Costco members have hot deals at the fingertips packed into the halls of the warehouse club, but the retailer also sells cars—and people really took advantage of the program in 2017.
Costco’s Auto Program announced it sold 520,000 vehicles in 2017, and General Motors vehicles were mighty popular. GM and Costco ran their own promotion for the holiday season 2017 and sales rose 50 percent over 2016 figures.
Aside from the holiday promotion, GM vehicles rounded out the top five most-purchased vehicles. They were:
- 2018 Chevrolet Silverado
- 2018 GMC Sierra
- 2018 Chevrolet Equinox
- 2018 Chevrolet Traverse
- 2018 Cadillac XT5
Costco said the most popular segment of all makes was crossovers, followed by trucks, passenger cars, SUVs and vans.
The program is popular for a host of reasons, but mainly because it provides upfront pricing that’s pre-arranged with participating dealerships. Namely, it’s a no-haggle situation. What the buyer sees is the final discounted price. It also dishes out a 15 percent discount on parts, service and accessories for the member’s household.
Comments
Reason the “CAP” program was so popular during the holiday season was because Costco was offering a $700 Costco Cash card which stacked with the other huge incentives; think the 17%-25% off MSRP…
For those who don’t know how the program works, first you need an active Costco membership number, you then go to costcoauto, put in your make and model and the site returns your local participating dealerships with trained sales staff and pushes you to make an appt with them without sharing any pricing…When you arrive at the dealership you’re presented with a price list including options with fixed pricing…Despite the claims the prices are fixed and its no haggle, unless something has recently changed, at any time the person in charge of the Costco pricing (usually that’s not a salesman) can change the price at any time and reportedly some dealerships have “haggled” by changing the Costco fixed price on the fly in order to close the deal…With all that being said, one of a dealerships secret money makers which still applies to Costco dealers is to under pay for your trade in so one still needs to watch out for that tactic…Essentially if you elect to trade in, go to CarMax to receive your free appraisal on your trade in prior to going into a dealership…Once the appraisal is received compare that to dealership’s offer and tell them they need to beat CarMax’s offer in order to close the deal…
It’s not very hard to beat Carmax’ offer. Some of the offers I’ve seen from them were laughable.
Rarely will the average dealership beat CarMax if you’re not buying a vehicle from them…Regardless, trade-in amount is only one part of the deal…There are 6 major parts to a new vehicle transaction, sales price, incentives, fees, interest rate, trade in and F&I services (optional service/maintenance contracts)…One might THINK they’re doing good on the deal as a whole but unless one scrutinizes all six, they won’t know if you’re getting screwed somewhere…
Just curious – do the sales Costco generates count as pure retail, or a variant of fleet, or something else?
Thanks –
Dealerships pay Costco to participate in the program and they need to get a salesperson to become trained in the Costco program…I don’t know for sure but it sounds like retail to me…Costco is #2 in US sales while AutoNation is #1…
Kinda what I figured. Thank you, sir!