The Warehouse Store

Today, we made our monthly trip to Costco–the giant warehouse store where everything comes in bulk. You can buy tuna in what looks like a 2-pound coffee can and a gallon of mayo to go along with it. Peanut butter comes in jar you can practically take a dive into and you can buy 90 egg rolls in one box! And seriously, who doesn’t need 500 paper plates or 30 rolls of toilet paper at one time?

I need to interject here that I’m not a shopper. As a matter of fact, I would almost rather have my gums scraped than go shopping and that includes any kind of shopping. I don’t like looking for clothes or shoes; I’d rather pass on the grocery store altogether, except we have to eat; and I avoid outlet malls and little cutesy towns that sell country decor, yard ornaments, and all kinds of kitschy wooden stuff. So you’d think that a warehouse store would be the last place I’d want to go into, wouldn’t you?

Well, you’d be wrong. I love Costco…and Sam’s Club. For one thing, they have books–great books at fabulous prices. Where else can you buy a case of toilet paper, a TV, a hot tub, a personalized birthday cake that will serve 40,  a toilet, a giant box of Cheerios, a 4-carat diamond ring, and ten quarts of blueberries all in one trip and still only hit one store? I get my swimsuits at Costco. Speedos for twenty bucks apiece! They appear in the spring and I’m right there to snatch up about five or six suits to last me through summer swims at my neighbor’ s house and the lake and winter swims at the gym.

My sister, PJ, loves Costco too–more than I do, frankly. Heck, she goes every week. She’s there constantly. She gets her mail there. Her kids stay there during the holidays when they visit from out of state. (I’m kidding about the mail and the kids, but she goes a lot!) She used to shop Costco when she lived on the West coast, mainly because she had four growing sons and that was the only place she could buy enough food to keep those boys fed. When she first moved here, we had to remind her that she had an empty nest and no longer needed to buy 12 frozen pizzas, 4 dozen eggs, or 3 gallons of milk every week.

Some people think that warehouse stores contribute to our nation’s obesity problem–food in giant packages encourages people to eat too much. I’d agree with that except that shoving a 500-pound cart of groceries and paper goods around a store the size of a small Midwestern town feels like exercise to me. So it makes logical sense that we’d walk off that giant tub of peanut butter on the trip to buy it, and it’d all come out even. Right? So excuse me, I’m heading to the kitchen to make tuna salad…for fifty!