I think this annotated image says most of it:
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s11/sh/a5cc2b32-390e-46a6-baf2-69f56ae7be10/736ab93a13501197ea293b21ec02c8cd
But I'll add some color about my experience returning an item here.
I arrived and stood with my return (fireproof safe I had in a cart) below the sign that says "merchandise returns". I waited about 10 minutes while 3 other groups of customers stood behind me in line. I noticed three other groups of customers line up in front of the membership sign. I figured they were there for membership issues, but it looked an awful lot like they were returning items.
And I was right. That's when I learned the return staff at Costco matches the Masshole-ry of many of the customers I've encountered at this store. (Once, I went to get an empty cart near the entrance close to closing time on a weekday night when the place was nearly empty, and a guy yelled that was HIS cart. He followed me around the store and made rude comments, even though I let him take the cart that was sitting next to hundreds of other empty ones.)
I asked the cashier in front of me (within arm's reach) if I was standing in the right place for a return. She told me there was only one line and I was standing in the wrong place. I asked her why she hadn't told me that when I arrived or some other time in the prior 10 minutes, and she told me she had been very busy. (Indeed, she was - she and the other cashier were working very hard on a return of perhaps 20 bottles of vitamins the entire time and the computer did not appear to be cooperating, even when 2 people stared at it.)
So, I got in line near the membership sign instead behind two groups of customers who had arrived well after I did. (Apparently membership is not even at this desk despite the giant sign. Instead, it is inside the store entrance, not even within sight of this desk. God help you if you are looking for membership!)
Around that time, the front end supervisor arrived. I asked her why the lines were so confusing. She said that she had been asking her manager(s) to move the signs for months and it hadn't been done. She was frustrated. At this point, there were perhaps 8-10 groups of looking to return items, and they were lined up all over the place. I suggested that she help people figure out where to stand, and to her credit, she did. (But within a few minutes, people started following the signs again and were lined up in the wrong place.)
This is the area of the store where there were two people checking receipts of people who are leaving, to make sure you didn't steal anything in the alley without any goods in it between the cash registers and the door. They noticed the mess of people waiting around and did absolutely nothing to help direct traffic.
At last, I made it to the front of the line. A woman in a blazer (blonde hair in the photo) without a name tag helped me. She was completely non-verbal. I handed her my receipt and stood there with the safe in my cart. She then stuck her hand out at me again. After asking what she wanted, she requested my membership card. It felt to me like she was struggling to even ask that simple question and that sticking her hand at me would suffice.
She then asked what was in the box. I told her it was the safe that was the single item on the receipt she was looking at. She reached over the counter and tried to open the flaps of the box. I helped her. (I also would have been glad to move the cart over to where she could reach it, but she didn't ask.) She stood on her tip toes and rapped on the safe inside, perhaps checking that it was made out of metal. She didn't check anything else.
"You want this back on your card?" she asked. I did want it back on my card. She handed me a receipt and that was it. No more or less talking.
Meanwhile, I noticed the line forming again in front of the "merchandise returns" sign, and the same cashier who told me that I was not standing in the proper single line for returns started helping people who were waiting in that new line. When I was there with a line behind me, she didn't offer to help me out.
So, in addition to the cluster of not knowing where to actually go to return my item, I had to have a Masshole of a woman interact with me. She was in a nasty mood and clearly did not want to be helping shlubs like me. All in all, 18 minutes of waiting for a transaction that ultimately took about a minute to finish up. (Granted, some others cut ahead of me in line and had shorter waits.)
(Oh, and as I was checking out with stuff I purchased, I saw a new line opening up, which was sorely needed. But the manager - Antonio I think - who set up the cashier apparently walked the cashier over, took away her trash can that she needed, and walked away without fully getting the cashier set up. She looked at him like, "huh?" and was asking him to come back, but he simply walked away and she wasn't able to open her line. WTF.) read more