Sam's club

 So Sam's club as you are probably aware I'll just tell you briefly is a big box discount club. What that means in America is you buy a membership for around $50 a year and then you can go in there with your card and buy things at a discount. Some of the stuff is truly a very big discount. Some of the stuff is just stuff you normally wouldn't buy anyway but they sell a bunch of it at a little bit of a discount. Candy can be like this. It's a little bit of a discount but they're just trying to sell you 60 bar candy bars. But if you look at the overall price of the candy bars individually are there like 75 cents to a dollar. So yeah that is a little bit of a discount but I mean are you really going to eat 60 candy bars I'm not. And it's really not discounted enough to be like a warehouse for convenience stores or something like that. So something has happened recently.

A couple of things have taken place recently. First of all inflation is going up so prices are going up all over the country and so prices are going up at Sam's club. This isn't a big shocker but the prices seem to be going up a lot like 20%. Also there are lots of products that aren't available. The same types of products are available at other stores. Like Walmart and all kinds of grocery stores. So I don't know if they're just having a supply chain problem or what but it seems interesting that this is tied in with a time at which they're making a big deal about their cash refund system. So what they're doing is every month they give you a small percentage back of the money you spent. It's called Sam's cash. It just goes on your account and you spend it. Now obviously the idea is to encourage you to spend a whole bunch of money so then you get some of the Sam's cash which makes you feel like you're getting stuff for free. But it seems sort of coincidental that prices are going up way more than normal inflation. Which could just be covering their Sam's cash rebate get it. The money has to come from somewhere and they're not going to take it out of their pocket oh gee I've got a good idea let's take it out of your pocket. Also they're making a huge deal out of upgrading to the more expensive plan no matter who you are. On the checkout kiosks it really looks like they're trying to trick you into pushing upgrade no matter what you do. This really started getting under my skin. I'm very sensitive to psychological tricks and that's what it feels like they're doing they're just screwing around a bunch they hired some advertising outfit that has come up with some exotic way to try to jack up prices but make you feel like you're getting a bigger discount. That's what it looks like they're doing.