So I’m wondering: have you ever stuffed your car so full of groceries that on the drive home your kids had to lie prostrate atop a thirty-six-roll MegaPak of Bounty Big Rolls?
I just finished up one of my irregularly scheduled trips to the wholesale club I belong to. The trips are scheduled irregularly because the club is actually quite a distance from my house. Apparently, big box stores are not welcome in Stereotypical Liberal Utopia, land of tasteful tearooms, organic markets, art house movie theaters, pottery studios, and twee boutiques.
Twee boutiques, I have discovered, sell neither the 30 lb. box of Arm & Hammer Super Scoop cat litter, nor the 500-count Tampax Variety Pack. (It’s for the children.) And I don’t fault Stereotypical Liberal Utopia in the slightest; I agree that it would be far less stereotypically liberal and utopian if it did welcome every Tom, Dick, and Wal-Mart that tried to break ground. But God help me, I need my wholesale club, and I’ll drive miles of bad Jersey road to get there.
And no, it’s not just because it’s a club that will have me as a member; socially pathetic though I am, I can point to my church vestry, urban-suburb PTA, and local chapter of Drinking Liberally as organizations that tolerate my ongoing presence. So I don’t necessarily need to fulfill my infrequent impulses toward human contact through like-minded north Jersey bargain shoppers. I actually have a completely irrational relationship with the wholesale club.
I hate it; and yet I force myself to go, because I’m just cheap enough that the idea of paying full price for Tide keeps me up more at night than does the dread of wrestling huge bundles of household products off of shelves, through check-out, and into a mid-sized SUV (a hybrid, of course, to appease my life-sized poster of Al Gore in a bathing suit). The vertical and horizontal vastness of the store elicits both shock and awe every time I enter. I am not a tall woman, so I am dwarved not only by the shelving that seemingly climbs into the middle of Ursa Minor—which I often have to scale as if my life were some sort of half-assed Spider Man sequel—but by some of the products themselves. For example, I am actually smaller than the aforementioned MegaPak of Bounty Big Rolls. Throw in a similar count bundle of Charmin Ultra Soft, that box of Tide I mentioned (which, when on the ground, comes up to my hip), and enough juice boxes to get us through to middle school, and my cart becomes impossible not only to steer but to see over. I’ve plowed down more than a few slow-moving bystanders through the years. (Sorry, Ma. How’s the knee?)
Almost as bad as the ginormous products are the small ones. Why? Because the wholesale club doesn’t give out bags at check-out! (Life-sized poster of Al Gore in a bathing suit nods approvingly.) So of course when I’m there I’m going to buy the three-pack of Crest toothpaste for $7.99, because the knowledge that three tubes of Crest are available, somewhere, for $7.99 would absolutely preclude me from buying Crest toothpaste at a regular store, for its regular price. And so, if I didn’t buy it at the wholesale club, we’d eventually run out of toothpaste, and our teeth would fall out, and we’d stink, and my mother would smugly say, “When you were little, I never let your teeth fall out. But you keep doing things your own way. I’m sure you know best.” And then she’d light a cigarette. But I digress.
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