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Costco Sold One Membership Per Household for Decades. Now There's a Scanner at the Door.

The Complaints Department

The Complaints Department

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Costco Sold One Membership Per Household for Decades. Now There's a Scanner at the Door.
Photo by H&CO / Unsplash

Costco sells membership by the household, but for decades, enforcement at checkout amounted to a cashier glancing at whatever card got handed over. Starting in 2023, that changed — first with photo-ID checks at self-checkout, then with card scanners installed at the warehouse entrance itself, meaning members now get checked before they're even inside the building.

A Business Model That Depends on Everyone Actually Paying

The warehouse-club model runs on membership fees, not markup — bulk goods sold at thin margins, subsidized by an annual fee every shopper is supposed to be paying. For that math to work, the fee actually has to come from the person shopping, not from whoever they borrowed a card from. For most of Costco's history, nothing at the register verified that.

A Family's Second Slot, Passed Down and Then Flagged

Card-sharing beyond the paying household was common enough that Costco went public about targeting it directly. One widely covered case: a member (posting on TikTok as @profitplug, later picked up by ABC News' Good Morning America, Eat This, and The Sun) had taken over his family's second membership slot when he left for college. When his mother — no longer listed on the account — scanned his father's card at self-checkout, employees confirmed she wasn't on the membership and banned her from the location on the spot.

The Checkout Line Never Verified Anyone

Card-sharing was easy specifically because the checkout process never checked identity against the card in the first place — a photo on a membership card only works as a control if someone's actually looking at it and comparing it to a face, and for years, essentially nobody was.

Now Everyone Gets Checked, Before They're Even Inside

Costco added photo-ID verification at self-checkout starting in 2023. By August 2024 it began rolling out card scanners at warehouse entrance doors, so every member — honest or not — gets checked before reaching a single shelf, and anyone without a member escorting them can't get past the door at all. The family that quietly shared one membership between two households loses the same way as the family that always paid for two: nobody gets through the door without their own card anymore.

Filed from public reporting:

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