It's A Costco World

When did life start to cost so much? I recently took a look back at my year’s finances and I have one question. Where’s the Mercedes that should be parked in my garage? I swear we are scrapping by on what was my dream salary at age twenty. I wandered into the mall today, with my teenager’s Christmas list in hand and was shocked to find that baseball caps now cost $40. Aren’t those the hats that companies used to give away as a promotion? The hats my dad sported all his life advertised things like John Deere tractors, Craftsman tools, and a short lived Mexican restaurant that I couldn’t pronounce—and they were free. Teens also want belts with buckles made out of seat belts, a steal at $35 unless you have access to a junk yard. It’s like we’re living in an alternate universe where we as parents have to pay top dollar for our kids to have things that we used to get for free when we were young. Of course we wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing freebies back then, but that’s beside the point.


I can’t imagine my grandmother paying $50 a year for the privilege of shopping, but we got conned into it and apparently 80% of the city’s population if a Saturday at Costco is any indication. You need a shuttle bus to take you from remote parking to the door where you get to drive an oversized shopping cart around while being fed mini-wieners and exotic cheese cubes on toothpicks. The average price point of every food item is $10 so you wind up going home with 24 rolls of paper-towels and a jar of pickles the size of a bug-zapper. For half the year my kids have to use the paper towel rolls as pillows because I don’t have any other place to store them. But the crowning glory of the shopping club is the “exclusive items,” those tempting displays that scream, “Limited quantity! Buy now before it’s too late!!!” Do you need another set of celebrity-chef endorsed cookware? Of course not, but it’s a special buy and so you must have it. I trotted home with a tall crystal urn with a spigot that I envisioned filling with fresh lemonade at my next garden party, even though no one in America hosts garden parties. We’re pretty much the cheese-ball, hot dogs for the Superbowl kind of crowd. But when a mountain of deep mahogany caskets graces the aisles of Costco as an “exclusive buy” I’m turning in my card because that would be proof we’ve all gone loony. As if forking over a membership fee for the privilege of shopping in a metal building with concrete floors isn’t crazy enough already. Next thing you know the malls will be housed in storage units—they are a gated community.