Marketing expert weighs in on Costco membership changes

Costco customers will notice a change when they enter the members-only retail store.

Costco cards must now be scanned at the door, at the Waterloo Region and Guelph locations, making it harder for non-members to shop the aisles.

Another change is that membership fees have gone up by as much as $10 a year, depending on which type you have.

The fee hike comes as Costco, like many media streaming companies, has been taking more measures to ensure non-subscribers aren’t taking advantage of other customer memberships.

On Monday, shoppers at the Kitchener location told CTV News it wasn’t much of an inconvenience.

“It was no different than usual honestly, it was just a little bit of a delay because people weren’t used to it,” one man said.

“They check it anyways, so now you just scan it and you get in. It’s fine,” another added.

Costco makes most of their profits off of membership fees, not from the sale of in-store products. Last year, the company earned $4.6 billion USD in revenue from membership fees. That’s an eight per cent increase from 2022.

Costco members show their membership at a Kitchener, Ont. store on Sept. 16, 2024. (Submitted)

Chatura Ranaweera, a marketing professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, says the price of groceries and other products could increase if the company doesn’t crack down on membership moochers.

He approves of the changes.

“Members themselves will benefit because they are the ones who are paying the membership fee and they don't want non fee-paying people to come in and patronize the service,” Ranaweera said, adding that the new scanners “protects the members.”

Costco’s also requires all guests to be accompanied by a valid cardholder to enter its stores, making it more difficult for non-members to sneak in using cards that don’t belong to them.

At the Kitchener location, members hope it doesn’t cause too much of a delay on weekends when the stores are already packed with customers.

Some admit trips to Costco are already time consuming, especially if they don’t stick to their shopping list.

“We just shop around for only those things, not scan the whole Costco cause if we scan the whole Costco, we buy the things we don’t need and just put it in the garage or somewhere,” said one shopper.