Costco Comique: A Ballet in Five Episodes

Costco Comique: A Ballet in Five Episodes
The author, hammering away, trying to stay relevant.

Prologue

What follows is not a factual report, although it is grounded in reality. It is a dramatization, a ballet of sorts, loosely inspired by a real-life shopping excursion. Think of it as a comic opera staged on a warehouse floor, choreographed with squeaky-wheeled carts and punctuated by price-check arias.


Introduction

“He who is outside his door has the hardest part of his journey behind him”
—Dutch Proverb

Life in a large urban area in the 21st century is never lacking in interesting activity. This is especially true if one ventures forth from the relative safety of the home, where being siloed and insulated from the world deadens the senses and clouds perceptions. But once the unsuspecting traveler exits and engages the rest of humanity with all its varied and often startling characteristics, the senses reawaken, like taste buds jumping back to life when a surprising entré appears at your favorite restaurant.

All of these episodes happened to me this Saturday just passed, as I ventured forth, an intrepid captain of my still functional 2006 Chevy Uplander, bound for Costco Lincoln Park, and determined that I would not fail in my mission of replenishing the larder with wholesome vittles and life-sustaining nutrition.

Episode The First: Parking Jousting—Medieval Sport Exemplified by Knights of Automobile Dressage

Parking at Costco Lincoln Park on a Saturday is a serious challenge. This is partly because so many people shop on Saturday, but currently because of significant constructions projects surrounding the existing lots, that severely truncate the possibilities, even the most remote ones. Combine this with the insistence of many customers that their parking spot should be as close to the front entrance as possible, that the aisles of Costco's parking lot are not designated one-way, thereby permitting or even encouraging confrontations, and you have the making of a perfect storm for parking lot Bingo with perhaps an occasional bout of road rage.

Parking Lot Jousting.png

I had deliberately begun my search about half way from the spots closest to the entrance to the most remote areas of the parking, hoping to avoid all of the unpleasantness that accompanies those prized "close-up" spots. I was about to enter a promising aisle, when I noticed two other motorists had already staked out a position in the middle. The two were facing opposite directions and were both waiting in anticipation of a single third motorist who was just about to vacate a parking spot.

In past confrontations as I have described, especially when I'm the third motorist actually leaving, I have noticed that it is the departing motorist that determines the winner in the parking space lottery. As you back out, then turn to leave, you must necessarily block one of the contenders for the now open spot, giving the remaining contender a "free kick" into the prized goal. This always seems to disappoint the losing motorist who frequently congratulates the winner with a quick middle-finger salute, and moves on.

Having no dog in this particular contest, I elected to move on to the next aisle, leaving the contestants leaning into their windshields, their white knuckled hands clutching the steering wheel, in rapt anticipation of which direction the departing vehicle would choose.

Within thirty seconds I chanced upon a lovely vacant spot, with no other contender visible, and easily glided in, stopped the engine, and began my one-block walk to the front entrance.

Episode The Second: Amusement Park Bumper Cars—An Innovative and Modern Competition Enabled by Humble Shopping Carts

Costco seems to have literally thousands of shopping carts—all over the parking lot, clustered in huge rows at the main entrance, and even scattered a bit throughout the warehouse. They are all large, since nothing is for sale at Costco that is not over-sized or packed with multiple product units in each sale unit. For the really large items, like multiple purchases of cases of water, or flat screen TVs that effectively cover entire walls of your living room, and Sherman Tanks, you can use one of the flat-bed trucks that while limited in number are generally easy to find and claim as your own for the duration of your shopping.

Shopping Cart Bumper Car

Unlike automobiles, there are no examinations or licensing required to operate a Costco shopping cart of any size or type, although there probably should be. This includes the little electric carts available for handicapped individuals or perhaps just lazy individuals claiming to be handicapped. Often, it's difficult to tell.

Discourteous, distracted or sometimes plain pathological cart operators can often be seen exhibiting thoughtless, discourteous or even dangerout behavior. Some examples include:

  • The NASCAR Driver Costco stores are generally laid out with a rectangular grid that features several main aisles, wide and capacious, that are cross connected by transverse aisles that are somewhat narrower. This results in so-called T-intersections in abundance. To further complicate things, Costco often stacks product displays six or seven feet high. All of this combines to result in "blind" intersections—intersection where you can't see oncoming traffic until you are actually in the intersection.

    Since nearly all customers push their cart ahead of themselves, this means that the cart enters the intersection well before you can even see what might be approaching from a conflicting movement. The result, if you're "speeding," is collision.

    While this is generally not damaging and certainly not fatal, it is annoying. Further, if one or both of the carts contains a child there is a somewhat remote possibility that the child rider might be injured in a minor way, especially little hands that tend to grasp things in every unsafe manner conceivable.

  • The Muncher or sometimes called The Snacker Product samples are a way of life in a Costco store. You can literally eat your way around the store sampling a variety of snacks, hors d'oveures, prepared entrés or deserts. This is not to mention that can also probably sample a variety of other products such as beauty or health products.

    These sample stations are typically set up using portable desks and displays with a friendly ambassador of the product's manufacturer present to encourage you to gorge and pronounce whatever the product is to be the "best you've ever tasted/used/etc."

    All of this is fine, except when a group of munchers all converge on the same sample station, abandon their shopping carts, and begin the ordeal of sampling, often requiring several portions to adequately judge the value of the product being offered.

    New York City has largely addressed this same problem on city streets by painting large diagonal lines in the intersection with large signs saying "Don't Block the Box" and for those that do, a hefty fine may be assessed. Costco needs to adopt that solution.

  • The Rambler This is often a characteristic of older or mobility challenged customers. They know that the product they want to purchase is down a certain aisle, but that's all they want in that aisle and feel that it is too much work to push their shopping cart half-way down the aisle to pick one bag of Edamame and then walk all the way back out.

    So they leave their cart at the mouth of the aisle while they walk to the product and return. This might work as expected except frequently they walk past other products reminding our rambling senior that they also wanted that second item they had forgotten to put on their list, so they stop to take a bag of Organic Strawberries.

    This might be repeated several times, making the entire exercise not only more effort for the Rambler than it would have been to simply push the cart down the aisle, but also a great inconvenience to others who must now navigate the unexpected barricade guarding the entrance to the aisle.

    Abandoned carts should immediately be impounded and removed by the Costco Police.

  • The Well-Connected Some people apparently arrive at Costco without really knowing why they've come. Their spouse has told them to do some shopping, but hasn't given very explicit instructions on what's needed; neither does the shopping spouse have the experience or expertise to make intelligent and informed decisions in the absence of the other half of the team.

    The solution is, of course, the cell phone. You can spot these people holding their phone to one ear, diligently reading a label aloud to whoever is on the other end of the phone. Frequently, they replace the product in question to move on to a similar product and repeat the same ritual until a decision has been agreed upon.

    This might be nothing more than an amusing vignette of ignorance and incompetence, except it is also the source of a great deal of inconvenience for other shoppers, who do know what they want, but who are being blocked as The Well-Connected gabs on the phone.

    This is not unlike people at your gym who park themselves on the leg extension machine interminably because it is a comfortable place to read email.

Episode The Third: The Supplement Aisle—A Sport for Those With a Keen Eye and Flexible Body

Imagine you believe you're not getting enough Vitamin C in your diet. As a good consumer, the logical way to remedy this is to purchase and regularly consume a Vitamin C supplement. The other option is to modify your diet to include more sources of Vitamin C. But the supplement is the easy route, so you trudge on over to the supplement aisle on your next trip to Costco-land.

You discover that there are many options for Vitamin C. The Costco website provides easily eight or more ways, not all of which might be available in the warehouse:

  • Kirkland Signature Vitamin C
  • Nature Made Extra Strength Vitamin C
  • Kirkland Signature Chewable Vitamin C
  • Kirkland Signature Vitamin C 250 mg Adult Gummies
  • Nature Made Zero Sugar Vitamin C
  • Nature Made Extra Strength Vitamin C
  • Nature's Lab Vitamin C with Quercetin & Citrus Bioflavonoids Vegetarian Capsules
  • trunature Respiratory Support Support
  • Emergen-C Vitamin-C Immune Support Variety Pack Drink Mix
  • ...and more, but you get the idea

If cosmetics are your target product, you don't lack for options:

  • StriVectin Super-C Moisturizer
  • StriVectin Super-C Night Cream
  • StriVectin Super-C Retinol Serum
  • Drunk Elephant C-Firma Fresh Day Serum (I'm not making up the brand name, here.)
  • Drunk Elephant C-Tango Multivitamin Eye Cream
  • ...of course, others as well

And this is only exploring Vitamin-C. There are other vitamins, B, D, E, Multi Vitamins for you, women only, maybe your dog, your kids, prenatal, mature multi, men over 50+ and women over 50.

Are you in to herbal supplements? No problem! Beet Chews, Ashwaganda, Ginko, Tumeric, Milk Thistle, AstaXanthin, Apple Cider Vinegar, Ginseng and something called Prostate Plus Health are all there to serve your every real or imagined ailment or defect.

But let's keep this simple, and imagine you just want plain old Vitamin-C gel tabs. It helps if you have a specific target, and yet the aisle itself is intimidating; it's long, usually a full aisle in length.

Unlike most Costco displays, that have a full pallete of something like noodles or 50 pound bags of par-boiled rice, the supplements aisle is the opposite, having many small displays of a case or two of the product, stacked one on top of the other in layer after layer of labels to scan, with no apparent ordering or organization, before you locate your plain old Vitamin-C.

Supplement Roulette

I have personally had to walk the aisle as many as three times before locating the product I was seeking. But I have observed even greater difficulties in the form of somebody down on their knees, desperately searching the bottom most cartons of the stack, and reaching far back inside to retireve what may be the last item in stock of their favorite laxative or sleep aid.

Only the relatively fit, flexible and strong can successfully execute this maneuver. Many who read this will recognize how difficult it can be for a senior to get back to his or her feet from a kneeling position. Getting down there is the easy part. Fear of being locked in the warehouse overnight because you can't rise up and walk out like a dignified person may prevent you from executing the "kneeling supplement search and grab maneuver".

Episode The Fourth: To Hear or Not to Hear—When the Benefit of Modern Audio Technology Is Exceeded by Prohibitive Costs

I happen to have degenerative hearing loss, and hence wear hearing aids, religiously, every day, every where, except in the shower or when I go to bed. I also like to make and edit videos where it turns out, some of the hardest activity is managing the sound. My hearing aids are or were, state-of-the-art with a BlueTooth connection to my cell phone. The cell phone app allows me to control the operation of the hearing aids without having to memorize those complicated button presses on the hearing aids themselves. Functions like volume, filtering, equalization and so forth are controllable from the cell phone so long as you keep your hearing aids connected via BlueTooth.

But the app also facilitates direct audio streaming. That means that phone conversations, as well as audio from phone apps like Youtube, or Google Maps is also audible directly through my hearing aids. Sounds are not audible through the cell phone speaker and hence, a person sitting next to me as I navigate with Google Maps does not hear the instructions the Map Lady is barking in my ears at appropriate moments. This can make your passenger uneasy, until you explain the magic behind your seemingly clairvoyant ability to anticipate lane changes and turns accurately.

But editing audio and video at my PC is another matter. Using something like Audacity, a widely used open-source audio editing program, the sound I'm working on is played through my PC, into my PC speakers, and then picked up by the microphones of my hearing aids and finally passed to my ears. This introduces an extra level of degradation to the sound signal, as the sound from the speakers passes through the air and into the hearing aid microphones; it is literally transformed two extra times. Further, it tends to introduce ambient background noise into what I hear, making it difficult to judge the quality of the recording and how I might process it to improve the quality.

The solution, of course, would be to pair my hearing aids with my PC Bluetooth and broadcast the audio directly to my hearing aids, bypassing the extra steps of speakers to hearing aid microphones. Simple, elegant.

Not so fast! Hearing Aid manufacturers use a proprietary BlueTooth protocol that is not published. You just can't pair hearing aids to a normal BlueTooth connection point on your PC. You need to have a driver that knows how to talk to your hearing aids using this secret protocol. It's kind of like the Navajo speakers that were used to confuse Japanese intelligence in WW II military communications.

The thoughtful manufacturers do provide a solution, however. My hearing aids are rebranded Resound hearing aids and Resound makes a little device calls TV Streamer 2, that you plug in to any 3.5 mm sound output jack. For the technically inclined this is probably what's called a TRRS jack (Tip, Ring, Ring, Sleeve to describe its physical characteristics.) It converts the analog output from the source to that secret BlueTooth protocol and you can then pair your hearing aids to the TV Streamer 2 for glorious sound.

So I stopped by Costco's Hearing Aid Department and inquired about availability of this miracle device and its cost. I discovered it must be ordered since they don't stock it. And it costs $249.00. [Choke!]

$249 Audio Converter

I'm afraid I uttered a relatively rude four letter expletive starting with F.

After I calmed down, I told the, audiologist, now somewhat taken aback, that I would think it over. All the while thinking to myself, "On my grave will I give you $250.00 for an audio converter that only my hearing aids can understand."

My current plan is to continue using my "over-the-ear" headphones connected directly to my PC. The extra large, padded ear-pieces surround both my ears and cover the microphones on my hearing aids. This doesn't eliminate the extra analog conversion going on, but it does tend to seal out the ambient noise, so it is an improvement over plain external speakers.

ChatGPT speculates that eventually hearing aids will catch up with technology and PC to hearing aid connections will become routine. Meanwhile, consumers will continue to be gouged by government red tape and vendor profit maximization.

Episode The Fifth: As You Set Out for Home—Hope That You May Find a Parking Spot

I proceeded on to the final hurdle in the Costco steeple-chase—Barbara. Barbara is a tall, attractive African American woman and her job is to count your items and compare it with the total printed on the receipt to make sure "you're not being overcharged" [wink, wink] She has a shapely figure that is enhanced by her nearly always choice of a knit dress that shows off her graceful form. In addition, she chooses her outfits so that they coordinate by a single prominent color; for example, a forest green dress and sweater, or a purple dress and complimentary shoes. The interesting part is that she almost always uses a colored Sharpie to mark your receipt that matches her outfit.

"Hi, Barbara. How are you today?" as I hand her my receipt.

"Fine, thanks. How are you?" simultaneously along with scribbling a matching colored line on my receipt.

Then on to my car at the distant permieter of the lot where I load my purchases into the bus pans I keep in the rear of the car for that purpose. As I'm loading, another motorist spots me about to leave, and begins to lurk in a position to seize the vacant spot as soon as I depart. But in a surprise feint, I look around, and discover that there is no nearby place to safely leave the empty cart—not even a planter island where it might be safely docked with the front wheels hooked up over the curb.

In the distance I spot a cart corral, and trudge off to leave the cart safely out of traffic. My would-be parker becomes impatient, and leaves, perhaps muttering an oath of contempt for my compulsive attention to safety.

But finally, I leave, and head for home, up Clybourn toward Damen. But Clybourn is jammed at Diversey and Damen, so I drive up the bicycle lane, which is completely empty, to arrive at the intersection just as the light turns green, thereby passing about 20 cars, all waiting to make a left turn. For the bicycle purists reading this, rest easy. That bike lane is a shared lane, not exclusive territory. And I've never seen a cyclist use it anyway.

At home, parking is another issue, especially on weekends. In the worst case, there are no nearby places at all, and I have to unload my purchases in the alley and then search for a parking place, often finding that the only place available is three blocks away.

But not today, the Parking Gods were smiling on my efforts, and not only did I find my preferred spot, directly in front of my apartment building entrance, open and waiting, but even more miraculous, there were three open spots behind it making a total of four contiguous open parking spaces—a nearly unheard of occurrence on my street.

I swooped in, gracefully landing my vehicle for convenient unloading. As I was at the open hatch-back removing my purchases, a neighbor pulled in to the same open spaces, now three in number, behind me. I got a parking space I deeply consider my own literally seconds before it would have been invaded and occupied by a foreign adversary. It is a remarkably smug and satisfying experience to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat that are that imminent. Schadenfreude takes on a whole new significance!

After that, unloading and carrying the swag into my apartment was the easy part.

Bringing Home the Swag

Postlude: Savoring and Stashing the Spoils of Your Engagement—And Return to the Cocoon

The final step in all this process involves stashing things into my kitchen. This mostly involves careful arrangement of the refrigerator contents. I've been doing this for years, and so have an almost instinctive feeling for how much will fit into the limited contents of my fridge. Before leaving for Costco, I typically open the fridge and freezer, and make a mental note of what I have, so that I don't purchase so much that I have no place to put it.

Everything fit as planned, frozen in the freezer, refrigerated in the bottom section, produce rearranged to accomodate new items, and onions taken to the basement. (I store onions in a mesh bag hanging in my storage space in the basement, where it remains cool all summer.)

And as Dylan Thomas, although without the snow,

I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.


Images: Created in collaboration with ChatGPT based on author-provided descriptions.
Hat Tips:
– To Brian Hutzell, whose expressive Bitmoji flair helped inspire this exploration of AI-generated illustration.
– To Michael Riley, fellow Toastmaster and passionate storyteller, whose dedication to the craft continues to inspire.
Milan Vydareny

Milan Vydareny

Chicago, Illinois