rice Club, now called CostCo, is a uniquely American (I suspect) shopping experience. It's great, in that you can find tremendous values on most every common consumer product. The downside is that they only have the top brands and nothing unique or unusual, and that you have to buy everything in 10 pound packages.

I shop there regularly, getting great deals on stuff I want, while trying to resist the temptation to buy a 4-box blister pack of some new type of cereal that looks vaguely appetizing. Despite my willing patronage, I have a love/hate relationship with the store and especially with the type of people who shop there, and how they behave during the shopping process/ordeal.

This page collects the various daily updates in which Price Club and other mega club store shopping experiences are detailed.  Expect my opinions to swing wildly from visit to visit.

More recent additions are added on top.

Tuesday afternoon I was in CostCo, ne Price Club, and as usual I found myself completely disgusted by my fellow humans.  Fellow Americans. CostCo is a great place to visit if you want to see what's best and worst about America under one high, undecorated roof.  I'm sure this applies just as well to places I've not been, such as Sam's Club and various other "Club stores," as they are called.

What's best are the low prices and obscene glut of merchandise. You can buy virtually anything, so long as you want a lot of it.  Cartons of cigarettes, 24 packs of candy bars, cases of soda, 20 lbs bags of potatoes, 5 pound bags of grapes, 12 packs of baked croissants or muffins or four loaves of bread, or 36 tortillas or 12 cans of corn or 3 lbs bags of chips, and so on.  They also have every sort of consumer electronic, big screens, computers, printers, digicams, and all you need to go with them; 24 and 36 packs of batteries, 6 and 8 packs of blank tapes.  Movies and DVDs and CDs and books, but only the new best sellers.  No selection of anything even the tiniest bit unusual or unconventional. There are clothes by the ton, but all jeans and t-shirts and socks and underwear and mass-produced cheap leather jackets.  Nothing designer, nothing classy, all very functional and low brow.

If you want quality stuff, or anything by a non-major brand, you are out of luck. Go to a boutique, and be prepared to pay for the luxury. Twelve pounds of three types of rigatoni and and a 6 pack of Ragu?  Got it.  Bag of gourmet tomato and basil noodles with garlic pesto sauce?  Be serious.

This is what's best about America; the colossal glut of products, almost everything you could want, so long as you aren't too discerning, in one place, in huge sizes. Of course you can get anything else you want with about a 10 mile drive to any one of a thousand smaller individual stores, and any regular supermarket will carry hundreds of things that Price Club does not and virtually everything that they do, albeit in smaller sizes.  In America, you can have anything you want, if you can afford it, and most of the time it's quite inexpensive.

What's worst is the bovine state that we, as consumers, have been reduced to by the ease of our lives.

Even in San Diego, California, a state that is, generally speaking, one of the most fit and health conscious in the US, most of the people at Price Club are fat.  Obese, bloated, waddling along with their weekly shopping cart stuffed full of more sugar and sweets than they need to eat in the next five years.  There is this slow motion, listless wandering speed that most people there seem to adopt, and an amazing obliviousness to anything around them.  About every other aisle has some uniformed woman with a mini oven or microwave, and lots of tiny portions of some prepared food.  Bites of beef lasagna, or fish sticks, or ice cream, or chicken enchiladas, or chili, or dill pickles, or breadsticks, or whatever.  Always some product that's for sale, and by giving you a tiny bite they hope to entice you to buy the 8 pound frozen box of it in the display to their left.

The fact that samples are being given out isn't a bad thing.  The fact that almost everyone bellies up to get a thimble full of it, usually leaving their heavily-laden cart to block the entire aisle, is what drives me nuts.  I never take any of the samples, as a matter of pride.  Like I'm some starving animal, reduced to snapping at anything edible that might trip across my path?  That and I don't know what the hell's in it, or if they dropped it or what.

I look down on the tub-o-guts who are so greedily gobbling up 2 or 3 sample cups of whatever glorified dog food they have to offer, and the fact that the people doing it are just so entirely oblivious to the rest of the world drives me nuts. It's like a case study in why there are traffic accidents.  Someone gets distracted and stops in the middle of the road, or goes too slowly while looking to the side, and gets in the way of others or side swipes someone.

"Look, you fat sack of crap.  If you are such a greedy pig that you can't wait to get home to stuff your chipmunk-cheeked face with the free roadkill in a cup, at least pull your goddamned cart to the side of the aisle way.  You are not the only person on earth, and it's entirely possible that the rest of us don't lack for anything else to do, or a sense of urgency to get to doing it, and therefore aren't so eager to stand behind you while you stupidly block the way."

Insert appropriate profanity and exclamation points.

Every time I am at Price Club, I find myself looking around at the weakness and sloth and helplessness, and wondering how long any of these butterballs would survive if they had to run for their lives, or fight for them, god help us all. First of all, they would have no idea that a threat was coming until it was right on top of them, so wrapped up are they in their own garbage-shopping/baby scolding/free sample consuming/cell phone yapping little worlds.  They can't even keep from walking out right in front of other people with their moving carts; what hope would they have with actual attackers?  And even if they did have to fight, could they?  Would they?  I see nothing but sheep and victims.  I would imagine that a talented pick pocket could clear $500 an hour at Price Club, and never have any risk of being caught.  The only difficulty is that all of these guys are so fat that their wallet is stuffed into the back pocket of their jeans like a slice of butter in a biscuit.

The beauty of America is that none of this matters, since odds are that none of them will ever actually need to do anything to defend themselves or fight for their lives.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.