Yesterday we needed to make a Costco run. For what, I don’t remember, but once you’re there you end up spending at least a hundred dollars, in this case $122. This is always frustrating when you realize you’ve spent 2 hours to acquire about 10 items and your cart is only half-full.

Costco is a strange kind of place. I think of it as the opposite of a convenience store, like a 7-11. Instead of lots of them on every street corner, there’s only one. The store is huge and all the items come in large quantities. It’s a nightmare to get in and out of the place, people everywhere. On the good side, stuff is usually much cheaper than in a convenience store.
You have to go out of your way to go to Costco. You still have to go grocery shopping for some things, so it’s yet another trip. In other words, it’s an inconvenience store.

On this trip I realized when we got there that it was midafternoon and I forgot to have lunch (or breakfast) again. The line for the snacks outside was pretty long, so I forged in, intent on satisfying my grumbly stomach with what else, but the bounty of Costco samples.

Today was particularly insane at the Costco, but somehow that means that there’s even more samples to be had. I had teryaki chicken, ham (twice), snapple meal replacement(!), animal crackers, whole grain bread with peanut butter, pumpkin cheesecake, and something I think was pork chops.

There’s definitely an art to acquiring the best samples. If you want just bulk, uncooked foods are plentiful. Cooked foods take a while and go quickly, so timing your visit at the end of a cooking cycle is critical. There are certainly people who just camp out near the best cooked foods though. It’s always seemed weird to be that they use desk scissors to cut up the samples.

Once I was at Costco just before it was about to close and the person giving out samples of beef jerky needed to dispose of leftover samples. She asked me if I wanted them. Who am I to turn down free beef jerky? The catch was that she didn’t have anything to put these small slices of jerky in, so she just dumped them in my cupped hands. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do and that day, I had to chow down on beef jerky, trough-style out of my hands.

Inbetween all this sampling, we actually had to do some shopping. Anne recently heard that canned green beans aren’t as good for you as fresh green beans and was warned that when our current stash runs dry there would be no more. My opinion is that if it’s green and I like it, you better give me as much as you can because there’s not a lot of vegetables that I go for. As we approached the bulk canned food aisle I made a lunge for the green beans but was quickly scorned. I recoiled, dejected, when a man walking the other way yelled “Be a man! Get it anyway!”. Turns out that we still have plenty of green beans left, but maybe I should start building up a secret stash anyway.

After many samples yesterday I was feeling less urgent needs for food, but I was still hungry. On the way out the snack line was much shorter, so I grabbed the rest of my ‘lunch’ there – a cinammon pretzel (huge and yummy) along with a berry smoothie.

Total cost my of fine dining at Costco – $2.40. Plus $122.