You can buy alcohol without a membership, because you cannot exclusively limit the sale of it. This is why recent warehouses created a hard liquor store attached to the side.

You can use the auxiliary services without a membership (Food Court, Hearing Aid, Pharmacy, and I believe you may order cakes and deli platters).

Costco has a secret online store that they sell their returned merchandise for super slashed prices, and it’s employees only. Working returns, you see mint-condition PC’s get returned, and they would go up on the site for 1/5 of the original price. I unfortunately didn’t get the URL before I left.

Costco spends more money suppressing bad press than they do on maintaining their website and promoting their company.

The bureaucracy of management at Costco is ridiculously political, and they will sneak around as much as they can to hide something that might potentially rub the public the wrong way (example: managers at my store were sleeping around, the ones involved were fired, the one that reported it was moved to a different store, and the managers in the area were shuffled around to fill the slots; none of the non-managers knew what happened for two months).

Costco single-handedly spurred the growth of coffee throughout central Africa, to help create competition globally and give themselves the cheapest seller.

Costco is (in very recent news) cutting ties with AMEX, I am unsure what the new system will be.

Source: Worked there for a year during my freshman year at college; they loved me and wanted to make me an assistant manager but I couldn’t commit so I mysteriously left.