Walk through a Costco warehouse and the price tags appear uniform — white rectangular cards with product names, prices, and a series of numbers that most members have never paused to examine carefully. Experienced Costco shoppers read those tags differently. They see not just a price but a communication — a signal about where the product is in its pricing lifecycle, whether it is available on promotion, whether it is about to disappear from the assortment, and whether now is

If you have ever walked past a Costco price sign ending in .97 and wondered if it was just a random number, you have been leaving money on the table. If you have ever seen a small asterisk in the corner of a Costco price tag and not known what it meant, you have walked past discontinued items without stocking up. And if you have ever spent twenty minutes in the warehouse without knowing that .88 price tags and .00 price tags are two of the best opportunities in the entire sto