Costco Wholesale — Local services in Tulsa

After having been saddled with Sam's Club as the only warehouse club option in Tulsa for years, I am so glad Costco has finally come here! Dropped my Sam's membership nearly a year ago now with zero regrets. Here at Costco the customer service is friendly, the workers seem to actually enjoy their jobs, and they are efficient and helpful. The store is clean and well organized. Returns are super easy and friendly: I was greeted with a smile and an apology a few days ago when I returned some peaches that weren't sweet and flavorful like they were earlier in the summer. No hassles, no poor attitude, no slowness, no fumbling to look up a receipt in some other system (like at Sam's). And at the check-out they offer you boxes for easier carrying and place your items carefully back in the shopping cart. And I'm so glad they accept Visa and got rid of their relationship with American Express!! And even better, they accept Samsung Pay, which is so convenient for both my Costco membership card AND the Visa I use to pay! (Sorry, iPhone users, no Apple Pay yet.) I disagree with one other reviewer that their selection is poor. Of course when you're shopping at a warehouse club you don't get 5 or more different types of peanut butter; it's not cost-effective to stock multiple brands and options of similar items (read the Costco history on Wikipedia, if you're curious). But the options they do stock are generally excellent choices, including their own Kirkland Signature brand, and they have many unique products I've never seen elsewhere. Their meats, ready-made meals, quickserve items, and bakery goods, for example, are all excellent, and most are freshly made or prepared in store. Also unlike Sam's, they keep their fresh fruit and vegetables that require refrigeration in giant walk-in coolers, so that strawberries, for example, don't mold quickly like they do at Sam's (trust me, I have photos I've taken of containers containing molded strawberries right there on the shelf at Sam's, not just on one occasion but multiple times!). Next, where else in Tulsa can you buy a gallon of skim milk for $1.90 ($1.87 when I first started shopping there)?! Not even Aldi has milk that cheap. EDIT: Skim milk now at $3.15 or so!! Ridiculous! Gas prices are amazingly competitive, often 20 cents or more less than QuikTrip down the street...and it's Top Tier gas with 5x the EPA detergent requirement (again, unlike Sam's). Finally, I will shop and support a company that treats its workers fairly and pays them a decent wage. The employees are people, not cogs in a machine!

UPDATE: A lot of new employees, just a few of the original crew since store opening, it seems. I'm not of fan of the scrutiny at the self checkout. If you have such a problem with theft here, then get rid of self checkout and bring back more serviced checkout lines!

UPDATE: Staff at the door tells me every time I come in 15-30 minutes before close what time they close. I'm fully aware---been a member for years. I'm not someone who wants to feel rushed while shopping, even though I fully plan to get in and get out before closing time. I'm usually just grabbing one or two things for dinner that same night.

So, in summary:

1. Good customer service overall though room for improvement in certain roles
2. Good product selection
3. Excellent quality of Costco's own Kirkland Signature brand
4. Easy, friendly returns (part of #1)
5. Takes Visa and Samsung Pay
6. Fresh fruit/vegetables kept refrigerated as needed
7. Very competitive prices on high quality, Top Tier gasoline
8. Competitive prices on products in general
9. Treats their workers like people
10. Annoying scrutiny at self checkout; hate being treated like a thief -- they seem to have backed off a bit here. Still hate not having access to the scanner tool to scan all items in cart.

UPDATE: I was recently at the Costco in Pleasant Prairie, WI, and they allow customers access to the handheld scanners at checkout! So it can't be a corporate-wide policy to restrict scanner use at the...

Long review: Worst retail experience I’ve ever had. My husband and I just got a membership and were excited for all the high quality products. We bought a lot of stuff. We arrived at self check and were directed by an employee to a self check station. I was a bit turned off by how the self check employees constantly yelled at customers like they were herding cattle. There’s better ways to do this. As we checked out, our self check had issues several times that employees had to come solve. They don’t provide bags but we had bought a storage bin and just put our groceries in it. We were walking out with our stuff and handed the receipt to the receipt checker at the exit. This is where things really went awry. I handed the receipt to the woman as my husband was pushing the cart and walking slightly ahead of me. I assumed she’d rifle through our things a bit, since we had a lot, then mark the receipt and send us on our way. Instead the woman suddenly jumped in front of the cart and began pushing the cart into my husbands body while admonishing us and telling us we should not have gone to self check for that much stuff and that she was getting a manager to check each and every item in our cart. She had our receipt and began walking off with it which was not ok with us since it’s our only proof of purchase and they’re already treating us like criminals. My husband demanded the receipt back and she refused. He tried taking it from her and she began waving it around and holding it up in the air and behind her back like a bully playing keep away. We told her this was unacceptable behavior and that if they don’t want people with lots of items using self check then it should have been addressed by the many employees we interacted with at self check. Due to her rude and confrontational behavior and refusal to return our receipt to us while we waited on a manager, we told her we were returning everything and canceling our memberships. She still refused to give us our receipt so we could return our things. She was holding us hostage there. Finally, my husband managed to get the receipt from her when she dropped it after waving it around like a banshee in her game of keep away. We went to return our things and a guy named Jake approached us and continued with the terrible customer service by blaming us for not knowing their rule of not using self check for that many items (there was no sign and no other employee at self check said a word about it). He told us we had no common sense and was beyond patronizing and rude. He then left us in the wrong line where we waited for 10 minutes before being told by another rude woman that we were in the wrong line for returns. We went to the return line and waited 30 min. Once we got up to the same woman who had told us we were in the wrong line, she said she couldn’t help us and would get a manager and that we needed to move to the side. We refused to move as we had been treated so poorly at this point there was no way we were getting out of line after waiting 30 min. I said we’d go with the manager once they arrived but we were not moving until someone was present to help us as I knew we’d just be pushed to the side with no assistance. Finally the manager arrived and took us over to the first line we had waited in and refunded our items and our memberships. It was unbelievable. All that original woman had to do was NOT be immediately confrontational for no reason and get physical with us and our cart and take our receipt and refuse to give it back. These people are insane and need some customer service training and some lessons in basic human decency. Costco also needs to do something about self check line control so customers aren’t yelled at and herded like cattle. They also need a sign regarding the number limit for self check and the self check employees should inform customers if they have too much stuff. Finally NOT being a patronizing jerk to customers seems like common sense, Jake, but clearly any form of sense is lacking with Costco employees. Avoid this place...

As for this Costco store overall, the employees honestly seem to really hate their jobs & hate being there, (that’s understandable with the chaos & the people I’m sure,) but still not an excuse to take it out on the customers. Excluding the older employees who hand out samples, the greeters, and the employees who package up the meats & rotisserie chickens behind the glass window- there are a few really nice ones who do seem to enjoy being there, or at least are good at acting like it!

The self checkout is miserable- as I’m in line I can see the 2 feet of space in front of me & can see when a register becomes available, I promise you don’t need to yell to make everyone keep moving up every 2 seconds, the yelling doesn’t speed anything up & only irritates us, making us want to go slower for you. It’s not that deep, and absolutely no need to talk to other humans, especially your paying (or trying to pay) customers like that. Everyone is on the same mission & is just trying to get out of there as quick as possible, you don’t need to remind us. The regular checkout employees also seem miserable, but are usually super fast, and they help avoid the rude, yelling employees at the self checkout.

We purchased some prescription glasses at the Costco optical area of the store this year, and had the best experience with the optician, MaryEllen! She was so kind, extremely thorough with measurements & walking us through the process (and all of our options), she was helpful with her opinions when trying to decide which were the cutest or would be most suitable for my facial features & measurements, she truly made the experience so easy! I’ve never been helped that much when getting new prescription glasses anywhere else! I had no idea this kind of help was available here, and honestly it was way cheaper than getting prescription glasses at my eye doctor like in the past too, even without insurance!

I’d give this review two stars if it was just about the employees & self checkout, but MaryEllen with optical was so great that she...