Costco vs. Lunds Cost Comparison -or- Our Unholy Love of Costco

As many of you know, we've become rabid Costco fans over the past 6 months. It all started with the whole remodel debacle-thing and tightening our belts. It's since grown to an unholy love that finds us making trips even while on vacation (we went to a Costco in Avon, MA, on our way to Cape Cod a couple weeks ago - pictures coming soon from vacation). Today, I decided to compare what we purchased at Costco to the equivalent products at Lunds, a local high-end grocery store. In all, we saved a whopping $52 by going to Costco! Now, there are a few caveats with that. Tom and both agree that we likely wouldn't be consuming as much lettuce, peppers and strawberries if we weren't buying them in such mass quantities at Costco. We can buy a pound of organic field greens at Costco for $3.99. A 10-oz (~60% of the size) of the same product at Lunds goes for $5.99. A pound at Lunds would cost $9.58! See (tiny) chart above for details on the comparison. Click on the chart to make it bigger.

Another caveat that bears mentioning is the annual fee we pay to shop at Costco. We pay $100 a year for the Executive Membership, which pays us back 2% on purchases made at Costco. If you do the math, without taking into account any of the savings we're racking up by shopping there verses other stores, we'll need to spend $5,000 at Costco to break even. If we don't hit $5K, Costco will refund the difference between our membership and the step below, which is $50. Based on the savings we're seeing in our weekly purchases, coupled with the fact that we'll likely get our membership fee back in rebates, it's all working for us.

We try, and mostly succeed, at buying only what we need and not a lot of extra stuff. Okay, so I succumbed to buying a Shark (the steam floor cleaner) and some 600 thread count sheets. I could make a damn good argument that we needed them. In any case, we usually stick to the things we will use and don't buy things in bulk that will go to waste. We freeze a fair amount of items that we don't use in mass quantities, such as bread and butter.

It's interesting how little we spend at Target now. We make virtually all of our purchases that we used to make at Target at Costco. I wonder how many others are making the shift to club stores in this economy?

Finally, I have to mention the pizza at the Costco deli. Tom, Lark and I ate there today for a mere $6 and change. That was three gigantic slices of cheese pizza and two drinks. Yum. Yum. And it was a little Lou Who, our picky little eater, who begged us to eat there. Costco has even won her little eight year old heart over.