North Star Writers Group

I borrowed a furniture dolly from a neighbor so I could haul my 200-roll convenience pack of toilet paper, my 30-pound family pack of chicken wings, my six-cubic-yard do-it-yourself landfill bag of potting soil, and my 25-gallon you-must-be-an-idiot bucket ‘o hot sauce in from the car.

God, I love Costco!

“Warehouse” shopping clubs have become a way of life for a lot of people. The concept is fairly simple – you build a huge, open building with a high ceiling and a cement floor, fill it with big shelves loaded with institutional-sized packages of pretty much anything a person might possibly want to buy, and let the shoppers fight it out for themselves. You do all your merchandising with a forklift.

And you charge a membership fee. This keeps the riff-raff out. After all, who wants to mix with the sort of people who don’t appreciate the value of buying their mayonnaise or tube socks by the hundredweight?

One of the key features that makes Costco work is the variety of merchandise available. In the old days, our ancestors would have had to go to three different stores to get donuts, dress shirts and car batteries. Can you imagine the inconvenience? At Costco, a single guy planning a big evening with the girlfriend can buy some flowers, a DVD of that movie she’s been wanting to see, a gallon of Captain Morgan, a pack of condoms and an economy-sized box of Alka-Seltzer for the next morning.

Why, the organized smoker can buy cigarettes, health insurance and a coffin, all in one easy shopping trip!

Of course, the best thing about Costco is the food samples. Scattered throughout the store they have ladies in hair nets and plastic gloves cooking steak bits and baby back ribs, dipping ice cream and pouring Mango nectar. Shoppers can, and do, literally graze the store for a free meal.

This is not without its down side. The food frenzies around the sample stations giving away the good stuff can bring store traffic to a standstill. And then there are the distracted drivers, those guilt-driven individuals who push their carts away from the sample stations while they shove pizza-bagel-bits into their mouths, smack their lips and gaze skyward, attempting to give the sample lady the impression that they are deep in the throes of a difficult purchasing decision, then run broadside into the cart that has the modular redwood backyard play set balanced on top of the make-all-the-kids-in-your-neighborhood-diabetic carton of Yoo-hoo.

Now personally, I prefer Costco over its chief rival, whose name rhymes with Schmam’s Blub. At that place, affiliated with a company whose name rhymes with Schmalmart, I find the cracking whips, the jangling manacles and the soul-searing screams of the employees to be kind of distracting.

So here I sit surrounded by my most recent Costco plunder, gazing with warm affection at my brand new 64-pack of nine-volt batteries. You see, I had to replace the battery in the smoke detector last week, the first time I’ve seen one of those little rectangular devils in a couple of years – since the last time I replaced the battery in the smoke detector, in fact.

Just thought I’d better stock up.

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This is Column # MB028. Request permission to publish here.