4 ms·
Costco won't sell you anything if you're not a member, so it's not a good analogy. It's more as if Target would refuse to sell you a certain size of diapers un
by athenot 9y ago
Costco won't sell you anything if you're not a member, so it's not a good analogy.
It's more as if Target would refuse to sell you a certain size of diapers unless you sign up for their credit card membership thingy.
- kazinator 9y agoNothing wrong with the analogy; the Prime membership is like a little Costco nested within Amazon. Costco could run a parallel retail outfit (also visibly Costco branded, like "Costco Open" or something) where anyone can walk in and buy anything, but not some things that are available only in regular Costco.
- bradjohnson 9y agoThat's a stretch. Even then, the analogy would only work if they stocked "Costco Open" with premium products and then if you had one in your cart, they tacked on the membership fee to your total price.
- Rebelgecko 9y agoMost Costcos will actually sell alcohol to nonmembers, as a probably unintended result of some states' old blue laws.
- kazinator 9y agoIn some Costco locations non-members can get into the food court area to buy Costco fast food. This is outside of the cash registers and the food vendors don't check memberships.
- adl 9y agoInteresting, in Mexico, Costco does check for membership at the food court, but I think they don't at the pharmacy.
- dottrap 9y agoCostco also allows non-members to buy from their pharmacy.
- daemonk 9y agoI guess the better analogy would be video games that are exclusive to a console ie. playstation exclusive or xbox exclusive.
- kazinator 9y agoSoftware usually has a technical reason for not running on a platform it's not targetted for. There is an analogy here though: like a site refusing to run after detecting that your browser is running on Linux, such that if you fake that string, everything works fine.
- mchahn 9y ago> Software usually has a technical reason for not running on a platform it's not targeted for. Not true. Many years ago Atari patented a little cartridge flap just so no one else could make a cartridge that could be inserted into their platform. There are many other examples.
- skellera 9y agoThis is actually wrong. You can order off their website for an additional surcharge. "Non-members may be assessed an additional surcharge for purchases (does not apply to prescription items)."