Despite its many benefits, there are some drawbacks to shopping at Costco. Not all Costco locations receive the same limited-time treats, for example, and the store doesn’t label its aisles in an attempt to get shoppers to stick around longer and buy more. Then there are the self-checkout kiosks, implemented in 2019, which can cause a whole host of headaches. One roadblock, pointed out by Reddit users, is an unspoken item limit at the store’s self-checkout area, which only gets revealed once the customer is at the kiosk, actively scanning items.
“When I tried to use the self-checkout I was told by an employee it could only be used with five items or less,” one commenter posted incredulously on an r/Costco thread. Presumably, there were no signs that alerted customers to the item limit at the checkouts.
This appears to be a somewhat common occurrence at Costco, with rules seemingly left up to individual stores to decide. Some of the commenters on the r/Costco thread supported the idea of item limits but said that a five-item limit was way too low. One response, though, summed it up best: “All I want is consistency. If Costco is going to enforce a number, do so — note what the number of items is, and enforce it consistently across stores.”
Why Costco might have unspoken self-checkout limits
This discussion does beg the question: Why doesn’t Costco create and enforce a consistent self-checkout limit, rather than leaving it up to individual stores? And why have a limit at all? To answer the second question first, Costco may be finding, along with other retailers who have implemented self-checkouts, that while convenient, they can also lead to a rise in theft. People may be slipping items into their baskets without scanning them, especially when they have a cartful (along with the problem of non-members shopping at Costco and using the self-checkout to get through unnoticed). The fewer items that go through self-checkout, the better the employees’ chances of spotting theft or breaches of the membership terms.
As for why the company doesn’t make a store-wide limit and post the number in the self-checkout areas? These measures might come down the line, but for now, different stores see different traffic from location to location, and most are busier on weekends versus weekdays. Costco could just be leaving things up to store managers as they know what works best for their specific location.
