Costco Wholesale — Local services in Menomonee Falls

At 1pm on Sunday, September 8th, my partner and I, along with a friend, went to this Costco after just moving from the south side of Milwaukee to the north side. Until today, we shopped at the Costco in New Berlin. They were always amazing and incredibly helpful.

Today, we needed to restock our new house and decided instead of making the trip to New Berlin, we would shop closer to our new home. We went to this Costco instead. The friend we brought along had never been to Costco before and wanted to see what it was like before committing to getting a membership. We had her wanting one the entire shopping trip until we got to the checkout. We checked out at lane 8 with Carmela scanning our items and Jovan putting them in the cart.

Jovan was incredibly nice and super helpful the entire interaction we had with him. Carmela scanned my partners Costco membership card and then scanned all of our items. We waited patiently until it was time to pay. I pulled out my credit card and inserted it into the machine. Carmela stopped the transaction and asked if she had scanned my membership card. I explained she scanned my partners and that I was going to be the one paying. My partner and I live together, shop together, and own a house together. The one thing we had not done yet is add me to the Costco membership as we have never needed to before as we always shopped together. We have shopped at the New Berlin Costco for the last three years and have never been stopped about this before.

Carmela explained it was a new policy that the Costco card holder was the only one that could pay. That unless the credit card had my partners name, we could not check out. We had almost $500 worth of items in the cart and a line of people behind us. I explained the situation and Javon asked Carmela if an exception could be made if we went to customer service right after to add me to the account. She explained an exception would not be made.

Instead, she called over someone to cancel our entire transaction - all $500 worth of items, moved them to a different area- and pointed us to the customer service area to fix this issue. I was very tempted to tell them to keep the items and we would shop elsewhere after dealing with her attitude, but we already had what we needed and figured it was easier to just comply.

For those reading thus far, there was no printable receipt that could be scanned at customer service or any other register after we made the account adjustments. So, after we walked to customer service and made the appropriate change (shout out to the wonderful ladies over there who were a delight and extremely nice), we had to walk back to the end of the checkout line and wait again to check out. This meant that another person at a different register had to ring all of our items up again.

There was no sign and we have never had this policy brought to our attention before. Had we, we would have made the correct changes to avoid it from happening again. Carmela simply enforced something that had not been communicated to us before and would not budge to make our experience a little less frustrating.

Again, we had shopped for years without issue at a different location. She was rude about this rule and frankly we would rather drive an hour to a different Costco in the future to do our shopping than potentially end up in her lane again. Our friend is now not getting a membership and we could not be more disappointed. Over 30 minutes of our time was wasted. Our frozen and refrigerated items sat longer than needed in a cart while we made the adjustment and everyone around us who interacted with us wanted nothing but to make our visit easier, except Carmela. She made the interaction uncomfortable and embarrassed us in front of a long line of customers behind us.

Again, shoutout to Jovan for trying to be a better person than Carmela. He really tried to make us feel less embarrassed and we could tell he definitely disagreed with how she handled herself and her decision making process.

TLDR; GO...

The only reason you might not want to get a membership here would be if you have a household of 1 or 2. Other than that, the more in your home, the more deals will make sense to you here. You can fairly easily make back the upfront annual membership fee with money you get back on purchases each year.

There are 3 Costco stores in the greater Milwaukee metro area - this one (Menomonee Falls), the Grafton one and the Pewaukee one. All three are great, but this one’s my favorite, and that’s probably just because it’s in such a cute area of stores and restaurants.

Checkout system is fast, the checkout peeps are crazy efficient and friendly. Returns are fast, easy and no problem. Receipts can be looked up using your membership card. Why doesn’t every place with a card do this? Their warranties on electronics, furniture, housewares, etc are literally unmatched. I believe my laptop has a 4 year full warranty that I paid exactly $0 for. I haven’t needed to use the warranty, of course, because my laptop’s great and has had no issues. Staff are friendly, smart and willing to help from the minute you walk in the door to the minute you leave, but won’t bother you if help’s not your thing. The store is organized and clean.

As for special departments: Returns and membership employees are just great. There’s some magic going on in the electronics department. I’ve had some great help with choosing several laptops in the past by an incredibly well-educated employee. Prices, quality and speed of photo enlargements and printed holiday cards are the best you’ll find. Tire prices and install speed is fantastic. - Ordering cakes is a piece of cake. The meat dept staff is on full view and busy like bees putting out meats and other food items. Liquor department - they have some great deals, plus a nice selection with great prices on scotch. Optical rocks. Wonderful docs and prices on goods. I haven’t used the pharmacy but I’d suspect they will not disappoint. Once COVID’s over, get a meal to go or eat in store with your kids. Super cheap eats plus fast service. People checking you in with your member card when entering and out with your receipt when leaving are nice and just good at their jobs.

A few other notes… Clean, large bathrooms. Stalls appear more accessible than most that say they are. And best for last, a parking lot design dreams are made of: wide spots, wide lanes ... every store in the known universe should copy their parking lot model. World peace would not be far behind.

This is a 100% recommended, all-around...

My husband and I joined yesterday. The staff we interacted with, really just the door greeter, lady at the service counter and the cashier were all very friendly and pleasant. We cruised the electronics and home goods departments first and there are many nice deals to find. Huge selections of wines from every price point imaginable, hard liquors was smaller but comparable in price to maybe woodman's. The variety of produce with organic options was good but not everything was a fantastic deal. Some were good others were pretty average. The 5 & 6 packs of romaine lettuce , 3 lbs bag of fresh broccoli florets, mushrooms were a great deal. The bags of avocados and lemons were comparable or slightly higher than the average store. Large selection of meats with limited brand variety not terribly competitive in price but still good. The cage free eggs were exceptionally priced for 2 dozen and 5 dozen packs. Milk gallons were priced @ 2.29 for whole with other varieties under $2. They only had land o lakes low fat cottage cheese in a mediumish sized tub, which was a bit disappointing. No pepperjack cheese. No Turkey hot dogs. They had 3 kinds of hot dogs (beef) and packs weren't nearly as big as I hoped. A 27 oz jar of Kirkland creamy almond butter @ $6.99 was fantastic! $4.99 for 64 oz Kirkland real mayo made with cage free eggs, outstanding! My ending verdict is that while the variety and options aren't always there in certain departments there are enough deals on common household staples and a few specialty items that will make the membership worth it in the long run for my family. The issue for some will be that it is not always budget friendly to buy in bulk. While we won't need to buy a lot of things for several weeks after $150 spent we walked out without a good chunk of our weekly grocery list either because they didn't have it, it wasn't priced competitively or it just didn't make sense for us to buy such a...