I went to Costco for the first time. Here are 12 things that surprised me.

I knew that Costco had recently started a membership crackdown, but it seemed surprising that the store has employees staff the entrance and check membership cards when customers have to flash their cards at the checkouts anyway.

To exit the store, you also had to show a member of staff your receipt and purchases, too.

Overall, this seemed quite labor-intensive.

We arrived shortly after 2 p.m. on a Friday, and the store was much busier than I'd thought. The customers spanned a range of ages, too, whereas I'd expected them to be mainly retirees at that time of day.

Some items, as I'd expected, were sold in massive sizes. This included five-kilogram (11-pound) blocks of cheese costing around £25 (about $30), huge bottles of fabric conditioner that are meant to last 250 washes each, and even 25-kilogram (55-pound) packs of sugar that I had no hopes of lifting.

Some products were in large multipacks, too – for example, a pack of 1,100 tea bags and a box containing 48 bags of chips.

However, I was surprised to see how many products were actually made of individual packs bundled and sold together. I noticed this with jars of pesto, boxes of cereal, and packs of mac and cheese.

There were some American brands and products that aren't commonly available in the UK.

While products like Oreos, Nerds, and Ben & Jerry's are widely sold over here, it can be hard to find Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Skippy peanut butter, and Cheetos, for example. But Costco sold them.

There were even some more niche products, like Smucker's Goober spread, Red Vines licorice, San Francisco Bay Coffee, and Mike and Ike candy.

The pandemic largely wiped out free samples at UK grocery stores, but Costco is still giving them out.

There were about half a dozen stands around the store with staff giving out food samples, including granola and yogurt, oatmeal, and gammon. The stands displayed packs of the products that you could take if you liked the sample, as well as signs displaying the price. The staff told you about the products before giving you the samples, and one even recited a lengthy sales pitch to me. He looked dismayed when I didn't take a pack of the product.

The samples were really tiny, though. I understand wanting to keep down costs, but the portion sizes just looked quite sad to me.

I don't think I'd ever seen stamps for sale like this before. Previously, I've only ever bought them from the Post Office, where a staff member retrieves them for you from behind the counter, or from customer service desks in grocery stores.

Like the other products on sale, Costco sold the stamps in large packs. I saw 64 first-class stamps for £76.99 ($93), or 64 second-class stamps for £47.19 ($57), which is a slight discount from buying them at other stores.

For £2.50 (just over $3), my local café in my hometown sold an incredible carrot cake. Deliciously moist, it was packed with nuts, topped with a rich cream cheese frosting, and decorated with charming iced carrots.

On one visit, I told a member of the staff at the café about how much I enjoyed the cake, to which they responded that they bought it from elsewhere. I wondered if perhaps they got it from a local bakery, but when I visited Costco I discovered that the retailer sold – if not the same cake – then a near-exact replica.

Costco sold a large assortment of large cakes, multi-packs of pastries and bread rolls, and other baked goods, and I wondered how many other cafés they supplied. The coveted carrot cake cost £11.49 ($14) and had a minimum weight of 2.2 kilograms (nearly five pounds).

Costco sold a massive range of low-priced essentials, and large areas of the store were dedicated to baked goods, meat, alcohol, cleaning supplies, and so on. But there were more luxury and big-ticket items than I'd expected.

These included a selection of bicycles, Xbox consoles, a telescope, drones, and expensive jewelry and watches. Some of the ovens and watches I saw cost more than £2,000 ($2,400).

Though the products were generally sorted into categories, there wasn't a clear distinction between the food and general merchandise parts of the store.

The aisles, though numbered, didn't appear to be labeled with the type of goods they contained, which is something I'm used to seeing in large stores. I can imagine it would take a while to learn your way around.

The store seemed pretty clean and tidy to me. There were quite a few bins dotted about, making it easy for customers to bin the cups or cocktail sticks their free samples were served in.

The aisles were really wide, too, making them easy to walk around with big shopping carts.

Like at German discount retailers Aldi and Lidl, Costco displayed a lot of the products straight in the boxes they were delivered in. This allows the warehouse chain to save money on labor hours.

Everything in the food court was ridiculously cheap.

I paid £1.99 (about $2.40) for a massive slice of five-cheese pizza, which was very greasy but certainly filled me up. There were three flavors to choose from, and for £9.99 (just over $12) you could buy a whole 18-inch pizza. I also got unlimited Pepsico soda refills for £1.19 ($1.45).

Like in the US, Costco also sold a hot dog and soda bundle for just £1.50 ($1.82).

I'd expected the food court to be cheap, but not quite this cheap. Despite Costco hiking up some of the UK food-court prices since two Insider reporters reviewed the offerings last year, the prices were still incredibly low.

Though the dining area was nothing fancy, the tables seemed clean and there was a vending machine selling bottles of water for around 30 cents as well as free ketchup and mayo.

I knew that Costco in the US offered a ton of extra services to its customers, but I didn't know that the UK business did, too.

It had a tire center selling tires and offering puncture repair services. A large leaflet stand near the door as you exited the store offered information on "Costco services," which included vacations, air-conditioning installation, and Hertz rental-van hire. Signs in the deli offered click-and-collect entertaining platters, too.

You could even get your eyes tested and buy glasses and contact lenses, which goes for all of Costco's stores in the UK. Some UK Costco stores have hearing-aid centers and gas stations, too.