Costco
First published 3/18/1999

If Y2K hits, I'm going to be alright. I've got lots of food: flats of tomato sauce, huge sacks of rice, 12-packs of mushroom soup.

It's not that I'm purposefully stockpiling. It's just that I went shopping at Costco. Yes, Costco -- the store that turns everybody into a survivalist.

Costco is the kind of place that saves you so much money that you go broke. Sure, everything's a good deal, but you have to buy it in such massive quantities that you spend a fortune. Yes, eventually, at some point in the future, I'll come out ahead -- but I'll have to live to be 104, because that's how long it's going to take me to eat all this soup.

I don't know why, but food always gets cheaper the further away it is from where you live. The corner store is the most expensive; the Costco on the edge of town is the cheapest. There's probably a super-super store in, like, Leduc that's even cheaper. I bet groceries in Antarctica are free. If they ever put a grocery store in space they'll probably pay you to shop there.

This is why explorers like Columbus or Magellan traveled so far from home. They were bargain hunting. Columbus figured if there turned out to be land on the other side of the Pacific, he'd probably be able to get a really good deal on bulk cereal.

Here's how the hierarchy of grocery store savings works:

Costco: furthest away from home, cheapest, food sold in massive quantities. Typical purchases: rice, flats of soup, giant tub of Bazooka Joe bubble gum you bought on impulse.

Superstore: a little closer, a little more expensive. Food sold in quantities you can reasonably expect to use up in your lifetime. Typical purchases: meat, eggs, Kindersurprise.

Safeway: in your neighborhood. Expensive, but you forgot to buy broccoli.

Corner Store: at the end of the block. Very expensive, but Bazooka Joe crushed the eggs and you're not going back to Safeway.

Restaurant: where you eat dinner, because you're way too tired at this point to actually cook your own food.

Perhaps the worst thing about Costco is that, although it saves you money, it kills the child within you. You find yourself in an aisle crammed to the rafters with boxes full of chocolate bars. Twix, Mr. Big, Eat More... whatever you want. And yet you buy nothing. Because that's not responsible. Instead, you move on to the discount socks and underwear, and somewhere inside you a 12-year-old feints in disbelief.

There are, I am sure, many more subtle ironies and bittersweet poignancies related to discount shopping, but sadly I have no more time to write. If I don't eat my hourly can of mushroom soup we'll never make room in the cupboard for those sacks of rice.

Like the column? Buy the book! 100 Years of Subatomic Humor now on sale!