Costco Is Raising Its Membership Fee for the First Time in Seven Years
Here’s what members can expect.
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Shopping at Costco can save you money, but doing so will now cost you more up front. The retail chain announced this week that, starting September 1, it will increase its annual membership fees. The change marks Costco’s first membership-fee boost in seven years.
Don’t panic too much, though. The fee increase will be modest. Individual Gold Star, Business and Business add-on members in the United States and Canada will pay $5 more for an annual membership — $65, rather than the current rate of $60 per year.
At the same time, the annual fee for a membership at the Executive level in the U.S. and Canada will jump $10 — going from $120 to $130 per year. On the bright side, the cap will be raised from $1,000 to $1,250 on the two-percent rewards Executive Members can earn on their qualified Costco purchases — so if you’re an Executive Member and a big Costco spender, you can more than make up for the increase.
Altogether, around 52 million Costco members will be affected by the fee increases. Just over half of those are at the upgraded Executive Member level.
You might expect the fee boost to go over just about as well as the changes Costco recently made to its rotisserie chicken packaging, which is to say, not very well. But in fact, the response in a thread on the r/Costco subreddit has been remarkably muted, if not downright supportive.
Witness this handful of comments:
“Makes sense”
“I am not bothered by it”
“This was long overdue”
“It was to be expected”
“It’s negligible, really”
“Still worth every penny”
One Redditor put it into perspective this way: “It’s a nominal hike and they’ve held the line for a while. It’s good for the company and does very little harm to the consumer IMHO.”
And then there was this comment, from someone we assume speaks for many: “Thank God the hotdogs are safe.”
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