BJ's Wholesale Club

Watch out for persistent stalking by home improvements salesmen. They try to catch shoppers alone in the aisles and do long, hard-sell harangues about signing up for home improvements with them. They carry clipboards to pretend they are store employees and have a lot of phony bonhomie in greeting you. They are hard to run off, they just keep talking at you.



BJs has gone downhill since they started allowing these salesmen to exploit their customers. They have always had a gazillion end-of-aisle sales tables and displays and hawkers of goods announced by loudspeaker, but this idea of letting salesmen actually chase customers down is a new and bad idea: businesses don't thrive when they do things that make their customers hate them, as Blockbusters and Radio Shack found out.



As the review above points out, BJs is continually changing things around at the store so the customer can't find what they are used to buying; whole sections disappear and reappear in another area entirely, pretty much every time one goes in. I suppose this is to force us to see things we aren't used to buying and they hope we'll buy more; from my point of view, it just makes for a more unpleasant and tiresome shopping experience.



The meat department is good, though they have changed that a lot, too, books always good, lots of luxury foods as well as basics. I used to love BJs, and still shop there quite a bit, but they are probably going downhill now and grabbing desperately at new profit possibilities, regardless of how it maltreats the customer. I don't think this is ever a winning business plan in the long term.

BJ's is a warehouse store - typical selections of food and household items, and located close to I95. Pricing is generally competitive with other warehouse stores (e.g., Costco) as well as local groceries (except for sales). Recommend trying to visit at off-peak hours. The store is open until 10pm most nights (call or visit the bjs.com web site to confirm). Downside of this location is the traffic in and out during busy periods.

We used to love shopping at BJ's with the exception of dealing with customer service. Anytime we had to go to customer service the people were lazy, rude and nasty. BUt we still loved shopping there. Then one year we had to let our membership expire but we renewed later in the year. We paid for a full year of membership and 6 months later they ended our memebership saying it had expired and we did not renew. First off we never received any renewal notices, second off we were only 6 months into our year membership that we paid for. We found out that they went by the start date of our previous membership and not the date we actually renewed and paid. Some research soon proved this was common practice for BJ's to pull on its members, not just this location. Hubby went in and put up a fight, with the proof of when we paid and renewed and after about 20 minutes they gave him the the 6 months they owed us. After that we never did renew again. We just went back today to use a special offer they mailed us and once again they just proved they are more trouble than they are worth. The offer we received said the free memebership was good for 60 days after date of activation and card must be activated by 12/31/07. The folks at customer service said no the membership expires on 12/31. Even though we had their letter in our hands stating the membership was good for 60 days after activation date and had to be activated by 12/31, they insisted that no the membership expires on 12/31. Finally after going round after ugly round, the clerk yelled at us "WE KNOW WHAT THE LETTER SAYS, IT'S WRONG!". So after that we just left the customer service desk and went in to check out the store. We already knew customer service had not improved any and wanted to see if the store was still as good as when we used to shop there. Well, the store was arranged strangely and items were very hard to find and the selection was narrow and left much to be desired. We may go back between now and 12/31 while we still have the free memebership just in case we find a Christmas gift or two there for a better price. That's another thing, most of the prices are no longer worth the price of memebership as the items can be found elsewhere for the same price or lower. We'll stick with Sam's before ever paying for another BJ's membership. Just a shame we can't have a Sam's closer to home but we'll make the drive there rather than waste our time at BJs again.