10 Things Warehouse Clubs Won't Tell You

More than 100 million Americans now shop in warehouse clubs including BJ's, Costco, or Sam's Club each year. That's 50 million more than in 2002. The attraction? For the annual membership price of $35 to $100, discount hunters can spend their weekends stocking up on 36-roll packages of toilet paper and nuclear-canister-size boxes of detergent. Too bad they also spend plenty of time doing anything but shopping. Michelle Wilkes says she usually waits in lines of no less than 15 minutes on the weekend at her Lake Zurich, Ill., Costco. There are often four to five shoppers ahead of her at the register, she says-and that's despite what Costco CFO Richard Galanti claims is a company-wide checkout policy of "no more than one in line and two behind." What further frustrates Wilkes is that her store never has all its registers open. "I have never seen it fully staffed," she complains. Galanti agrees that "There's nothing worse than having half the 20 registers open. Shame on us."

Heads up: Warehouse clubs are notorious for letting products drop on unsuspecting customers. In 1998, a woman in Cincinnati was hit by five 38-pound containers of kitty litter while shopping in a Sam's Club. She sustained head, neck, and shoulder injuries. And during the summer of 2001, a woman shopping in a Maryland Sam's Club barely avoided serious injury when a sofa fell from a shelf.

Plaintiff attorney Jeffrey Hyman says injuries often occur when unsecured merchandise slips from shelves, either because a store employee stocking an adjacent aisle accidentally pushes it or because another customer is trying to take down an object. Hyman says that despite the accidental nature of the incidents, "If you know you have a problem and you know you have a dangerous condition, you need to fix it." A Sam's Club spokesperson insists: "Our shopping environment is very safe. But when something like that happens, it causes us great concern." The company, he adds, tries "to put in safety rules to prevent anything from happening."

Since Sam's Club honors only the Discover card, Mastercard, and debit cards, many shoppers decide to get a Sam's Club personal credit card. But before you sign up, beware: The standard card comes with a 23.15 percent APR, which is about nine percentage points higher than the current average for variable credit cards, according to Bankrate.com.

Worse, once you sign up for the Sam's card, you may find your phone ringing off the hook with eager telemarketers. Unless you opt out by calling a toll-free number or mailing in your request, the privacy policy on Sam's Club's credit card application says your information can be made available to "third parties, who are interested in offering special products or services to you"-precisely the folks you want calling you at dinnertime. A spokesperson for GE Money, which services the Sam's Club card, denies the use of telemarketing for any product cross-selling, saying, "What we have the right to do and what we do are two different things."