The Freezer Aisle Mistake That Constantly Irritates Costco Employees

Costco is a big place. The Costco website estimates that the average size of its warehouse stores is around 146,000 square feet. Needless to say, such an enormous store requires lots of employees – employees who must navigate the massive warehouse, stock the towering shelves with everything from bulk paper towels to bags of cat food, and assist the throngs of customers that fill the store each and every day.

Costco employees have talked about what it's like to work at Costco before, discussing certain perks like after-hours shopping (via Mental Floss). They've also described the drawbacks of working in the warehouse. It's pretty much like any retail job: Some workers may like it, and others may not. It should come as no surprise, then, that Costco employees find themselves dealing with customers in ways they may not always enjoy.

As CNBC tells us, there are a lot of reasons Costco members flock to the warehouse, whether it's the allure of bulk purchasing, the wide variety of choices, or the $5 rotisserie chicken. With an enormous amount of people coming in and out of the place each day, it's no wonder employees may find themselves cleaning up messes or dealing with unpleasant situations more often than they'd like. But there's one mistake some customers make that really gets under the skin of employees.

If you've ever been in any grocery store, you may have noticed random products on shelves they shouldn't be in, like a jug of detergent in between boxes of pasta or cans of soup next to bags of chips. More likely than not, these are from customers who decided they didn't want this particular product and chose to leave said items in these random places under the belief employees will take care of it for them. For some customers at Costco, this also extends to frozen or refrigerated items too.

According to Insider, one particular peeve that sets employees off is finding frozen items in areas where there are no refrigerators, such as pints of ice cream sitting in random aisles. Costco employee Tess Robison explained that some refrigerated or frozen items are spoiled by the time employees find them since members leave them in well-hidden spots. To go out and search for these missing items costs time and money – employees who have more important things to do find themselves running across the store looking for a bag of frozen vegetables someone left in the snack aisle behind a box of chips.

What makes such behavior even more baffling is the fact that Costco has a "go-back cart" specifically meant for items that customers have changed their minds on. Customers can leave items in the cart and employees will return to where they are meant to go.

Frozen food isn't the only thing that gets left in inconvenient places. If you've driven through an empty parking lot, you may notice the odd shopping cart left randomly in the middle of a parking space or at the end of the lot. Why would someone, you wonder, take their shopping cart and just leave it somewhere? If you ever had this thought, know that Costco employees are thinking the same thing.

On r/Costco, several employees vented about members taking shopping carts and then not returning them. A suggested reason for the behavior is a certain mindset: that just because employees are paid to do it, members shouldn't be bothered with making the effort. One user even reported seeing a customer purposefully abandon his cart for an employee to get.

"Watched a guy take his cart to [an] empty return. Pushed it so hard that it went out the other side," claims the user. "He watched (and laughed) the wind take it and went down the small incline hard. Lucky no cars or people were hit. Poor employee that had to eventually go get the cart out in the middle of nowhere."

Some also made mention of Aldi's shopping cart system as a solution. Aldi requires a customer to put a quarter into a slot on the cart to unlock it from the rest of the carts. Only when the cart is properly returned will the customer get their quarter back (via Aldi).