My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Industrial Strength Shopping

When I first met my husband, I did not know about price clubs. I simply thought I was dating a man for whom it was very important never to run out of things. Ed owned entire shrink-wrapped bricks of canned tuna, though by all outward appearances he was not a man passionate about tuna fish. For as long as I’d known him, there was a 500-count box of latex gloves in the closet. He had eight orange plastic-handled pairs of scissors and six glue sticks. I began to think he had run a kindergarten out of his home and that when it was closed down—no doubt owing to parental discomfort over the rubber gloves—he was left with the classroom and lunch supplies.

Then one bold shining day, Ed took me by the hand and brought me to Costco. Initially I was aghast. Who were these poor people who could use up to 112 packets of Alka- Seltzer or a 2-pack of jumbo-sized bottles of Immodium in a single lifetime? Then we hit the food aisles, and I understood who they were. They were the people eating 18-packs of Vienna sausages and 6-pound cans of garbanzo beans in a single lifetime. I began to see the place as a vast conspiracy of bigness, one colossal, insane purchase leading to another. Need a bigger refrigerator for your 30-pound salmon? Aisle 11. Need a 10-pound box of Arm & Hammer to freshen up that big refrigerator? Aisle 5. If you’re buying 72 frankfurters, better get the gallon tub of French’s.

“Two seventy-nine,” said Ed, of the French’s, looking rapt. “You can’t afford not to buy this mustard.” It’s a sickness, and my husband is well beyond help.

Next to the entrancing mustard was a white plastic bucket of mayonnaise, looking like it had taken a wrong turn on the way to The Home Depot. The soy sauce came in a metal one-gallon can of the sort used to transport gas to your car when you’ve been running on empty, as you tend to do when your bank account has been drained dry by army-sized requisitions of cling peaches and Dimetapp. What happened to bottles you can actually fit into your kitchen? Is it worth saving $1.71 if it means spooning condiments from industrial vats into more manageably sized bottles, thereby soiling countless shirts with spots that will not come out even with 406 applications of SHOUT?

Then there’s the fact that Ed is one of those guys who likes to walk down all the aisles when they shop. At a place as vast as Costco, you don’t enter into this lightly. You need good arch support and a map, possibly a donkey and canteen. To get out in under an hour, you’ll need to break into a jog. Given you are about to buy snack foods totaling 350,000,000 calories, jogging’s probably a good idea, but still and all…

“Perfect,” said Ed when I pointed out how long it would take. He’d dropped off film at the Costco one-hour developers. “Go try on some glasses at Costco Optical,” he said when I complained. “Go watch the TVs. Sample a sausage.” Gradually, I succumbed. Now we pretty much live at Costco. It’s working out nicely, as our home is a warehouse for paper towels and mustard and giant flats of beverages.

My fondness for the place continued to blossom until one day the kindly man at Hector’s, my neighborhood office supply store, complained about all the business he was losing to places like Costco and OfficeMax. Some weeks later, while stocking up on office supplies at Costco, I felt a twinge of guilt. It was a small twinge, and somewhat hard to detect what with the giddiness of finding printer cartridges for half the price I was paying at Hector’s, but I was torn.

Then I saw something horrifying. I nudged Ed and pointed to a man cutting up sample-sized bites of string cheese with a pair of scissors. Something about him looked familiar, though perhaps it was just the orange-handled scissors and the latex gloves. “Is that Hector?” I whispered to Ed. I wondered aloud whether all the people who owned the grocery stores and office supply shops driven out of business were now standing around in hairnets, working at Costco. Ed nodded thoughtfully and put a Mega-Bag of Fun-Sized candy bars in the cart, on the grounds that Halloween was just around the corner. (It was March.)

That night, sensing rebellion, Ed sat down with one of our three identical calculators (for those times when three family members need to work out complex math problems simultaneously) and totted up our annual savings due to Costco. On beer alone, it was over $50. I tried to argue that you had to subtract the money spent on food items sitting uneaten for over two years, such as the two-foot-by-one-foot carton of chicken teriyaki strips currently serving as a sort of display platform for ice cubes and Popsicles in our freezer. Ed countered that keeping a large, frozen object in the freezer made it more efficient and cut down on electric bills. There was no fighting it. Costco rules the universe (and is slightly bigger).