My Costco Quandary

I used to listen to a musical group called Enigma, and on one of their tracks, they had this line spoken over the music: "The path of excess leads to the tower of wisdom." Though at the time this sounded deep and mystical to me, later I realized that the statement really makes no sense and is no more than a piece of New Age fluff. Why? Because, more so than any other nation on earth, we Americans are firmly fitted into the ruts of the path of excess, and it has hardly taught us wisdom. It's not leading us to the tower of wisdom--in fact it doesn't seem to be leading us anywhere at all. Similarly, at times in my life when I just knew I was overdoing it--too much food, too much sex, too much alcohol--I felt so out of control that I thought the only way out was death. And although we do have people in our culture who think death and the tower of wisdom are equivalent, we usually refer to them as psychopaths.

Why all this fuss over a trip to Costco?

I used to think going to Costco was fun. "Let's just go and window-shop," I said to my husband. "They have all their Christmas stuff out--it'll be fun." Despite the fact that this was a dangerous thing for a tightwad to say to her hubby (who tempts her to loosen her habitual spending controls), I wanted to put my inner consumer to the test. For a year I had been playing a mental game with myself. I would think about something I wanted--or thought I wanted--and then imagine going to the store, picking up the item, going to the check-out to pay for it, loading it in the car, driving it home, taking off the wrapping and throwing it away, and finding a place to either use/display or store my new acquisition. Throughout this exercise I would try to calculate how much value this item would bring to our lives, how much money it would cost, whether it would continue costing money and/or deliver additional value, and how much satisfaction I would derive from the purchase. Finally, I would imagine the money being deducted from our checking account, and then I would compare that feeling with how I would feel imagining that same money deposited in our savings account. Not many items passed this test.

But suddenly there we were in Costco. I remembered the words of an old boyfriend who called Costco the "Land O' Plenty." He certainly seemed right. I mean, there were heaps and stacks of things. All the boxes and packages were humungous. Even the cart was so large there was enough room for two children to sit in it, side by side. Some items seemed like a good deal. Dean was fingering a heavy winter jacket. "It's only forty bucks," he said. I thought about the seven or eight other jackets and coats he had at home and drove on. There was an enormous Christmas wreath and "outdoor ornaments" that were bigger than Carl's head. There were fancy wrapped packages of chocolates weighing anywhere from one to five pounds. There were huge bags of biscottis, and giant tins of butter cookies. And there were toys. They all came in oversized boxes, packaged to thrill. There were fancy trikes and art sets and a giant dollhouse, even a "travel system" stroller and highchair that was exactly like you would buy for a new baby, only it was for a doll. There were big canisters of Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs for the nostalgic. I felt like a Dickensian child who had accidentally wandered into Harrod's from the street.

As I struggled to maneuver the huge cart down the aisles without hitting other people, I spotted some scrapbooking supplies and stopped to look. The package had 24 pairs of scissors in it, each designed to put a different sort of edge on a piece of paper. The whole package was $19.99. Suddenly the display didn't seem so benign. Who could possibly use 24 pairs of scrapbooking scissors? Who could possibly want that many? Why would they package up 24 different pairs like that? They were only scissors! The most any reasonable person could want would be maybe three or four. Befuddled, I stopped and pointed this out to Dean. "Suppose you ran a craft workshop, or were a teacher," he said. "Oh," I said. Right next to it was a similarly priced set of 100 marker pens. Suddenly, I felt overwhelmed and tired. "Let's just go to the bakery section," I said. I wanted some of the apple streusel bread that in my imagination had seemed so good. Other than a reasonably-priced baby sleeper for Carl, and some Christmas chocolates, our cart was empty. But when we got to the bread, I saw the price was $4.29. I knew I could get flour for seventeen cents a pound and bake something similar for under a dollar. We passed it by.

I had a list of things I'd been waiting for months to get at Costco because I'd determined they would have the best price, but I just kept driving the cart. I didn't want to put anything in it. "Let's just go," Dean said. We didn't even eat any of the samples. Carl was sucking his thumb, looking sleepy and tired. On the ride home I felt shifty and weird. "There's something wrong with that," I kept saying, but couldn't put my finger on what it was. After clipping grocery store coupons for a year and replacing my eggs with soy flour I had, somewhere along the line, lost my taste for richness. I had come to appreciate the leanness of mixed, powdered milk in my coffee. I had come to the point where I scanned the curbs while driving for interesting-looking piles of junk. I had learned the joy of rooting through the dollar bin at Goodwill and pulling out name-brand clothes. It wasn't so much that Costco was "wrong," or that people are wrong to shop there. It was simply that Costco tells you what the world tells you--that life is easy, comfortable, even luxurious, and that you deserve to have all these things in your life at a price you can "afford"--and I had just gotten to the point where I no longer believed it.