Does Costco Have Grocery Bags?

As popular of a warehouse club as Costco is, not everyone has a membership, which leaves many of us curious about the finer mechanics of the place. If you're exploring the idea of signing up, one interesting detail is that Costco doesn't offer grocery bags at the checkout counter. That might seem like an inconvenience at first, but it does offer something a little more suitable for your purchases: cardboard boxes.

A plastic bag (or your own reusable tote bag) would generally be useless since most of the items at Costco are so large they don't even fit into a bag as-is. We're talking about things like eight-packs of canned beans, massive frozen lasagnas, and enormous packages of home staples like paper towels. So no, there aren't any bags at Costco for you to take your stuff home in; you'll be sorting through a large bin of cardboard boxes to find the right one to carry your haul home with. 

Unfortunately, due to the size of your purchases, public transit isn't exactly the easiest method to bring Costco stuff home, either (a heads up from someone who lives in a big city). With that in mind, make sure these large, cardboard boxes can fit in your mode of transportation.

The Costco boxes you see past the register aren't just any old boxes, either. They're the boxes all the Costco goods come in; the ones that hold fruit, snacks, cleaning products, and anything you can think of. It's actually pretty ingenious from a business standpoint, since Costco doesn't have to buy its own branded cardboard boxes up front for customers to use. Plus, it repurposes cardboard products that would otherwise go to waste — they get a second life as a way to take your belongings out of the store.

That does mean the boxes can vary quite a bit in size (from large ones to small ones), which can be useful depending on how much you bought during that trip. I like to think of it sort of like grocery Tetris where you try to get the perfect-sized box for what you purchased. (As a secret bonus, our cats love to play in the empty Costco boxes once everything is put away.) 

A Costco employee also has to look through your items to match them to your receipt when you leave (after you visit the marvelously cheap food court, of course), which might be inconvenient if they're stuffed in a bag. If you have tote bags and you're planning a trip to Costco, I'd leave them in the car since they're not really going to be of much help, even if you mean well.