Shell Shocked: A man’s place is not at Costco
There comes a time in a man’s life when he has to take stock of himself and ask the perennial question: “Who am I and what am I doing here?”
Don’t get itchy. This isn’t meant to be a deeply philosophical column pondering the meaning of life. Nothing as sublime as that. What I’m pondering is why I keep saying yes to my wife when she asks me to accompany her to Costco. I truly hate to shop. When I need something I inhale deeply before entering a store and head immediately to the section where I can quickly find what I’m looking for and get the hell out.
You might say I have a phobia about being shut up in retail stores. The moment I enter them I find that I can’t breathe, my balance is fragile and my eyesight affected by the tons of aisles, shopping carts, sales clerks and checkout counters. I’d rather be any place in the world – even Siberia or the North Pole – than in a store.
But my wife drives a hard bargain. Well, it’s actually blackmail. She says that if I don’t accompany her just this one time to Costco she won’t allow me to watch baseball games on television. Of course, I could overpower her and physically keep her away from the TV set, but all she would do is send me to bed without my supper. Or, even worse than that, I would be forced to drive to a – ugh – store to pick up some readymade food.
Because of the claustrophobia I suffer when I’m in a store – any store – I force myself to shop as quickly as I can. As if to compound my phobia, my wife stops at every single shelf and peruses every item slowly and torturously. She picks up every food package, reviews the ingredients, the price, the calorie content, how it’s cooked, and whatever related fine print documentation and information the product label can absorb, including where it was originally grown at the beginning of time.
In the meantime, I’m twiddling my thumbs with a cold sweat breaking out and the nagging feeling that if I don’t get out of here right away my heart will explode and fly across the room and land on a romaine lettuce display. Survival instincts begin to take over and I wander away from my wife’s deliberate slow motion and keep myself moving, I’m practically running as I begin to explore the thousand and one aisles within Costco. I begin to look for items we really don’t need so that my wife will get the idea that maybe it’s better for her to just shop alone in the future rather than drag me along.
I begin to pick up items like pickled kangaroo liver, vodka coated toothpaste, Eskimo beer, curried molasses powder and asparagus milk and throw them in the shopping cart. My wife studies these items for a moment and says: “If you buy them, you eat them.”
I immediately put them all back on the shelves and wander into other sections. The problem with Costco, as you know, is that each package on sale contains a huge quantity. Whatever you purchase is fit for a family of twenty or if it’s just for two people will last you for the rest of your life. Can you imagine having to eat a salmon filet every day forever? It would seem to be more of a torture than water boarding.
But you can’t beat Costco prices and that’s why my wife enjoys shopping there. As for me, I’d rather be saying mush to a dog sled in some frozen tundra at the edge of the world than accompany my wife to a shopping expedition to Costco.
As I wander through the myriad of aisles in Costco the thought occurs to me that Costco is a maze and that if you don’t have a map you could get lost and never find your way out. It was at that point that I asked myself that question again: “Who am I and what am I doing here?”
I finally stumbled onto something that intrigued me and felt I could use. It was a multi-purpose all-in-one electronic device which included a lap top computer, cell phone, camera, walkie-talkie, wrist watch, tire gage, blood pressure measuring device, hand cuffs, mini-TV, DVD player, ear drops, and nose hair remover. Wow, only at Costco.
I picked it up and intended to bring it to the shopping cart my wife was pushing. But I couldn’t find her. I went from aisle to aisle lugging that futuristic monster with me but my wife was nowhere to be found. I began to freak out. I didn’t want to be there in the first place, I couldn’t see where the exit was, and I was having a panic attack.
I’m certain I attracted attention because I found myself hitting my head against a foot long pepperoni as a protest to the state of affairs I found myself in. Mercifully, my wife showed up with a shopping cart that could feed the entire state of Florida for a month and helped me make my way through the checkout counter into daylight and fresh air.
I told her I would do whatever she wanted as long as I didn’t have to go back to this store with her. She smiled and said, “Oh, we’re not done yet. We need to pick up some things at Home Depot.”