This is from May 9, 2010. I happened to read it again today and thought you might enjoy it again…
Yesterday afternoon, I went to Costco for lunch and had a nice feast of Costco dim sum. That's what I call the copious free samples you can get there, wandering from aisle to aisle, taking little noshes from ladies in hairnets. The teriyaki chicken bites were so good, I doubled around for seconds, hoping the hairnet lady wouldn't recognize me and yell, "Hey, one to a customer, sport!" I could eat very well at Costco for free if I could just figure how to get out of that place without spending $300 on a lifetime supply of baking soda.
Then I replenished my car — thirsty from the long shlep to and from Riverside — with Costco gas…and got to thinking. We used to buy gas in this country based, at least in part, on the premise that one brand was better than another. I had the idea, and I'm not sure where I got it, that my old Buick Skylark ran well with Shell or 76, not so well with Chevron or Texaco. To this day, I'll sometimes bypass Chevron for Shell…and I don't even have that car anymore, nor any reason to suspect my current auto cares.
Of course, that preference is only exercised when the two brands are close to the same price. I'm wondering what percentage of Americans take anything else into account except price and maybe which station is easiest to get in and out of. A distant third might be the business practices of the company. I forget which outrage it was — the Valdez spill, maybe — but I stopped buying Exxon a long time ago. I've only purchased Exxon gas once since then. It was a time when I was in a strange and desolate area, the needle was hovering around "E" and the Exxon station looked like the only option for miles. So I bought there but I still felt like I was reneging on a sacred vow.
Oil companies used to advertise heavily that their brand was better for your car…their gas had certain additives that let it run cleaner, longer, happier. They still do a little of that advertising but my sense now is that some don't advertise much, and those that do put the main emphasis on saying, not exactly in these words, that their company isn't destroying the planet quite as rapidly as others. BP, it always seemed to me, sold nothing much beyond the same gas and the notion that they were somehow greener than their competition. (The station near me used to actually give away flower seeds.) I would imagine that a lot of the money they'll wind up spending on the clean-up of the Gulf Coast will be diverted into an attempted clean-up of their reputation.
As I was pumping my vehicle full of Costco gas, I realized I had no idea what kind of gas it was, where it comes from, how good it might be for my car. Since I don't think Costco owns any oil wells, they must buy it from other companies…probably whoever will give them the best deal that month. It could be Exxon for all I know but I prefer to think it's just Costco gas. It's cheap and that's all that really matters.
My father would have loved Costco gas. In fact, he would have just plain loved Costco. He was a very generous man. If I asked for something, I got it. This was, of course, because I was prudent enough to never ask for anything he couldn't afford…but the point is that he didn't balk. "My son wants it? Fine." That was the attitude. Same deal if my mother wanted anything. But beyond that, he was very frugal, sometimes illogically so. I guess that was the case with a lot of folks who grew up in the Great Depression (the last one) and never in their later lives got near any standard of affluence.
I'm recalling when gas was around 29.9. This was in the sixties. 29.9 was a common price but out in Venice, about a seven mile drive from our house, there was a station that was always a penny cheaper. If gas was 29.9 down the street from us, it was 28.9 at this one place in Venice. My father used to drive out there — make a special trip — just to fill the tank on his old Oldsmobile Cutlass.
I guess I thought I was helping when I pointed out how silly this was. The car held 20 gallons…and of course, he didn't wait 'til it was bone dry to fill up. He went when it was down to about a quarter-full, so the most he could save was around fifteen cents. From that, you had to subtract the cost of the gasoline consumed by driving out to Venice and back. I figured it out once and he was getting 13-15 miles to the gallon so deduct a penny. He was spending about ninety minutes, the length of the journey, to save fourteen cents. If you factored in wear and tear on the car, maybe twelve.
My father was not paid well at his job but his time was worth a lot more than eight cents per hour. Heck, he paid a kid down the block two bucks an hour to mow our lawn. But he could somehow not get over the idea that it was worth 90 minutes of his life to drive to the station in Venice. He kept telling me that if he paid 29.9, he was being played for a sucker.
I learned many things from my father, mostly having to do with common decency and compassion and honesty and avoiding pointless angers and tensions. And then there were those lessons I learned by observing him and making up my own mind to not follow some example. His kind of False Economy was one of the these. There are expenditures I don't make because I'd feel like a sucker but they're for a lot more than fourteen cents…or even the present-day equivalent adjusted for inflation. As a freelance writer for (now) going on 41 years, I've learned to value my time as well as my money. I feel like I'm doing right by both when I go to Costco…getting good prices but also stocking-up on supplies so as to save myself frequent trips to the market.
As I said, my father would have loved the chain. Similar stores were around when he passed away and I don't know why he never went to one. Come to think of it, I don't know why I'm writing about my father on Mother's Day…or why Costco made me think of him when I was there, in part, to buy crates of things my mother needs. Maybe it was because he was always buying her what she needed and now I have that responsibility. In any event, remind me on Father's Day to write about my mother. Just to balance things out.