Costco President's response............

[mrmpa]

I've been getting my prescriptions from Costco for about a year. The pharmacy team attached the label and then put heavy scotch like tape around the label and the entire vial.

I got sick and tired of trying to remove the paper from the vial in order to recycle it. I invariably just tossed the vial, as I couldn't even use a Sharpie over the tape to obliterate identifying info. About 2 months I emailed the President of Costco and asked why the Pharmacy did this and how it really stopped me from recycling, and doing the right thing.

The response I got from the President is............tape is no longer put on the vials. I just recycled two vials. I never received an email, but I know he got and answered it.

[rurallib]

1. interesting

you have pull somewhere!

[sharp_stick]

2. Maybe they just ran out of tape

or they got the message and now the pharmtech is waiting on the shipment of strapping strength tape that will never let you in a bottle again.

[mrmpa]

3. see below

[davidpdx]

4. Funny story about Costco here in Korea

The Special K Red Berry cereal is what I eat every morning for breakfast. So a few years back they suddenly stopped carrying it. They said that they had to send all of it back to the warehouse and they weren't able to sell it. So I started dogging them with messages in the box, bugging them at the store, and calling the local corporate office. Finally I found it that it wasn't Costco's fault, but the KFDA that had a problem with the way the cereal was categorized and it had to be tested as well. So I started bugging the KFDA. They finally got sick of me and did whatever it was they had to do and told me they approved it. Ok, back to Costco. "Hey it's approved why isn't it on the shelf??" They said ok, we are working on it. It will be 4-6 weeks. I'm like "Work faster, I'm the guy that pushed the KFDA for you". Eventually the cereal got back on the shelf.

Ah, but this isn't the end of the story.

Next it was granola bars. I was eating those and they stopped carrying them. Time for the feature film Stalking Costco II: David's back. I ended up with speaking to a buyer and meeting with him at one of the stores. Apparently this time the problem was that General Mills started using GMO in their product which couldn't be imported here. They had other factories (in Spain) that produced non-GMO products, but they were too expensive to import. It did pay off though. The buyer acquired 6 large boxes of granola bars for me (the non-GMO ones) and shipped them to me at home, free. I did the math and figured it was $100-200 in free product. Yeah they bought me off for my silence.