find on Amazon, especially if you price out the cost of building a desktop with much better and newer parts.
Be very careful buying things you ingest on Amazon. The risk is high of fake products from otherwise trustworthy brands or "fake" brands of some guy ordering something to be packaged at a dodgy Chinese manufacturer with little or no QA or basic verification.
Let's be real. Under no circumstance should you be ingesting anything you buy on Amazon. It's going to take a baby formula scandal like what happened in China before the general public wakes up the problem.
Amazon has their Essentials brand for vitamins which is apparently legit. I think brand name foods and drinks are probably OK since they are hard to counterfeit and if you did get a counterfeit I am sure the brand would be very interested in Amazon's role in it. Vitamins though and any kind of spice should be suspect... I think this is why they started Essentials. Costco also does product quality tests so buying stuff there should be ok. I'd be interested in lead testing Tumeric from Costco, Amazon, Whole foods etc... that's been a big thing recently. We also know Kona coffee is not legit for instance even at Costco.
When you get counterfeit electronics, you can usually tell right away. The packaging is off, misprinted, often has a Chinese name in small print on it somewhere. The product looks fine from a distance but up close, the mold alignment is off, it's too light, it feels cheap.
More often than not you roll your eyes and use it anyway, because most of the time it works well enough, for a while at least.
Branded food is a lot less likely to get a pass on any of those. We have a strong sense of what it's supposed to look like, smell like, taste like, feel like; we might put up with less from a clearly marked store-brand copy, but a name brand that doesn't taste like it should sets off alarm bells. And exactly reproducing a commercial food product is hard.
That's very much not true. I've received many fake items - where if I didn't already own the product AND box and could compare side by side, I'd never know.
Even then, until it doesn't work right, you wouldn't know.
There are some _very_ good looking counterfeits on amazon.
Look at how they mix stock under the same SKU and see if you’re still confident perhaps that Peet’s coffee came from Peet’s or perhaps a third party seller used counterfeit — Amazon’s will put hem into the same punnet and pull out one where it’s from amazon or “fulfilled by amazon”.
Right now I’ve only seen it in electronics but I don’t buy much food that way. Amazon fresh is a different thing (all sourced / sold by amazon) so probably not a problem. Likewise oddball stuff (a low volume brand of tea) is unlikely to be worth counterfeiting. But mass market goods definitely are and the baby food example, while not amazon, is an excellent cautionary tale.
I gave up on Amazon once I wasn't able to buy the replaceable toothbrush heads for my electric toothbrush. Try ordering the name brand oral-b ones and see what shows up (in my case, cheap Chinese knockoffs that lasted about a week instead of however many weeks they're supposed to).
I honestly miss being able to go to a unique store to buy things - that way you could look at what you were actually buying and (maybe!) find something better for what you're trying to do.
Downvote walrus01 all you want but I’ve never met a person in real life who eats Soylent. If it weren’t for HN or Reddit I’ve never even know it existed.
They must exist. I can buy Soylent off the shelf at my local Fred Meyer (Kroger for people who don't have Fred Meyer in their area). They are pretty aggressive about dropping products that don't sell in sufficient quantity.
Amazon sells lots of food items that are sold by Amazon.com. You have to use discretion, but there is nothing wrong with buying multi-vitamins, probiotics and supplements on Amazon. However, it is probably a good idea to not buy them from a third-party seller.
> Amazon sells lots of food items that are sold by Amazon.com.
“Sold by Amazon.com” is not safe, because of potential commingling with stock identified as the same SKU from Fulfilled by Amazon sellers. If you know of a reliable non-FBA third-party seller, that's the safest thing
At least in its SoCal warehouses, Amazon does not commingle its own inventory with FBA sellers for product liability reasons. It maintains separate internal warehousing SKUs for FBA inventory stockpiles.
a technically well-versed audience like this HN crowd is not really the customer base for computer equipment from Costco. In keeping with their product offering approach, Costco is catering to the people too busy and/or don't find it fun to evaluate computer equipments. What their customers know is that what Costco offers is good enough and pretty good value. The liberal return policy helps ease customer concerns about making equipments work. Looks to me like Costco is doing it pretty much right.
Yes, the electronics/appliance selection, when one needs it, can be slightly lacking. Costco appears to reduce costs by often stocking exactly one option for a given thing. E.g., I'm in the market for a toaster as my old one died (a 2012 basic 2-slot model, $20 at Costco). My local Costco now seems to only have an upscale 4-slot model for $50. I'm considering my options and living a toaster-free life at the moment, but even two options would be nice.
It's hard to beat the prices on bulk foods, though, which keeps me going back (and I like voting-with-dollars for well-run, customer-friendly stores). Perhaps it's just the bulk-commodities mindset from the food aisles leaking over into electronics that causes the above.
This is true. In fact Costco frequently stocks models of electronics that are exclusively sold through them. For example, many TVs you buy there are slight variations of popular models that only Costco sells. They even have distinct model numbers that you'll have a hard time finding info about on Google. The manufacturer makes up costs by defeaturing the TVs. Frequently they reduce the number of ports or withhold smart TV features. This is actually great for me because I seldom want all the bells and whistles. I'd like as much money spent as possible to go to size and quality of the display.
Since the Smart TV shit started, I've moved to just buying large PC monitors and using them with my PC. (It helps that I'm a cable cutter. There's nothing interesting on TV that's not streaming somewhere.)
I do not understand this. Buy the TV as it is bigger and cheaper. Just do not configure the WiFi and do not plug the Ethernet in. I have 2 Samsung’s that are set at just out of the box with no internet.
Some smart TVs will find an open AP if you don't otherwise configure them for internet access, hence the swing to dumb TVs and monitors for people who want to guarantee no logging of their viewing habits.
At some point I realized I did not even want to use the TV apps and did not care to maintain the PC with Kodi on it. I just switched to an AppleTV for everything and paid for MrMC (Kodi port for AppleTV that supports SMB/NFS mounting). So much simpler.
My experience is that the Costco exclusive models of many electronic products are not feature reduced but are identical to the non Costco versions except bundled with accessories or services not included with the non Costco versions.
For example Ring security systems and cameras sold at Costco usually include additional sensors or things such as additional Ring chimes plus a free year of service.
Back in the day, I haven't bought one in years and can't speak to the current situation, printers sold at Costco almost always had unique model numbers because Costco insisted printer manufacturers include USB cables and full ink or toner cartridges instead of starter ones. So if HP sold a model 420 everywhere else they would sell a model 425 at Costco which included the cable and full ink cartridges but the printer itself was identical to the 420 sold elsewhere.
A couple of years ago I bought an electronic keyboard for my daughter. It had a different model number than the keyboard normally has but the keyboard itself is the same feature wise as sold other places but it came bundled with a stand and a couple of other accessories which would have been extra elsewhere.
But often it's not. You can find threads on AV forums comparing Costco only models to their common models. Though maybe this has changed a bit as I haven't shopped for a TV for a few years.
They don't always remove features. Really it's more about making the comparison between the products just fuzzy enough that the other retailers can't give the manufacturers a hard time for offering Costco a cheaper deal. And in some cases just trying not to devalue their brand elsewhere.
Costco doesn't sell the same Dyson vacuum as everywhere else -- instead of a "Total" they sell an "Absolute" or some other equally confusing nonsense.
The difference is they remove a single (non-motorized/cheap) attachment, and throw in two different ones and a couple other accoutrements. And sell it for $100 less.
The part that's not included in their package can be purchased retail from Dyson for less than $100.
Other retailers can't use this to put pressure on Dyson. Dyson doesn't look like they're overcharging everywhere else.
Wow -- the engineering cleverness is actually really incredible (using heat expansion of the nichrome wire to automatically lower the bread! fully mechanical closed-loop monitoring of bread surface temperature!). Tempting.
Yes, I'm not advocating someone to try a homeopathic recipe for cancer. However, there are times when supplements can be beneficial and you can find actual reports in the NCBI and legitimate references and supporting information on Wikipedia.
Multivitamins and probiotics are things that can help supplement nutrients and help with digestion for people that may not be getting enough in their daily meals. Some people choose to be Vegan, and it is nice when you can find options sold by Amazon that don't have a bunch of fillers in their supplements or meat products.
I recently had some issues and found that an organic garlic supplement and apple cider vinegar concentrate helped me feel better. Would I still go to the doctor in case of a medical emergency? Absolutely! However, there are a lot of great herbs and extracts out there that provide benefits to a persons health. As always, do your own research and know the risk.
However, there are times when supplements can be beneficial and you can find actual reports in the NCBI and legitimate references and supporting information on Wikipedia.
Parent is not busting the chops of Whole Foods for carrying vitamins and supplements that arguably have some minor benefit for a subset of the population. No, parent is busting their chops for carrying magic water that, AFAICT, has zero supporting evidence.
In the worst case, at least your garlic supplement has garlic in it.
Costco usually have a descent selection of organic foods cheaper than you'll find almost anywhere else.
One area that I'm disappointed in is their computer selection. Although you may be getting additional support and a cheaper warranty, they simply don't refresh their hardware enough. Almost all their computers are lower end and still expensive compared to what you'll find on Amazon, especially if you price out the cost of building a desktop with much better and newer parts.