There is a legend that Odysseus, star of the Odyssey, mistakenly took his crew into the cave of the Lotus Eaters. It was a trap, and they were tricked into eating fruits which cast upon them a spell of blissful euphoria that made them forget their life and mission outside the cave completely. I have known that cave.
The last time I was in a Costco I was sixteen, fat, and thought an entire store-bought apple pie in whipped cream was an appropriate midday snack. This actually made me the perfect customer for the superstore, which is only one of the reasons I never went back to the Warehouse of Temptation. Until now. For those unfamiliar with Costco, it is the last bastion of American capitalism and the sacred temple of mass consumerism. The size of several airplane hangars, it is a membership-based chain where you go to buy things in wholesale. Versions of it like Hyperstar and Metro have opened in Pakistan, but there is nothing quite like the Mothership.
A trip to Costco starts innocently enough. Perhaps you needed milk. You start by taking a shopping cart that is slightly larger than average and walking to the nice woman who greets people at the entrance. “Good afternoon!” She grins at you. “Card?”
You flash the plastic members’ card that you can buy for a onetime fee of $60 and she smiles even broader, nodding at your mutual acceptance into this Land of Things. The entrance is stunted, so the when you turn the corner you literally lose your breath at the vast, cavernous, truly gargantuan space that unfolds before you for as far as you can see. On either side of the building, boxes and boxes rise up all the way to top of the highest ceilings, towering above you with literally everything that had ever been made. They are so tall that there are electric cranes near each one that lift you to the higher shelves. The middle of the store is bisected by dozens and dozens of aisles: one has chips, the other just chewing gum, on the third could be socks, followed by electric wiring.
But you won’t buy just one pair of socks. Never, here. At Costco the motto is “Go big and go home”. Everything is sold in bulk and that’s what makes it so unbelievably, jaw-droppingly, heart-wrenchingly inexpensive. 32 pairs socks in the small size for $8, 64 socks for $16. $8 for a box of 32 kinds of potato chips; toothpaste in boxes of 24 for $9. It’s so cheap that I found myself standing in front of a box of printer paper saying out loud “I mean, 196 boxes of paper works out to be cheaper in the long run if you really think about it…”
I found myself standing in front of a box of printer paper saying out loud "I mean, 196 boxes of paper works out to be cheaper in the long run if you really think about it…" I don't even own a printer
I don’t even own a printer.
But it’s easy to walk past stuff like clothes, shoes, insect repellant, socks, desks, gardening shears and walk on. The place where it gets real for me is Food, which is set all the way at the back of the store. There are tubs of Guacamole for $9. I don’t mean small-scale plastic tubs you’re used to at supermarkets. I mean things you can put a drain in and call a shower. There were slabs of cheese so large you feel like the mice in Cinderella and cakes so tall you’d swear a stripper was hiding inside. They don’t put dairy in a fridge, but rather in a frozen room the size of a house. Here again economy of scale matters. Although I know for a fact that if I were on a bender I could finish that tub of guacamole in under ten minutes, a regular person without body dysmorphia and an oral fixation might find that much food would be too much. Or they may get sick of it. That’s why mainly families shop at Costco, which means that every so often you have to contend with some snot-nosed white kid throwing a fit in the middle of Aisle 876 because their mother won’t buy them the life-size car made out of Lego that’s on sale for $30.
The only place there aren’t any kids is the liquor section, and this is where Costco truly comes into her own. It’s expectedly vast, but here you can buy a single bottle of something rather than 12, which means that an expensive champagne that I know for a fact costs $180 in New York is sold here for…$20.
Classical visual representation of the American Dream
I’m traveling and have to contend with a bus on the way home, which is the only reason I didn’t buy enough stuff to build my own house out of packets of cheese crackers. Though you could build a house out of things from Costco if you wanted to. They actually sell whole garden sheds ready-made. They also sell cribs, backpacks, pimple cream, college notebooks, formal wear, adult diapers and coffins. You can buy everything from birth to death. They even plan vacations.
Once you’re done shopping you come out for the final battle: the food court. They have (good) pizza for $1 and a hotrod the size of your leg of $1.50. Mineral water was 25 cents.
I’m on my way back to New York now, where a bottle of mineral water costs you $10 and no one says “Welcome” unless they’re trying to violate you. It’s easy there to forget that this superstore is what the American Dream is for most people: a vast, shiny box-scape of things to buy for less than you could ever imagine. It represents the best and worst of this country. But while you’re in there, right in the middle of the fruits and laptops, a part of you can’t help but hold your hand out and ask for another lotus.
