Reluctant Costco members

First let me say that I’ve never liked stockpiling.  I can’t stand clutter and hate having to work around excess stuff even if it is stuff that we’re going to use in the near future that I got for a deeply discounted price.  It’s because of this mentality that I’d never seen the point of joining a discount warehouse type club.  Of course as a single person it didn’t make very much sense at all to buy in bulk.  Even when S and I joined households I couldn’t convince myself that it was worth it.  After all we had a very small urban house and we ate out a lot.  We didn’t have a place to store bulk items and bulk food just went to waste.

Slowly I’ve been warming up to the idea of having some “extra” items in stock that we use regularly.  By paying attention to sales and using coupons I’ve been able to dramatically reduce the amount we spend on everyday items we need.  We have a bigger place now that has plenty of storage so our extra stuff has a place to hide out of the way until we need it.  I still wasn’t convinced that the warehouse club was for me though.

And then I started calculating baby costs.  Just in diapers alone the discounted price more than covered the membership fee.  Once I looked at pet supplies and realized we could almost halve our pet costs each month by buying at Costco I was convinced that maybe a warehouse membership would be a good thing after all.  So S and I went and joined this weekend.  We got the months’ worth of pet supplies at half price… go us!  But we also got sucked into some other cheap stuff we “needed” once we had seen it… not good at all.  Add in the awful crowd and the inconvenience of the location and I’m not sure how I feel about going there frequently or if I really will save in the end.

For now I’m thinking that, like all the other cost reducing methods I’ve learned over the last year and a half, Costco will just take some practice to master.  Just have to remember the old DARE saying… “Just say no”… to the 6 pack of frozen pizzas and the 2 gallons of peanut butter that is!