Costco: a Reflection

I always get really amped about going to Costco.

It's kinda fun. You get to show your ID to the guy at the front of the store, like you're going into a sexy nightclub or you work for a company that has a website. Then you get a to push around a giant oversized cart. It makes you feel like a little kid playing with a shopping cart at the grocery store, and you get very tempted to get a running start and ride it. But you really can't get away with that, since there's people everywhere (except in that one aisle where they sell things you'll never buy, like catapults and artificial rice substitute. Yes, they are in the same aisle).

Then you fill your cart with the groceries you'd usually buy at the grocery store, except you buy three times as many. I almost bought twenty pounds of potatoes, but then I remembered I wasn't a serf.

You can also buy CD's and DVD's, but the prices are surprisingly high. In fact, most of the time, Costco prices are among the highest anywhere for media.

There's no punchline to that. Costco's DVD prices are terrible.

And the food court! You can buy delicacies such as a crust filled with parts of a chicken. And I think they sell 2 or 3 other things too.

The best part is the checkout, because you get to see what other people bought and make assumptions about them based on their purchases. For example, the man in front of me was buying a case of Tecate, a box of 1000 latex gloves, and a 3 gallon tub of mayonnaise. He was obviously on his way to either the best party of his life, or the worst.

Then again, I was buying vodka and pens. What does that say about me? Probably that I'm a writer with a substance abuse problem, or as they call me in the industry, a "writer."

So in a way, Costco is a fun place to visit a few times a year, like Disneyland. But it's also confusing, money-draining, and there are lots of fat people standing in lines, like Disneyland. But the good news is, you leave without a sunburn.