Costco fans are riled up over removal of popular in-store feature

There’s an old saying that goes, “if you want something nice, you’re going to have to take care of it.” Those who live in a large city understand the sentiment of this saying all too well, as most public places tend to lose their amenities over time due to a few bad apples. Such is the case now for Costco, as warehouse locations everywhere have begun to remove their public-use coffee grinders.

“Attention members: The coffee grinders are no longer available in the warehouse,” one sign reads at a local Costco warehouse. News of the announcement quickly spread to Reddit, where one user wrote, “Uh oh, I don’t know what happened, but we lost our grinder privileges.”

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For those out of the loop, for some time now, Costco warehouses have provided free public-use coffee grinders for members to grind their beans before heading to the checkout counters. According to a former Costco employee in Seattle, “the grinders were broken at least once a week.” Locations that struggled with this issue the most would put up signs asking members not to double grind their beans, but their attempts have fallen on deaf ears.

“People would do it all day long and clog the burrs,” the Seattle Costco employee wrote. “Those grinders cost a few thousand dollars each.”

While Costco’s decision to remove the grinders all together will certainly be annoying for some, the truth of the matter is that it is extremely difficult to put a blind blanket of trust over each and every membership holder. When you have nice things, it’s only a matter of time before people begin to misuse them and you can’t blame Costco for not wanting to bleed money in the form of broken grinders.

“Someone put chocolate covered coffee beans in the one at my local grocery store,” one Reddit user wrote in response to the news. “Double grinding, grinding nuts through, dropping brushes. Members can’t be trusted not to disrespect property they don’t own,” wrote another.

Despite this being a very real problem for Costco, we couldn’t help but chuckle at some of the first hand customer experiences with the now defunct coffee grinders.

“Ours were next to the food court, so naturally someone stuck a hot dog in one of them. We do not have coffee grinders any more at the warehouse.” Another wrote, “Costco should set up a display of home use grinders next to the decommissioned ones.” We love to see the jokes rolling in.

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