Carried Away at Costco

        Three hundred sixteen dollars and ninety-six cents!  Have we gone mad?  How did we walk in that place, spend an hour and a half, and walk out the door leaving that much money behind?  And what we have to show for it is an oversized shopping cart full of oversized quantities of household commodities.  This is not your typical visit to the grocery store.  This is Costco.

        You may have been there, or to Sam's, or to one of the other big box retailers as they are called--and for good reason since you don't just get small quantities of anything, but you get cases and big boxes.  Texas size quantities suitable for feeding armies.  This might be great for big families, but for just my wife and I it always seems to border on the ridiculous.

         Sometimes I've seen the Indian couple that run the convenience store where I sometimes stop to grab a lottery ticket shopping at Costco for goods to supply their store.  After a run to Costco I look at my shelves and cupboards and wonder if maybe I should put a sign on my front door and open a neighborhood grocery. We could probably do it except I don't want a bunch of weirdo neighbors wandering through my house buying toilet paper and canned goods.

         This is ridiculous.  I've got more sardines and endamame nuts than any reasonable person should ever have.  What do you do with endamame anyway?  They looked kind of tasty and I had heard that they were supposed to be healthy, but I guess I shouldn't experiment with five pounds of weird little soybeans that I've never tasted before.  Well, at least I like the chocolate covered almonds that came in the seven pound jar.

       Then there's the five hundred and fifty square feet of aluminum foil.  After I wrap the outside of my house in it I should still have plenty left over for kitchen use.  I hardly ever use aluminum foil, but that was the only quantity they had.  Well, that is, unless I wanted to get those rolls that are like three feet long and then you still have to buy two rolls of them which is probably seven hundred square feet or so.

          Since I got the foil, then I had to also get the giant packages of plastic wrap.  There's so much plastic wrap that my wife and I could have each wrapped ourselves up in it--don't ask me why, we just could have.  Why heck, we could have had the weird neighbors come over and all of us wrapped up in plastic wrap and toilet papered the whole neighborhood.  Then after we were done we could have sat around drinking instant breakfast and eating chocolate cake.

           Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that chocolate cake.  I see those chocolate cakes everytime we go to Costco and I threaten my wife that I'm going to buy one.  Well, since my birthday's this Saturday my wife went ahead and bought a chocolate cake.  She'll help me eat it, but guess what I'm going to be eating for lunch and dinner for the next few days.  If you guessed chocolate cake and instant breakfast you're close.  You forgot endamame nuts-- I'll have to eat a few of those as well.

           Breakfast is covered.  I got the institutional size carton of eggs and four pounds of bacon.  You can't buy just one pound of bacon at Costco.  You have to buy four one pound packages wrapped in plasic wrap.  At least they found some use for their plastic wrap.

            So now my cupboards are pretty full.  The only problem is that they are mostly full of the same things.  At least we have food.  The coffee and sugar should last a few months.  I'll have four meals of corned beef hash (they have some great canned corned beef hash at Costco).   And my wife has seventy bottles of water--I say my wife because I drink water out of the tap.  I never could figure out that thing about buying water.   And just in case my buddy, Stephen McCarthy, ever stops by to visit I've restocked my supply of Grand Marnier.  And if he doesn't ever stop by then I guess my wife and I will wrap ourselves in plastic wrap one night and drink it ourselves.  Whoopee!   What a wild party!