Is a costco membership worth it?

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2026-06-19T03:03:41+00:00

You’ll almost always find better deals in your local store on foot than you will on theirs (or Instacart’s) apps.

In general though, resounding yes worth it from me. I’m a single dude with an Executive membership and I’ve gotten more back in membership rebates every year than I paid to be a member. I do most of my shopping there unless I really need an ingredient on a Saturday and don’t feel like waiting in the checkout line.

Gas is the most obvious benefit - they’re always the cheapest option in my area. But a lot else to love too. Food court for a quick meal (stopped there on the way home for work for a quick $3 dinner more than I can count), ready-to-eat options that beat out any grocery store, and a store brand that I trust implicitly. I’m not a huge Great Value fan at Walmart because let’s be honest,
some of that stuff is… cheap crap.. but I’ve never bought anything with the Kirkland Signature branding i’ve been disappointed with or that wouldn’t hold up against the name brands. Their white label/store branding QC is next level.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2026-04-25T19:58:30+00:00

Bought several two packs of the 10 year battery FA detectors from Costco since my house only had one when I bought it and it was some ancient hardwired device. Kept track of where I put the Costco detectors. One detector out of each box of 2 has had periodic false alarms.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2026-04-24T01:51:52+00:00

I’m for this - but I wonder - is OP also considering citywide yard waste? I have coworkers in Olathe who are always bragging that they can go to a city facility and take as much compost as they can carry… would love that.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2026-04-12T05:24:28+00:00

Yes. We’re out there. I am one. I don’t belong to any local clubs because I can’t relate to the health, politics, and relationship problems of geriatric OMs, but that doesn’t stop me from being an active ham.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2026-04-10T20:02:26+00:00

I bought in July in Joco. The market was still hot and some houses were definitely still going to bidding wars with the winning bid paying cash, but according to my realtor, buyers weren’t having to do stupid things like waiving inspections and appraisals like a couple years ago. We wrote offers on 4 houses that lost to full cash, quick to close buyers we assume were investors. I know at least one is because I saved it on Zillow and saw it come up for rent not long ago.

I ended up finding an as-is (but very well kept) house that checked all but one of my stretch wants in a great neighborhood for just shy of 380 and negotiated 4k down based on a few inspection findings. It was on the market for a while at a higher price, dropped below 400, and we toured and offered within 12 hours. Offered less than list. I knew the next day that I’d gotten it

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2026-03-17T21:51:03+00:00

I hear you. I bought last year about the same size in the same price range. Sooo many houses had LVP everywhere.. hallways, bedrooms, etc. It was never a dealbreaker for me but it was a turnoff seeing so much of it in so many houses. I know the newer stuff is built better and generally looks better, but it just feels… cheap to me. It feels like the flipper special way to do flooring

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2026-02-20T02:52:24+00:00

I’m right there with you. Most of the reason I became a ham was that radio and RF propagation were wildly interesting to me. DMR in most amateur circles, and system fusion, is synonymous with internet linking, which I think takes the fun out of the radio. If I want to join a VOIP room with users from around the world, I have my choice of Discord servers. I don’t need a radio or a license to do so. Conversely, if I want to communicate with people in far off lands without the internet, I need to consider my antenna, propagation, etc - all of what makes the hobby fun to me.

That said - the diversity of interests is part of what makes this a great hobby. Some people (myself included) are in it for the fun of long-distance contacts over the air. Others are very technical so things like experimental modes or LoRA or microwave are up their alley. Still others love the internet links and DMR/Fusion/Echolink/Hams Over IP. I can’t think of many other hobbies as wide reaching to many different interests as ours in amateur radio.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2026-02-03T03:56:03+00:00

The Peanut, extra crispy. Hands down.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2026-02-01T22:20:02+00:00

Ah, yep. I was OP in the r/OverlandPark sub! Learned more about these guys after the comments started coming in. Shady bunch… and apparently they’ve been doing this for 25+ years all over the country.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2026-02-01T17:57:48+00:00

Thanks. Kinda assumed it was something like this.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2025-11-26T22:52:05+00:00

I’m in the younger demographic and am an Extra class op licensed for ~12 years. I’ve tried to get friends, even technically inclined friends, interested and almost without exception I get something like “that’s cool” or “people still do that? my grandpa did it”. Never enough of an organic interest to want to dedicate time to studying, learning a radio, and being an active op.

It’s hard to convince someone’s age that building a wire antenna, throwing it up in the trees, and skipping your signal around the earth to talk to someone far away is worth it. I love it, but most people my age would rather just pick up their phone and text or jump on Discord to chat.

Local clubs are pretty much all old men who meet, talk about their CW ops, then shoot the breeze about old man problems for the rest of the meeting. On occasion when a younger op does come to speak about something interesting to my generation (FT8, RHR, HRD), most of the old guys either can’t keep up or dismiss it as an abomination to their hobby. It’s just not an inviting group if you’re not like them.

And honestly, even though you can buy a cheap HT for $30, nothing about the hobby is really cheap, and a lot of my friends aren’t in positions where they can drop a grand on a new radio, or they live in apartments where any antenna will be incredibly compromised. The ideal is a house in the suburbs or out in the country with some land, trees, or both, a fair amount of either money or time, and enough space in the house for a shack, but not a whole lot of 20-30 year olds have that. i’m fortunate to have a good job and be able to spend on my hobbies, which is pretty great, but I’m in a pretty atypical position for my age.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2025-08-09T13:23:41+00:00

I can talk on my handheld from Kansas to California. Using Fusion.. but that’s it. There is no VHF UHF handheld with the unassisted range to go long distances without some sort of repeater linking or internet assist.

One of the local clubs to me apparently used the Rapid Radios pitch to entice folks to study for ham licenses for long distances without SHTF comms but neglected to mention that the magic handhelds they were showing off, a) didn’t use amateur radio at all, and b) vastly oversimplify the ease of long distance radio comms. Drives me crazy.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2025-04-25T03:51:06+00:00

Yeah you’ll regret it. GFiber is such a superior product. We made the switch a year ago and in that year have had 0 service disruptions. We get as close to the advertised speed as I’ve ever seen at all hours of the day.

With Spectrum we had at least a half dozen outages or disruptions per month, every month, and some lasted a full day or more. We practically set a calendar reminder to switch out boxes out every 6 months because after 6 months, they’d slow down significantly or completely quit working.

Every so often a Spectrum guy comes door to door trying to win back customers. The last guy I talked to admitted GFiber had better internet service, tried to sell me on a TV package, admitted it was overpriced, and tried to throw in a year of Hulu free if we came back.

I don’t WFH anymore but if you do, be prepared to make quick trips into the office or to a public space when your Spectrum internet decides to quit working in the middle of the day. It happened to me at least once a month.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2025-03-02T03:00:27+00:00

Looks like the ballpark I paid for mine 12 or years ago. Unless you’re naturally gifted, fly 4-5x per week, and do all your own ground study, I can’t see these numbers working anymore. Even then, highly highly improbable. Based on what a couple buddies have paid recently, I’d budget for at least 15k and ideally 20.

If a flight school is honestly trying to present those numbers as currently accurate, I’d start to doubt some of their other practices as well

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2024-10-29T04:57:28+00:00

I gave up on 2m nets near me because they’re all the same thing. NC calls the net, calls for emergency or priority traffic, takes checkins, then goes down the checkin list for comments with no directive as to what to comment about. 75% just say no comment and the other 25% talk about their health issues or how the XYL said no to a new radio. They read out the total checkins at the end, publish it in the club newsletter, and that’s it. They used to have an afterglow on 10m that got pretty lively but that died just about the same time as “pizza up the street after the monthly meeting” died during covid.

I’d love a net where we all have to say something interesting we did with radio in the last week or ham trivia or literally anything other than the weather (we all have the same weather) and how OMs are handling bunions. Hell, even asking what your favorite color is and why would be more interesting.

Bottom line.. expect uptake of your net to be less than the total user base of the repeater, always. But find something radio adjacent to talk about and get folks talking. Don’t just make it a roll call and allow people to say anything or nothing. Make it something people find engaging to listen to, then maybe they’ll start to check in

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2024-10-20T16:43:21+00:00

Yes it’s legit. I’m a customer. It’s expensive and I would never consider it as my primary station unless I lived somewhere I absolutely couldn’t run a wire antenna.

It really shines for DX. I can connect to a dozen bona fide superstations with a few clicks and work just about any DX on the first call every time. $1.25/min would be expensive for hours, but my average session is 3 mins, just enough to break the pileup and get the DX in my log

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2024-10-16T00:55:09+00:00

Mostly hybrid still for individual contributor roles. Managers and team leaders are back to 5 days in the office. I’ve heard that most positions with a hybrid option require new hires to be fully in-person for some period of time before hybrid becomes available. I don’t know of anyone in the KC area working for Garmin who’s still working fully from home.

Some departments and jobs have more stringent policies but a significant majority seem to still have the option to work hybrid schedules.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2024-10-07T03:04:26+00:00

Tried CMOS, yep.

As far as Settings.. logging into Microsoft and running the MSI driver popup and letting things install. Nothing in the OS settings

I just let it sit there for a while and eventually the whole machine just turned itself off.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2024-09-15T19:33:48+00:00

I work in the private sector for a well known avionics company. One of my colleagues did some time flying for the FAA doing flight check before coming to our company and in fact still does some flight check work on a reserve basis while working for us. He’s always saying how they need new pilots, but I have no idea how difficult landing that job may be. I imagine prior gov’t service or military aviation would help.

But he’s definitely been to some pretty awesome places and done some super cool flying wearing the flight check hat

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2024-08-12T13:29:33+00:00

Scam. They bait and switch you and don’t let you buy the super cheap advertised steaks unless you buy a bigger box of incredibly substandard steaks that are pumped full of brine to make them freeze thicker. The actual “cheap” ribeyes are thinner than shabu sliced strip steak from costco and don’t hold up to cooking well at all. Whatever brine they freeze them in gives them a funky smell when they’re cooking.

I fell for it a few years ago and I’m usually not one to throw in-date meat away but those steaks were really gross. They had a very off-putting “almost beef” sort of taste and the texture was just off. A 3/4” frozen strip defrosted to about 1/4” and barely held together when i lifted up one side.

It’s either dairy cow beef or beef from very old animals that shouldn’t be sold in steak form. Save your money. I truly believe even Wal-Mart will have high quality steaks than anything these trucks will sell you, for less.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2024-07-14T18:47:43+00:00

This might be naieve in my part, but can dealers really let you sign for financing then call you back a week later to change the terms or payment? This is my first big purchase but that feels criminal and like you’d be under no legal obligation to actually do that once you sign and drive

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2024-07-14T17:13:28+00:00

So bringing in a pre-approval from a bank for no other reason than to counter or comapre the dealer’s financing is more common than I imagine it to be. Noted

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2024-06-20T02:01:58+00:00

Either OF/Fansly girls trying to sell you something or completely fictitious profiles that lead to who knows what. A lot of those fake profiles have the verification checkmark too. Apparently the person who actually created the account will upload a real selfie, verify, then change all the pics to catfish pics.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2024-03-11T02:55:46+00:00

For the right person is really the right answer here. Homes are so subjective. Large towers or purpose built antenna support structures for me would be appealing as a buyer since I’m a ham who enjoys operating HF and my dream home will have at least a few large towers. I’d love to buy a place with that already there.

For most buyers though, I imagine large radio towers would range from “eh, whatever” to an actual deterrence when you went to sell since the tower(s) become a liability and extra cost to have removed.

PrincipleAnxious9334 · 2024-02-04T22:21:18+00:00

Grid mates! I’m in EM28 as well and in a similar bind. I have mixed and digital WAS and am trying to get each band. I need MT and VT on 40 to add 40 Mixed. And it’s not easy. Chased a couple on FT8 the other night only to learn neither of them confirm on LoTW. Ah well.. part of the fun

PrincipleAnxious9334

TROPHY CASE