Sam’s Club: Open House August 3 – 5 Everyone Welcome and No Up-Charge And Our Thoughts On Membership

Sam’s Club is having an open house starting today, August 3 – 5th where anyone and everyone can shop with no up-charge, just as if they are members.  This is a great time to check out whether or not a membership would be worth it, or a great time to compare prices on big ticket items that you have considered and budgeted for.  Sam’s Club this weekend might be the time to get it.  Please see the site for details.

Also, we wanted to share our thoughts again regarding the value of a club membership. We find that we save more money in the grocery store or Target/Walmart with sales and coupons than we do for the shelf prices of Sam’s Club bulk items with the exception a few items listed below.

We have mostly used the membership for a few food items that we like that can only be found at Sam’s Club or things that are hard to get cheap at the store – we have consistently purchased these items at Sam’s Club. We usually end up going about every 3-4 months.

For example – these items (in our experience) seem to be the cheapest and hard price to beat at the store:

• Fresh shredded Parmesan (the hard kind) is cheapest there
• Hormel real bacon bits (these are quite pricey for the non-imitation) in the regular store and we use it in recipes and salads a lot!
• French’s Fried Onions
• Honey (although we have been able to get this in our local grocer’s case lot sales the last 2 years for cheaper)
• There are some frozen bulk foods that can only be found at Sam’s Club that we really like too
• When we do make our quarterly or so run to Sam’s Club – we often find great produce deals and will stock up to eat fresh or freeze for the future.
• For a large item deal – we have found that Sam’s Club is a great place to get freezers – for your awesome food deals – they seem to have lower and very competitive prices on new freezers
• Our most recent large purchase was a new t.v. that was last year’s floor model for over 75% off.  They had it marked down by over 70% as it was last year’s model and the floor display and then we talked them down by another $55.
• When you are not getting your digital photo prints for FREE and need some photo prints now – Sam’s Club has the lowest price at .15-.16 a print. It is also easy to upload them from your computer and pick them up in the store and even cheaper that way!
• They can also have good deals on office type supplies and ink if/when you get in a bind and have not been able to get those items cheap lately and need them now.  We mostly buy our ink with our Max Perks rewards – but have still needed to make a Sam’s Club ink run here and there.
• With some exceptions – we will purchase the frozen chicken or fish if/when we run out and there are no immediate sales (see our explanation on saving on meat).
• Finally, we go through batteries very quickly with our camera that is always on 😉 We cannot stock-up fast enough to keep up with our usage (after we run out of our awesome stock from the office store sales) so we get the excess that we need at Sam’s Club as they have the lowest everyday price.

So that is what we have done with our membership.  We debate renewing it each year, and this year we decided to pass, but to try out Costco instead based on many of your comments and assessments of Costco vs. Sam’s Club. We will share more later if switching to Costco was a better idea for our family or a good idea at all, but in the meantime, check out Sam’s Club this weekend.

If you are interested in getting a bunch of free stuff from Costco from a new member promotion that they are having, we suggest, reading our previous post HERE.

Please share your thoughts on whether or not you think a warehouse/club membership is worth the value and your experience!

Thanks Bluegrass Savers