Costco, the biggest warehouse club chain in the country, recently put a cap on how many 24-karat gold bars customers can buy at once. These bars have been one of the club’s hottest items in recent years.

In June 2023, the warehouse store started selling gold bars to its users. At first, each person could only buy two one-ounce gold bars. However, Costco recently made it so that members can only buy one bar of gold per transaction and no more than two bars in a 24-hour period, according to the store’s website.

Customers are now only allowed one one-ounce gold bar instead of the two bars they were used to. This may not seem like a big change from what members were used to, but Business Insider reports that members were able to bring home up to five gold bars from a warehouse in Wisconsin at one point last year, so the change is bigger than some members may think.

The 1-ounce gold bar made in South Africa is now selling for as much as $3,279.99, which is a lot more than the $2,000 price that the bars were going for when Costco first started selling them in 2023. But that price rise makes sense since gold prices have gone up more than 70% in that time and, according to USA Today, hit all-time highs in April.

The last year has seen a huge increase in demand for the gold bars, which may be why Costco decided to change the cap on how many can be bought at once. Bloomberg did a poll last year that showed that in October 2024, gold bars were sold out at about 77% of Costco stores in 46 states.

If we put them on the site, they’re usually gone in a few hours, and each member can only get two,” Costco’s CFO at the time, Richard Galanti, told investors on the company’s earnings call in September 2023 (S&P Global Market Intelligence transcript).

In the beginning of the same year, Wells Fargo Equity Research said that Costco was making as much as $100 million to $200 million a month from selling gold bars alone.

Our research shows that there has been a lot of interest due to COST’s low prices and high level of customer trust,” Wells Fargo equity expert Edward Kelly said in 2024. “The sharp rise in the number of Reddit posts, the speed with which products sell out online, and COST’s strong monthly eComm sales all point to a sharp increase in momentum since the launch.”

The store’s website says that you can buy Costco’s bars in PAMP Suisse Lady Fortuna Veriscan and the Rand Refinery’s South African gold.