Love Song to Costco
July 10, 2022 11:33 PM Subscribe
Hit me in the face a few times.
I started leaning in for it.
Flagged as fantastic, thanks for posting.
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:18 AM on July 11, 2022 [1 favorite]
I started leaning in for it.
Flagged as fantastic, thanks for posting.
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:18 AM on July 11, 2022 [1 favorite]
...my father loads up boxes of oranges and blueberries that he tries to force-feed me over the next few days. I do my best to act grateful because I know the people he’s trying to feed are no longer alive.Wow, that's a line for the ages. This was such a well-written, insightful essay. Thanks for sharing!
posted by jeremias at 4:41 AM on July 11, 2022 [17 favorites]
Wow. The author’s parents are not so much older than me. Whew.
posted by 41swans at 6:57 AM on July 11, 2022
posted by 41swans at 6:57 AM on July 11, 2022
A beautiful read. Thanks for sharing.
posted by MelissaSimon at 6:59 AM on July 11, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by MelissaSimon at 6:59 AM on July 11, 2022 [1 favorite]
I think I want to go to Costco now.
My experiences can't touch the author's. but... I grew up in Hawai'i, and we were used to weird shortages and high prices -- everything has to be shipped 2,500 miles to get to us. The holy grail was always "Mainland prices" -- stores would advertise "great food at Mainland prices!" as a synonym for "what normal Americans pay" instead of $5 for a gallon of milk. When the first Costco opened up it was an island-wide sensation... we had never seen anything like it. People drove around with a cooler permanently stored in the trunk of their car to enable those cross-island trips to Oahu's one Costco for luxuries like Tillamook cheese and enormous bags of frozen gyoza. A trip to Costco was an event, even if you didn't buy a pair of huge jars of artichoke hearts or a sack of rice that would last a month.
Yeah, I think I'm going to tell my family we need another four-pack of butter and an enormous sack of potatoes.
posted by kikaider01 at 8:25 AM on July 11, 2022 [6 favorites]
My experiences can't touch the author's. but... I grew up in Hawai'i, and we were used to weird shortages and high prices -- everything has to be shipped 2,500 miles to get to us. The holy grail was always "Mainland prices" -- stores would advertise "great food at Mainland prices!" as a synonym for "what normal Americans pay" instead of $5 for a gallon of milk. When the first Costco opened up it was an island-wide sensation... we had never seen anything like it. People drove around with a cooler permanently stored in the trunk of their car to enable those cross-island trips to Oahu's one Costco for luxuries like Tillamook cheese and enormous bags of frozen gyoza. A trip to Costco was an event, even if you didn't buy a pair of huge jars of artichoke hearts or a sack of rice that would last a month.
Yeah, I think I'm going to tell my family we need another four-pack of butter and an enormous sack of potatoes.
posted by kikaider01 at 8:25 AM on July 11, 2022 [6 favorites]
(I misread Longreads as Longform and I was very excited for a moment.)
posted by Gable Oak at 9:36 AM on July 11, 2022
posted by Gable Oak at 9:36 AM on July 11, 2022
It’s always nice to read a different perspective on aspects of American life that the stereotypical MeFite might reflexively consider “weird, inauthentic capitalist dystopia”.
posted by Hypatia at 9:52 AM on July 11, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by Hypatia at 9:52 AM on July 11, 2022 [7 favorites]
I loved this, thank you for posting. I grew up with a father who came of age during the Great Leap Forward and seeing that echoed in this was moving.
posted by coolname at 10:40 AM on July 11, 2022
posted by coolname at 10:40 AM on July 11, 2022
Such an interesting overlap in this article. My late parents were older when I was born. My father grew up in the Great Depression, my mother had dozens of stories of rationing for WW2.
Food was so, so important to them. We were lower middle class in a wealthy neighborhood, without many things, but nothing could hurt my mother like not having enough food for her kids. We kids, of course, didn't understand why she spent so much time and energy feeding the entire neighborhood of waifs that would inevitably show up from the local broken and hurting homes.
And my father, so traditional, didn't cook, but would eat anything without complaint. Tabasco jello? Worst cut of liver in the world? Windfall apples? Best thing he'd ever had... just eat around the worms, it's fine!
They loved Sam's Club and Costco. Long after we had moved out, I would go by the house and find every bit of the pantry, every nook in the kitchen, and sometimes the hall closet filled with food. Never wasted, but far, far in excess of what two retired folk might need. I would always leave with boxes of anything they could give me. I often gave it away without mentioning it to them, but it satisfied that need for them, to provide.
One of the first things I did on buying a house was to build out the pantry shelves in the front coat closet. For today, there is enough food.
posted by SunSnork at 10:50 AM on July 11, 2022 [8 favorites]
Food was so, so important to them. We were lower middle class in a wealthy neighborhood, without many things, but nothing could hurt my mother like not having enough food for her kids. We kids, of course, didn't understand why she spent so much time and energy feeding the entire neighborhood of waifs that would inevitably show up from the local broken and hurting homes.
And my father, so traditional, didn't cook, but would eat anything without complaint. Tabasco jello? Worst cut of liver in the world? Windfall apples? Best thing he'd ever had... just eat around the worms, it's fine!
They loved Sam's Club and Costco. Long after we had moved out, I would go by the house and find every bit of the pantry, every nook in the kitchen, and sometimes the hall closet filled with food. Never wasted, but far, far in excess of what two retired folk might need. I would always leave with boxes of anything they could give me. I often gave it away without mentioning it to them, but it satisfied that need for them, to provide.
One of the first things I did on buying a house was to build out the pantry shelves in the front coat closet. For today, there is enough food.
posted by SunSnork at 10:50 AM on July 11, 2022 [8 favorites]
cooler permanently stored in the trunk of their car to enable those cross-island tripsCo-signed from the big island. My cooler dates from solving the Hilo to Kona saddle road expeditions to Costco.
posted by minedev at 12:04 PM on July 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
I do my best to act grateful because I know the people he’s trying to feed are no longer alive.
Wow.
posted by praemunire at 12:30 PM on July 11, 2022 [6 favorites]
Wow.
posted by praemunire at 12:30 PM on July 11, 2022 [6 favorites]
They loved Sam's Club and Costco.
Yeah. I, a singleton, have a membership but use it to buy nonperishables and contact lenses--and of course a hot dog, most visits. My mom, also living on her own, buys everything she can figure out how to freeze. She has a chest freezer she keeps crammed full in her little 2-bed apartment in a complex in suburban sprawl. (Chest freezers are common enough in the state I grew up in for hunters and such, and not weird for our family when it was quite large and we would take just about anything edible we could acquire legitimately, but...yeah.) She packs the food into vacuum bags to fit more in. I have my own issues re: abundance and satiety, but every generation we get further away from the starving Eastern Europeans, I suppose.
posted by praemunire at 12:37 PM on July 11, 2022 [4 favorites]
Yeah. I, a singleton, have a membership but use it to buy nonperishables and contact lenses--and of course a hot dog, most visits. My mom, also living on her own, buys everything she can figure out how to freeze. She has a chest freezer she keeps crammed full in her little 2-bed apartment in a complex in suburban sprawl. (Chest freezers are common enough in the state I grew up in for hunters and such, and not weird for our family when it was quite large and we would take just about anything edible we could acquire legitimately, but...yeah.) She packs the food into vacuum bags to fit more in. I have my own issues re: abundance and satiety, but every generation we get further away from the starving Eastern Europeans, I suppose.
posted by praemunire at 12:37 PM on July 11, 2022 [4 favorites]
I love reading this -- as a fellow Chinese American, a lot of this is really familiar in terms of we went to the same places, but I see so many differences as well, and specifics to her family that are crucial, and how I was in a different time and location than the author. I hope more Asian diaspora essays about Costco continue to get funded, because there's way more of us. (For example of a difference: My mom thought pierogis were very cute, actually, not trash food, although I'm sure she carried that opinion for other stuff)
posted by yueliang at 12:12 AM on July 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by yueliang at 12:12 AM on July 13, 2022 [1 favorite]
This is lovely. Thank you for sharing it here.
posted by charmedimsure at 12:52 AM on July 13, 2022
posted by charmedimsure at 12:52 AM on July 13, 2022
If you liked this, you might like Gastronomica magazine, one of my favorite magazines. The food bits here remind me of that.
For me, the most poignant part of the essay was the paragraph before this one : "The pianos stay for a week, maybe two. Inevitably, the next time we go, they are gone."
I feel the same thing every time I sneak into an academic library and lose myself. Invariably at some point my eyes will leak or I'll forget how to breathe.
" Chinese people like to say that they are a culture obsessed with food, and it’s true. It never occurs to me until adulthood just how much of that obsession stems from"
I'm ashamed of how obsessed I am with food, because it's a marker of poverty, and I wasn't always this way. The irony is that I talk about food and channel creativity into food and spend time researching and understanding it because it's the only thing I can spend money and time on without being judged (as a poor person). Conversationally it's generally pretty neutral (as long as you don't get into health), so if you're feeling raw, it's a "safe" topic that won't get rocks thrown. All of these are markers of vulnerability and feel like a scarlet letter, one obscured by the fact that most people don't understand what they're seeing reflected in me.
I have a friend who recently told me she doesn't think there's any class difference between the two of us. She is contemptuous of Costco and has told me so when I mentioned that I buy the giant bottles of NSAIDS there because take handfuls every week and it's the only way I can afford them. She has a doctorate, buys handmade goods rather than shopping amazon, takes vacations, and her medical complaints are seen to promptly and respectfully. She has an extensive network of friends and professional contacts, and dresses in a way that reflects her personality, right down to experimenting with gender. Everything I wear is ill-fitting, worn, rarely matches the gender I prefer (sizing is impossible) and most of it was free. When my friend was getting her degree, I spent a year trying every day to get a job with a living wage, eating white rice and dr. pepper. Occasionally I found something in a dumpster that made it a red-letter day, like half a pack of beer (a bottle broke, so the whole thing gets tossed), and a crushed package of cookies. That was the year I developed autoimmune disease. The gene was there, but it took an epigenetic switch to wake the slumbering demon, and malnutrition and stress flipped it.
But it's the things like her contempt of Costco that make me feel so alienated from her. I have a relative whose family makes far more money my friend's and in a sense I feel more connected to this relative, because at least she's "common" enough to shop at Costco, and won't turn up her nose at dumpster-diving for craft materials. My friend has the luxury of living her values. I work hard to find the best compromise I can in order to survive while making it worse for other people as little as possible. That means scraping up the Costco fare every year for the cheap NSAIDS and food, both because it's cheap and because Costco treats employees better than the other places I can shop.
I loved this essay for its complexity, the kind that tastes different in each space, moving through your mouth. She slipped in so many meaty ideas and feelings that you could chew over it for weeks. Among the things that come across is that America, like Costco, is place of abundance. That unlike areas of China so long ago, here and now there is abundance. From where she's standing this is truth. From where I'm standing, it's not. I've been so poor I've stolen anti-diarrheals so I could exit my bathroom and maybe go to class. I've been so poor I've stolen underwear. Her love letter to Costco is my desperate grasping at anything to keep me afloat, mentally and emotionally.
What strikes me is that even though they were poor, there was a community there. My primary problem with poverty isn't the effects of poverty. The worst thing is the isolation. So I see the things she describes for her parents as a kind of bad situation that looks slightly better than mine. Reality is all about where you're standing.
I loved this description of an immigrant experience, and I found so many things to relate to. The crummy thing about hearing a well-off friend tell me she doesn't see any difference in our class, is that it closes the door for allowing me to talk about my experiences, to allow me to feel whole and accepted and unembarrassed by the things I have to do, by my will to survive. When I read things like this it lights up a spark for a second in my mind and makes me feel braver.
Thanks for posting this. And check out Gastronomica.
posted by liminal_shadows at 11:19 AM on July 16, 2022 [5 favorites]
For me, the most poignant part of the essay was the paragraph before this one : "The pianos stay for a week, maybe two. Inevitably, the next time we go, they are gone."
I feel the same thing every time I sneak into an academic library and lose myself. Invariably at some point my eyes will leak or I'll forget how to breathe.
" Chinese people like to say that they are a culture obsessed with food, and it’s true. It never occurs to me until adulthood just how much of that obsession stems from"
I'm ashamed of how obsessed I am with food, because it's a marker of poverty, and I wasn't always this way. The irony is that I talk about food and channel creativity into food and spend time researching and understanding it because it's the only thing I can spend money and time on without being judged (as a poor person). Conversationally it's generally pretty neutral (as long as you don't get into health), so if you're feeling raw, it's a "safe" topic that won't get rocks thrown. All of these are markers of vulnerability and feel like a scarlet letter, one obscured by the fact that most people don't understand what they're seeing reflected in me.
I have a friend who recently told me she doesn't think there's any class difference between the two of us. She is contemptuous of Costco and has told me so when I mentioned that I buy the giant bottles of NSAIDS there because take handfuls every week and it's the only way I can afford them. She has a doctorate, buys handmade goods rather than shopping amazon, takes vacations, and her medical complaints are seen to promptly and respectfully. She has an extensive network of friends and professional contacts, and dresses in a way that reflects her personality, right down to experimenting with gender. Everything I wear is ill-fitting, worn, rarely matches the gender I prefer (sizing is impossible) and most of it was free. When my friend was getting her degree, I spent a year trying every day to get a job with a living wage, eating white rice and dr. pepper. Occasionally I found something in a dumpster that made it a red-letter day, like half a pack of beer (a bottle broke, so the whole thing gets tossed), and a crushed package of cookies. That was the year I developed autoimmune disease. The gene was there, but it took an epigenetic switch to wake the slumbering demon, and malnutrition and stress flipped it.
But it's the things like her contempt of Costco that make me feel so alienated from her. I have a relative whose family makes far more money my friend's and in a sense I feel more connected to this relative, because at least she's "common" enough to shop at Costco, and won't turn up her nose at dumpster-diving for craft materials. My friend has the luxury of living her values. I work hard to find the best compromise I can in order to survive while making it worse for other people as little as possible. That means scraping up the Costco fare every year for the cheap NSAIDS and food, both because it's cheap and because Costco treats employees better than the other places I can shop.
I loved this essay for its complexity, the kind that tastes different in each space, moving through your mouth. She slipped in so many meaty ideas and feelings that you could chew over it for weeks. Among the things that come across is that America, like Costco, is place of abundance. That unlike areas of China so long ago, here and now there is abundance. From where she's standing this is truth. From where I'm standing, it's not. I've been so poor I've stolen anti-diarrheals so I could exit my bathroom and maybe go to class. I've been so poor I've stolen underwear. Her love letter to Costco is my desperate grasping at anything to keep me afloat, mentally and emotionally.
What strikes me is that even though they were poor, there was a community there. My primary problem with poverty isn't the effects of poverty. The worst thing is the isolation. So I see the things she describes for her parents as a kind of bad situation that looks slightly better than mine. Reality is all about where you're standing.
I loved this description of an immigrant experience, and I found so many things to relate to. The crummy thing about hearing a well-off friend tell me she doesn't see any difference in our class, is that it closes the door for allowing me to talk about my experiences, to allow me to feel whole and accepted and unembarrassed by the things I have to do, by my will to survive. When I read things like this it lights up a spark for a second in my mind and makes me feel braver.
Thanks for posting this. And check out Gastronomica.
posted by liminal_shadows at 11:19 AM on July 16, 2022 [5 favorites]
But it's the things like her contempt of Costco that make me feel so alienated from her.
If it makes you feel any better, this is a pure reflection of secret class anxiety on her part. The estimates vary, but the average Costco household earns ~$100,000/yr. (The East Harlem Costco in Manhattan is probably the only thing that draws most of its many affluent white consumers into that particular neighborhood, but come they do.) As someone who has spent a loooot of time over the years in janky, depressing stores explicitly aimed at poor people, Costco has a whole different vibe. Someone turning up their nose at Costco for being "common"...has issues.
posted by praemunire at 3:05 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
If it makes you feel any better, this is a pure reflection of secret class anxiety on her part. The estimates vary, but the average Costco household earns ~$100,000/yr. (The East Harlem Costco in Manhattan is probably the only thing that draws most of its many affluent white consumers into that particular neighborhood, but come they do.) As someone who has spent a loooot of time over the years in janky, depressing stores explicitly aimed at poor people, Costco has a whole different vibe. Someone turning up their nose at Costco for being "common"...has issues.
posted by praemunire at 3:05 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
« Older U.S. Election Deniers Are In or Behind Critical... | No such thing? Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by CostcoCultist at 11:51 PM on July 10, 2022 [9 favorites]