This post was first posted here on 9/19/10. In recent years, for reasons I'm sure you understand, Costco has gone from being a place where I shop often to a place I go on rare occasions but I get a lot of deliveries from them.
Since this first appeared, the KMart near me has done what KMarts everywhere have done: Gone out of business. But that's okay because I have all the ball peen hammers anyone could ever need. I have one.
I gave up on Brita filters after deciding they were no match for the shouldn't-be-there things in our drinking water in my area and I no longer buy white vinegar. But I do buy lots of Rao's Marinara Sauce and I still feel the same way about the business establishment from which I get it…
For reasons I'm not sure I can explain, I like shopping at Costco. Well actually, I don't really like shopping anywhere but since one must at times shop, this one prefers to do it at Costco and not that many other places. Some of that is because when you shop at Costco, you go home with such large quantities that there's less need to shop again soon.
But I also like the feel of the place, the mood of the customers and employees, the little women in the hairnets dispensing free samples…and the fact that in almost every visit, I take home something that makes my life better in some way. I have been to five different Costcos in Southern California and as I'll tell you in the next installment in this series, one in Indiana. I felt very welcome in all of them.
That is not the case with other huge stores. In the last few months, I found myself in a Kmart, a Best Buy, a Target and a Walmart. I couldn't wait to get out of the Walmart. There was something tacky about the place…a joyless mood with customers afraid to make eye contact with one another. I was there because I was looking for three items I'd been unable to procure anywhere else and the Walmart website said this particular store had all three in stock. It lied. They were out of two and had never heard of the third…or so said a pale store employee who looked like one of the orphans in a bad road company of Oliver. I was almost happy to hear that they didn't have what I wanted because that meant I could leave immediately. Which I did.
The one nice thing about the store for me, though I didn't purchase anything, was that anything they seemed to have in multiple colors, they had in orange. Some Walmart exec must have ordered this because usually when you have to pick the color of something you're buying, my favorite color is not an option. I'm even surprised when you can get an orange in orange. Anyway, I got out of there fast and didn't even pause to buy something that was orange.
My assistant Darcie and I stopped into a Target a few months ago to pick up a new vacuum cleaner for my mother's house. They had about twenty sample models on display and once I'd made my selection, I had the nigh-impossible task of flagging down a store employee to fetch me a fresh one from the back. Darcie and I fanned out to scour the aisles but we could find no one. You'd have better luck trying to hail a taxicab in Times Square on New Year's Eve if you were non-white and bleeding.
Finally, one clerk apparently made a wrong turn and wandered close enough that Darcie could tackle him. He grudgingly looked up the model I wanted and told me it was out of stock. Then he looked up my second choice and told me it was out of stock. After he informed me my third choice was out of stock, I told him, "Let's do this the easy way. Tell me which of these vacuums you do have in stock." He actually said, "All of them, except for the ones we're out of."
I go occasionally and voluntarily to a Kmart near me because it's near me and sometimes, you have a sudden urgent need for a ball peen hammer. Best Buy isn't bad but for some reason, every time I find an item I want, it's the only one they have left and it's been purchased by someone else, returned and resealed. The sales people sometimes look that way, as well.
So it's Costco for me and I am well aware that it's a different kind of store from the other institutions. For one thing, at Kmart you can buy one of something. But at Costco, people look at each other like they're not ashamed to be there. Oh, one may occasionally fight over a rotisserie chicken but for the most part, it's a very friendly place.
When I take my business there, I not only come home with truckloads of toilet paper, case lots of white vinegar and enough Brita filters to purify Lake Michigan…I usually come home with an anecdote or two. I've told some of them here before and will be sharing a few more under this category heading in the next few days. You may wind up with more of them than you want but I'm afraid that's just part of The Costco Experience.