I didn't know anything about this until I just got an email from Costco about it.
But I'm glad someone finally got upset enough about this to do something. The lawsuit has to do with Costco's practice of renewing lapsed memberships but not changing the renewal day (for example, if your renewal is due on April 1st but you don't renew until June, the following year your membership will still expire in April, not June - so you effectively don't actually get 12 months for what you pay).
The lawsuit, rightly, claims this is unfair. However, upon reading what their proposed settlement is, I'm considering opting out of this settlement. I'm fairly certain that every single year I've been a member, this has been the case for me - and the settlement period is from March 2001 through now - but the settlement says that if this happened to you on more than one occassion, then they will use the first occurence to determine how they compensate you. It's not yet clear to me what that actually means, but if it's what I think, then I still think it's unfair.
Cripes, they are completely computerized and it would take some relatively simple programming skills for them to completely, fairly compensate for this!
Anyway, the point of this post to to say that if you (like I do) disagree with this settlement, then you have until August 11th to notify them that you want to opt out of the settlement - and thus leave your options open if future class actions arise.
I love Costco dearly, but I have to say, this has been the one issue that has always really bothered me about them.
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"The settlement provides additional periods of membership to eligible Settlement Class members who renewed their memberships more than 21 days after their previous expiration dates and were affected by the renewal policy. If a Settlement Class member renewed their membership more than 21 days after the expiration date, and was affected by the renewal policy on more than one occasion since March 1, 2001, then that Settlement Class member's benefit will be based on the first such occasion."
-- Costco members who renewed ... more than 21 days but less than 2 months after their prior expiration date will receive one month of free membership
-- ... 2-3 months = 2 months free
-- ... 3-5 months - 3 months free
http://www.costco.com/renewalsettlement.pdf