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Costco is one of the few places where you can return just about anything: brown bananas, dead plants, clothes that don’t fit. Most Costco products fall under its generous Risk-Free 100% Satisfaction Guarantee, which gives you a full refund if you’re dissatisfied. Even for those products that aren’t covered, such as electronics, they typically have a wide return window.
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This lenient return policy may be one of the best perks of a Costco membership. But it can also lend itself to abuse. Indeed, stories abound of people returning some absurd things, like dead Christmas trees and empty wine bottles. While some of this might be folklore, surely Costco employees have seen their fair share of questionable returns.
Recently, a friend who lives in the same apartment complex as my family told me he had been blacklisted at Costco. After digging a little deeper, I realized that Costco was probably justified in that choice — but that my friend may not have many chances left.
A surefire way to get blacklisted at Costco
This friend — who we’ll call Patrick – is a little, well, eccentric. He’s very clever and somehow finds a way to get what he wants. For instance, when the cupboards in his apartment were full, he convinced the leasing office to let him use an empty refrigerator in an unleased apartment without any extra charge or hassle.
Refrigerator space is a big problem for Patrick, who once worked as a professional cook. So when he bought an enormous quantity of ribeye steaks at Costco last November, he decided to freeze the bulk of them. They were for a party, he told me, which ended up being canceled. Since this was around the holidays, he let the ribeyes sit in his freezer, thinking he might end up using them.
About eight months later, he defrosted them, only to discover they had developed a pungent odor. It was so bad, Patrick told me, there was no way he was going to eat them. They weren’t cheap, he said. So he took his chances and returned them to Costco.
But the odor was so bad that Patrick wasn’t going to drive with them in his car. So, he showed up at Costco, without the ribeye steaks, and asked for a refund. He showed up eight months after purchasing the ribeyes, then tried to return them without actually having them in hand.
As I expected, this wasn’t the first “odd” return that Patrick made at Costco. But he is a regular customer, spends a lot of money at Costco, and has a long history of being an Executive member. Even so, the manager of this Costco was very hesitant to offer him a refund. She finally agreed to it. But before he walked away, she reminded him that Costco reserves the right to revoke memberships at any time. Since he had a “history” of unusual returns, she thought she should remind him of this.
She was pretty upset, Patrick told me, and looked as if she was going to revoke his membership on the spot. I couldn’t tell if Patrick had had a change of heart — something tells me no — but he seemed spooked by it.
What happens when you’re on Costco’s blacklist
As far as I know, Costco doesn’t have a blacklist per se. But if you abuse its return policy, it can cancel your membership at any time. As it says on its website: “Costco reserves the right to refuse membership to any applicant, and membership may be terminated at Costco’s discretion and without cause.”
While Costco doesn’t state how many questionable returns it takes to get banned, pulling a stunt like Patrick’s is not going to help your case. All it takes is one store manager with a short fuse (or justified indignation) to refund your membership dues on the spot and tell you to have a good day.
That said, you shouldn’t be afraid to return items to Costco, especially if you have a good reason to and it saves you money. Returning items frequently because they don’t work or you don’t like them doesn’t put you on a blacklist. It’s when you’re clearly trying to game the system — like buying TVs before a big sporting event only to return them a day later — that you get into trouble.
In Patrick’s case, he probably should have brought in the ribeye steaks, or at least taken a picture of them. It was the fact that they weren’t there that made it suspicious. At any rate, he’s going to have to be a little more careful about his returns, especially if he runs into the same store manager again.
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