"I just came here for chicken” said Patricia on a particularly empty Tuesday night in Costco. It was near closing time, and I had ventured once again to the glorious wholesale warehouse to continue my inquiry into its meaning.
“Have you had any interesting or memorable experiences in Costco?” I asked Patricia.
“You mean like some stranger coming up to me randomly to ask questions about Costco?”
“Sure.”
“No. This would be a first.”
As Patricia made clear, Costco is not something people usually try to understand. It doesn’t even strike people as something that’s worth understanding. Even so, Costco has played a quiet and strangely omnipresent role in my life, so I need to make sense of it. Growing up, trips to Costco became a monthly event when one opened an hour and a half from my hometown. Costco was so much more affordable than the local grocery stores that the gas costs and the mandatory membership fee (it’s at least $60 per year) seemed justified.
Weirdly enough, Costco became a space in which I could escape. Somehow, Costco’s therapeutic powers never failed to work their magic on my existential insecurities. I remember being in middle school, waiting for my first crush to text me back, nervously checking my small flip phone as my parents debated what type of cheese would be most popular with our extended family over the holidays.
As a college freshman, I strolled the aisles aimlessly, usually hungover, finding solace from unfulfilling relationships in the vast expanse of bulk products. I would pause and see my puffy face reflected in the polished gray floor. As I grazed on samples, I marveled at the apparently infinite quantity and variety of products. Costco, after all, is the only place on the planet where you can buy both a 9-foot fishing pontoon boat and an extra-large bag of crème brûlée flavored almonds. You can sip green juice samples from the Vitamix guy, and as you wonder whether a two-person electrical sauna would fit in your dorm room, you realize what a difference the 240-mph blender blade can make in the flavor and texture of your smoothies.
I found solace between the towering warehouse shelves, in the maze of shoppers who struggled with overflowing shopping carts and neither knew nor cared who I was. I muffled headaches with dollar-fifty pizza slices, and I calmed a fear of the future by letting the products on the shelves inspire thoughts on ways my life could improve.
We Costco shoppers go to Costco not necessarily to acquire products we need, or even products we know we want. We go so that Costco can tell us what our needs should be. We go for subconscious advice. This advice, although subtle, informs us of the best ways to acquire what Costco shoppers call “value.”
When I asked Patricia With The Chicken what the greatest part of Costco is, her meandering response ended with, “value in everything, really.” This feeling of value that Costco exudes, at its core, is the sense that we’re getting more than we’re giving up. The feeling depends on knowing that we’re getting a lot while paying a little, and that we’re getting the highest quality stuff at the lowest price.
Whether or not the calculation is correct—whether or not you’re actually getting more for less—is actually almost irrelevant. It doesn’t matter that, despite your best intentions, you won’t finish the 2-by-3 foot bag of spinach before it goes bad. The fact that you’re at Costco means you’re already economical; it means you waste your money efficiently. What matters in Costco is not actually the value of the products. What matters is the feeling of value that shopping there provides.
Costco’s mandatory membership distinguishes it from other stores. Forcing customers to pay for a membership before they can shop might seem like a bad business model, but the membership works magic. Because shoppers have already made a sacrifice by paying the membership fee, every purchase at Costco makes the membership more and more “worth it.” (The membership isn’t worth it if you only buy a couple things from Costco every month, so you better buy a ton of stuff to make sure you get your money’s worth.)
What we forget is that if you’re buying stuff you don’t need in order to make your membership worth it, then you’re not really getting more out of your membership. But regardless, the more you buy, the less significant the fee you’ve already paid seems. The manifestation of getting a good deal is to acquire more, so at Costco, a loss in money feels like a gain in value.
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The Costco Member, myself included, constructs their identity around their purchases. In Costco, buying a lot is viewed not as excessive, but as smart and efficient. All the excess becomes pragmatic because you are, as the thinking goes, getting value. It eases the tension between our desire to accumulate stuff and our reservations about gluttony. Coming for some bagels and leaving with a paddleboard is not evidence of a tendency to succumb to temptation, but simply a #costcoproblem.
The experience of being a Costco consumer seems like an individual activity, but is actually positioned within a kind of community. The community is united by the feeling of getting the best deal—that is, getting the best value. Just by being a Costco member, you’re already ahead of most other people—namely, everyone who’s not shopping at Costco. But the game also continues within Costco. Who is going to make the best purchase? Or find the thing that’s simply too cheap not to buy? The whole thing is much more like a recreational activity than a chore. What started as a means to buy what we need for other activities has become an activity in itself.
Take, for instance, a passing experience I had with a lady who sported a pixie cut, a pink headband, pink pants, pink lipstick, and sunglasses (perhaps to combat the strong fluorescent lighting). She had a motorized shopping cart, and her single crutch lay within her bin on top of her produce. We approached the sample stand together and she asked for the blueberry Go-Gurt. When the man behind her also chose the blueberry Go-Gurt, she raised the Go-Gurt into the air like she was making a toast and said, “Great minds think alike!” He reciprocated with the same motion, giving a slight nod as he raised his Go-Gurt in solidarity, as if to say, “Cheers!”
In Costco, we feel like a part of something, part of a great game that is both enthralling and sickening. As I thought more about it, I began to wonder whether this value calculation game might be applied outside the confines of Costco. I’ve become convinced that this desire to get value is so deep in our psyche that I chose a college and might choose a life partner according to the same calculation: will I get out more than I put in?
You apply to college not knowing exactly how much it’ll give you; you send a flirty text hoping, but not knowing, that it will lead to something more. And because we don’t know how much we’ll gain, or whether we’ll gain at all, we minimize how much we sacrifice and risk. Usually, we’re thinking, “I shouldn’t give up too much, just in case this doesn’t pan out.” But unlike the rest of the world, once you’ve made your sacrifice by getting a Costco membership, you can make it pan out simply by buying more. Maybe this explains why Costco is so therapeutic. It’s the one place where we have control over the payoff.
Walking through the furniture aisle, I overheard a woman, one half of a short and plump couple in all gray, say to her partner, “I can’t wait till we have a house so we can buy all this stuff!” They were shuffling slowly, holding hands, and melting into each other’s grayness.
Their way of being made me sad, not because of the gray, but because she seemed more excited about future consumption than she did about actually using the things they were planning on consuming. She was excited to have a house so that they could buy more stuff at Costco.
Knowing you’re gaining at Costco only feels liberating because we think of our whole lives in terms of gain and loss. Maybe if we weren’t always so worried about whether or not something is going to pay off, Costco wouldn’t be the therapeutic recreational activity that it is. Maybe those samples wouldn’t taste so good.
It’s sort of nauseating to think that buying unnecessary things is a respite from the usual anxiety of gain and loss. How dark and burdensome is my life, really, if going to Costco feels freeing?
As I check out, I look to my fellow members and wonder, will I grow up to be one half of the gray couple shopping for furniture, part of the family debating diaper brands while their child cries, or the balding man wandering around in his pajamas at closing time with 24 donuts tucked under his arm? It’s not that I don’t want to be like them. They’re just people living lives of a variety as infinite as the products they consume. And most of them are seemingly pleasant lives, too. Even if they’re not content with their lives, at least they seem content here. They are, in the end, like me: little value calculators, engulfed in the shiny bright products, trying to decide which one will make their experience at Costco most joyous.
The Tuesday night I met Patricia, I sat in the food court after finishing dinner, listening to the constant beeping of checkout lanes and the rattling of shopping carts as people left the store. It was closing time, and the emptiness of the aisles made the shelves seem even taller than normal. Amidst the awe of, “There is all this,” I find myself wondering, “Is this all there is?”