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Costco has built a warehouse empire by offering customers bulk discounts on popular household items along with plenty of things that most people didn’t plan to buy until they encountered them while shopping. The gold bars the chain has been selling for the past couple of years certainly fall under that second umbrella, and it’s been forced to reduce the limit on the number you’re allowed to buy due to the demand they’ve generated.
I was forced to accept the fact that I was Officially Washed when I reached a point in life where I realized making the trek to Costco had routinely become one of the biggest highlights of my week.
With that said, if deriving a bit too much joy from a shopping trip that ends with me taking home two-and-a-half pounds of panko shrimp, a rotisserie chicken, a laughably oversized version of Connect 4, and a $13 handle of vodka that is actually palatable is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
One of the best parts of shopping at Costco (aside from the hot dog that awaits at the end of every pilgrimage) is that you’ll never know what you’re going to encounter when you’re browsing, as the chain has mastered the art of luring shoppers into pulling the trigger on impulse buys by offering bargains that seem too good to pass up.
I can’t personally say I’ve been too intrigued by the gold bars Costco has been selling on its website since the summer of 2023, but there are apparently plenty of people who have been when you consider Wells Fargo published a report last year that asserted they’ve helped the retailer generate upwards in $200 million in revenue on a monthly basis.
The one-ounce bars of 24K gold were selling for around $1,900 in September of 2023, and if you pulled the trigger on one back then, you made a pretty solid call when you consider the same ones are now being peddled for $3,389.99 (which is a bit higher than the market price that’s sitting at approximately $3,200 an ounce as of this writing).
Costco was previously limiting customers to two gold bars apiece, but according to Quartz, it has opted to reduce that number to one due to how many people have been trying to scoop them up as the price of the precious metals has undergone a noticeable spike.
What a world.