This meant some items at Costco were expensive relative to what you could find elsewhere on sale, but it also meant it was phenomenally useful to figure out what items other retails were making obscene amounts of profit on.
If your assertions are correct, then competition is unnecessary since costco or any company would have the appropriate price/quality ratios. So we should only have 1 monopoly in every industry.
What's the point of having other large warehouse retailers when Cost is going to have the right price/quality? It's just redundant and wasteful.
I also know all of their net income comes from membership fees, which means the margins for their products is likely going into essentials (I haven't heard of their organization indulging on lavish pay and parties and whatnot).
Of course, as a buyer, it is in my interest to have multiple vendors around to keep them competing. Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to go to other wholesalers also. However, technology does tend to reward the most efficient with all of the gains, so we seem to be inevitably going towards a future with fewer competitors and at most 2 or 3 businesses dominating each field. I don't know how to solve that problem, since as a buyer, I greatly benefit from the conveniences the efficiencies of scale afford me, but I know in the long term, the tables can turn and the seller can gain power over the buyer.
Basically I’d never be able to trust I was getting a fair price at the instant I pushed the button.
I use camelcamelcamel a lot and haven't seen any discrepancy between what I Amazon shows me and what camelcamelcamel alerts. Maybe I'm mostly tracking slightly higher priced items and they're less subject to change?