Tales From Costco #8

Still battling that deadline. Here's a rerun from November 26, 2011…

I didn't post for the last 25+ hours because I went shopping on Black Friday. Many have tried it. Few have returned. And the ones that did return were returning stuff they bought that didn't fit or work.

Actually, it wasn't so bad at the Costco in Tustin today — don't ask what I was doing in Tustin — though they were out of almost everything I wanted. On the way in, a nice lady handed me a coupon book of this-weekend-only specials and I went off to one side to page through it. Amidst the many bargains were low, low prices on three items I wanted. (I was not, by the way, shopping for gifts for anyone. I was buying stuff for me.)

There was a new Seagate external 2 TB hard drive for something like 19 cents. I forget the real price but I didn't pay it anyway since they were all out of them. There was sign that said that because of the shortage caused by flooding in Thailand, there was a limit of two to a customer. And then underneath that sign, there were no hard drives.

I stopped a friendly Costco employee, pointed to the little coupon in the book I'd been handed not five minutes earlier and asked, "Are there any more of these around?" I received a slight snicker and the information that they'd sold out at 10 AM that morning. It was now around 12:45 and I asked him, "What time did you open?"

He said, "Ten."

I asked, "How many did you get in?"

He said, "Ten."

Then he laughed and said, "No, we had a few hundred of them here but people just swarmed in the door and I blinked and they were all gone." It was that way with the two other items I found in the coupon book: Fresh out. I could only find about eighty dollars worth of non-advertised items to buy, which is kind of pathetic considering it's Costco where I've been known to spend that much on canned tuna.

The checkout line actually went rather swiftly. The checker asked me, "Did you find everything all right?"

I pulled out my coupon book and pointed to three separate coupons. "Yes. I found where you were out of this and out of this and out of this."

He apologized and said, "It was kind of a crush here this morning. We opened the doors and all these people just poured in and grabbed up all the specials. The thing is, a couple of those items have been available here at the same price for weeks and some of them are the same price online. I guess it just seems like a better bargain if you buy them on Black Friday."