Church of the Wholly Consumer

Many years ago, I was:
a) Living in the United States
b) Living in the suburbs
c) Living in a house
d) Living with a 3 or 4 (at various time) people who shared groceries
e) Eating a lot of prepackaged, frozen, and generally bad for me food

At that time in my life, it almost made sense to go to Costco. We would make occasional trips there, get large boxes of stuff we didn't realy need, and put it in the huge pantry at home, and all was well.

For the past 10 years, I have been:
a) Living in Canada
b) Living in the downtown of a vibrant city
c) Living in a small apartment
d) Living with one other person, and we very rarely entertain
e) Trying to lose weight and stay healthy, by eating lots of fresh food and staying away from the prepacked stuff which always seem to have too much sugar, fat, salt and random toxins.

So, for some very strange reason, a couple of weeks ago I bought a costco membership. They opened up a store near me (quite the feat, managing to find space for a costco in downtown Vancouver). My company paid 1/2 of the $55 fee, and the deal included $25 gift cards. So my membership was effectivly only a few bucks for the year, and I figured I'd get that much entertainment value out of it.

After a few weeks of looking at my card and thinking "what have I done?", we finally went to the store.

First problem: we need to drive about 10 blocks to the store. For city people, it's a big deal when we need to use the car. We like to walk. We choose to live in the city because we think cars and buring gasoline is something to be avoided. But I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to carry the 5-gallon jar of mayonaise home, so we had to drive. The parking lot was the first hint of the "supersize" experience. Those of you who drive SUVs and have a really hard time getting parked in normal lots would love this place. The parking stalls are at least a foot wider than standard, and there's an extra foot "median" painted between stalls. They had 4 cars where anywhere else there would be at least 5, maybe six cars. We parked the car between a pillar and a wall (normally a challenging feat), and there was meters of clearance all around.

On the way in, there are shopping carts. Just like at Safeway, but the carts are at least 50% bigger.

Inside: a huge, caverous room. Isles were at least 2 meters wide. Everything in excess. I needed some zip-lock sandwich bags. A half year or so ago, I bought a box of 100 bags at Safeway, and it's now empty. At Costco, I could get a package of 4 boxes of 150 bags each. I wouldn't use 600 bags in two years. Likewise, I could get a kilogram of crushed garlic. I did choose the smallest package of peanut butter I could find: 2 kg. We looked at the produce, but everything we saw was in such large units it would have gone bad before we could eat it. Robyn was quite disappointed that we couldn't buy a huge, 5 kg tube of toothpaste (they sell toothpaste in normal-sized tubes, but you have to buy them 4 at a time).

All in all, it was an interesting experience. If I had 5 or 6 people to feed, and a large pantry to keep these boxes of food in, it might make sense to shop there.

At the checkout, the final shock: they don't take normal credit cards. Believe it or not, the only credit card Costco takes is American Express. That's just silly. American Express is well known as the card almost nobody accepts. It's the card you carry if you want to pretend to be willing to pay the bar tab, because you can order rounds of drinks, give your AmEx to the server, have it rejected, and then claim that you tried to pay, but couldn't. Fortunately, I had enough cash in my wallet to pay.

It was fun. I don't think I'll be going back there.