Costco blog/discussion forum

If you have problems seeing and need glasses, you need to go through three steps. First, an examination by a doctor. Second, choose and buy the frames. Third, choose a lens material and have the prescribed lenses mounted into the frames. You can do all three of these steps at different places, of you can combine them at a single location, like your local Costco Warehouse.

Consumer Reports did a study of eyeglass purchasing in November 2006 and concluded that Costco's Optical department was the best for most people. Costco, along with several other stores, offered the lowest prices. (Lenscrafters charged four to five times the price of Costco for similar lenses.) But Costco also offered some of the best service, on par with small optical shops and doctor's offices. These small optical shops and physician offices, however, were usually much more expensive than Costco Optical.

Consumer Reports found Costco lacking in two areas, speed and selection of frames. If you are not in a hurry, they suggest ordering your frames online (from Frames Direct for instance) and then ordering the lenses at Costco and asking them to install their lenses in your frames. Costco will charge you an additional $20 or so for this service.

Costco has a handy Face Shape Guide that can tell you whether it is best to order geometric, rounded, oval, navigator, square, aviator, or rectangular frames based on whether your face is oval, square, round, or triangular.

The June 2008 issue of Costco Connection has an advertisement for a Costco Travel vacation to Las Vegas. They quote a rate of $627 per person for air travel from Seattle to Las Vegas and three nights in the new Trump International Hotel and Tower. This rate includes taxes and fees on the hotel and flight. It's good for a trip departing on Monday July 21, 2008.

I wanted to see how good of a deal I could get on my own, for comparison. Reading the fine print, the $627 per person requires double occupancy at the hotel. So my goal is to beat $1254 for two people to fly into Las Vegas and stay three nights at the Trump International Hotel and Tower.

First, I used Kayak to find the best flight. The absolute best price I find is $259 per person, but that has some bad flight times. (You would have to leave Las Vegas at 7 am returning to Seattle.) A more reasonable flight is going to cost $274 each, for a total of $548. This is on a combination of US Air and Alaska Air, booked at the Alaska Air web site on June 4, 2008.

By going directly to the Trump International Hotel web site, I found the rates for a Studio Suite City View room (the same quality room that I'd get through Costco Travel). The rates were $199, $199, $239 for the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. (Hotel rates in Las Vegas are very dependent on the day of the week.) That's a total of $637 for the hotel, but it goes up to $694 when you include taxes.

The total cost for my vacation when I book it myself is then $694+$548=$1242 for two people. That's $12 less than the Costco Travel price.

Last year, I decided to shop around when our car insurance policy was up for renewal. I love Berkshire Hathaway, the company that owns Geico and of course Costco. So I compared those two. Here's my comparison:

As you can see, I compared the cost of insurance for two cars with a pretty high level of coverage. Geico and Costco didn't have exactly comparable levels, so the Geico coverage is a little more than Costco's.

The results are amazingly close. For Car #1, Geico quoted $275.10 (this is for six months of insurance) while Costco quoted a much higher $320.91. However, for Car #2 Geico quoted $245.70 and Costco quoted a much lower $200.91. In the end, I liked the Geico web interface better and went with them.

Executive club members at Costco get some benefits with auto insurance, including free road side assistance. So that adds some value that is not included here.

Conclusion, if you are going to buy Costco auto insurance, shop around first. You might, or might not, get a better deal. It will depend on your individual circumstance.

We wanted shades for five windows, and decide to order them from Hunter Douglas through Costco.com last year. It starts by calling a toll free number, the next day we were contacted by a designer, via e-mail, who set up an appointment.