Free money
I hate Costco with a passion. I despise their utter lack of customer focus, the way you can’t possibly find anything in the store without just searching high and low, and, most of all, the way they treat you like a thief checking your receipt on the way out.
I shop there for one reason only: the prices. Today, they outdid themselves, selling dollar bills for 80¢.
Seriously. My in the Swiss this morning told me that his wife had found $100 gift certificates for the Hyatt hotel (where the current regional is being held) for $79.99. So I checked with the front desk, called Hyatt Reservations, asked my lawyer, and everyone said the deal was on the up and up.
Off I went to the verdammnt Costco, and promptly purchased $1400 worth of gift certificates, which cost $1120. I took some and Micky B. took some, and we just created $280 out of thin air. We can pay our hotel bills with the gift certificates and go out to dinner with the difference.
They have a variety of these deals–California Pizza Kitchen, Hyatt Hotels, other resorts and restaurants and places you would want to go, and they are all just selling cash at 80 cents on the dollar. Which may just be an indication of how overpriced the Hyatt is, but I may as well take advantage of it.
So maybe today I hate Costco just a little less.
Totally Unauthorized 
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I work for a commission where the commissioners (in the 90s) thought people want customer service and customer choice. As a result, they tried to deregulate electricity service and make us all buy our electricity from our favorite local provider.
This was, of course, nonsense. I’d drag any commissioner who pushed customer choice to Costco and show them the teeming masses who loved the place. Only the commissioners and their rich friends could afford customer choice – for the rest of us it’s price, baby, price! That’s why everyone is at Costco and Chris is by himself at Lombardi’s, if that’s how it’s spelled.