We have a Costco in Evansville, not that impressed with them. I like Sam’s Club better. The brick and mortar stores are on the way out, Amazon has made a huge change in that. I never could understand the pull of Pier 1, it’s all crap to me. I guess I never felt the need to buy stuff to just set it around and then I have to dust it. It was all faddish, and I never had the money for fads.
Sam’s came to our area in Seattle about 20 years ago and we became members for a year. The thing we really liked about it was there were not long lines at the counter (but we enjoy that in the Louisville stores now).
But here is why we didn’t keep our membership: We noticed a lot of overlap of sorts in the products they sold, but there was a key difference: Sam’s would be a little cheaper, but have significantly lower quality. They are sort of like a box store version of Wal-Mart, which makes sense.
One example: We bought a vacuum cleaner at Costco and then went to Sams club and saw the same one for $30 less. But then we examined it closely. Though they were both the same base unit, the Costco one had the “rubbery feeling” hoses with internal wire while the Sams one was one of those cheap plastic accordion hoses you see on a shop vac. Also, the Costco one had a very robust attachments bag of goodies while the Sams one had a couple of basic attachments that, again, were cheaper (attached brush on one at costco while it’s equivalent at sams had no brush). That is just one example.
The funny part was that if you were not familiar with either store, and just walked through both, they looked almost identical. but the devil was in the details.
We have a Sams within 40 minutes of us, but found costco worth the extra trip. But, again, Amazon is eliminating the need for either for us.