Customers have been putting Costco on blast recently. Allegations include that the company sold moldy dates, its water smells like a wet dog, and most recently, one TikToker claims she received an undecorated, plain white sheet cake after Costco failed to complete her son’s custom-order birthday cake.
Katelynn Ross (@Katelanterman) said in a now-viral video with over 796,000 views as of Monday that because all the cake decorators had already clocked out by the time she arrived, Costco was unable to give her a full explanation for the blank birthday cake.
However, Ross hypothesized that her cake decoration request, which aimed to be a simple recreation of the street sign from the famous educational children’s show Sesame Street, was a potential licensing hazard.
Katelynn also claimed she asked the bakers to pipe “Happy Birthday Teddy,” and some numbers and letters, and place a green top border and a bottom blue border. These details never materialized, Katelynn said.
“What confuses me the most is why they wouldn’t do the bare minimum of at least ‘Happy Birthday Teddy’ and the border colors,” Katelynn wondered. “Like they just left it blank white instead.”
A Costco manager offered Katelynn $5 off for the inconvenience, she said. She also received some decoration supplies so she could customize the cake herself at home. In the end, Katelynn used her skills to transform the cake to match her initial vision.
“I’ve done cake stuff in the past before this,” Katelynn said after criticizing her handwriting on the cake. “So this was the best I could do.”
Yet Katelynn’s viewers poured in with support.
“The ‘best’ you could do looks really great. Good job mama,” one person assured Katelynn. “Now you have a memory and a story to go with his bday.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to Costco via a media request form and Katelynn via Instagram direct message.
@katelanterman #Costcofail Without explanation, Costco didnt decorate my son’s birthday cake so I had to do it at 9pm the night before his party. #nailedit BUT SERIOUSLY, you thought leaving it blank was a good idea??? Do the best you can offer and thats my problem after, but them leaving it blank was a horribly petty plan. I normally LOVE Costco, we still spent bought all of our party food there tonight because that was my plan and I didnt need the added stress of changing plans over this. I’ll still shop there, but i will NEVER order a custom cake again #cakefail ♬ original sound – Katelynn Ross
“I normally LOVE Costco. We still bought all of our party food there tonight because that was my plan and I didn’t need the added stress of changing plans over this,” Katelynn added in the video caption. “I’ll still shop there, but I will NEVER order a custom cake again.”
In the comments section, a debate erupted over Costco’s protocol for custom cakes. According to the Costco menu website, customers can choose what bakers write on cakes and also select from 11 different image designs.
One user pointed out this limitation.
“Costco doesn’t do custom orders. You have to pick from the design they offer.” the viewer wrote.
However, many people replied and claimed they had received specially-made cakes from Costco before.
“I’ve gotten so many custom orders from Costco. They definitely do it,” one user contended.
“Ours told us they don’t offer that when we tried to get a princess cake for my daughter,” another wrote. “It must be a store to store thing.”
Costco has recently become the center of jokes after one customer requested Costco to trim their cake’s edges in red frosting. The customer added a drawing of a red 3D rectangle to help illustrate his request, and Costco bakers mistakenly recreated the image of that box on top of the cake.
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