Costco!

On Saturday, we had a date night planned (dinner and Josh Johnson at the Palace), and Cute W proposed that we leave a little early to see the new Costco. “On a Saturday…?” I said doubtfully. I have the work-from-homer’s spoiled aversion to doing any major errands on a weekend. Give me the serenity of shopping on a late Tuesday morning any day. But recently our Vitamix foodcycler had died, and there was a foodcycler that was a super-good deal with a Costco membership (and yes, the new foodcycler is great, and the capacity is much bigger than our old one). So Cute W had already purchased a membership online, and the two of us had to go together to get our official membership cards. I sighed and hoped that showing up after 5 pm would mitigate the Saturday-ness of it all.

We arrived and the place was a mob scene. The parking lot was jammed with cars and people swarming, the lines to get gas looked long, and I feared that the whole experience would be rough. First thing? A big ol’ line of people who were outside of the main entrance, because of course you need your membership card to enter, and the store is new. We were pleasantly surprised when a staffer scooped us out of the line quickly once he knew that our membership decisions were over and we just needed our pictures taken for the cards. He said he was up from the DC area to help with the opening rush, and that he’d met people who’d driven two hours to visit this new store. I laughed because I hadn’t been into a Costco before and had almost balked at stopping here on the way. But in any case, we were card-carrying members entering the store pretty darn quickly.

At first I thought that we were just going to treat the store like tourists, so I told Cute W to pose with this gargoyle. He was confused and unamused, so he has been cropped out. But this is the only picture I took inside the store because it only occurred to me that the visit was post-worthy as I was leaving.

We tried to be relatively systematic. Basically, prices are really good, but there’s also not variety. So if you’re not brand-loyal or you happen to like the brands they carry, then it is awesome. As usual, there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t call out to us because we don’t need, like, super-huge portions of food. But walking around, we took notes on things that we already buy that were much cheaper than typical grocery prices:

• Tide detergent
• Cascade dishwashing soap
• Halloween candy
• Maple Syrup
• Vitamins
• Sugar in the Raw
• Sesame Seeds and other spices
• Better Than Bouillion
• Boursin and other cheeses

I also thought to myself that this would be a great place to go to help the girls set up apartments, because they had fantastic deals on a lot of kitchen and bath basics. Honestly? We didn’t get all the way through the store. There was a lot there, and we were pausing to take notes, and after a while we could not resist picking up a few things.

Some things that brought me joy were just the fact that the packaging was bigger. We routinely go through capers and Better Than Bouillon so quickly that the typical small bars are just maddening. As we continued to walk around, now with arms full and still holding our phones to look up prices, we joked that we’d come up with a great self-limiting system because, cartless, at some point we’d have to sacrifice something in our arms to pick up something new.

We hadn’t quite gone through everything when we got close enough to the registers to worry about how long it would take to check out. There was a huge crush of people milling around with piled-high carts, and we had a schedule to keep! However, we’d barely made it into the self checkout line when a Costco employee materialized next to us with a scanner and pre-scanned all of our items for us, so by the time one of the check-out lights turned green, all we had left to do was pay. We were out in a jiffy.

The same thing happened with the gas: the prices were great but the sheer number of cars looked daunting.

And once again, we were pleasantly surprised that we basically didn’t have to wait at all. So: yes, please. We are fans. Sure, I’d love it if it were a little closer and not in that super-hectic Crossgates zone, but it’s also right on Cute W’s route home from work, and soon it will be too cold and dark for him to bike. Please do share your favorite Costco finds. And if you’re curious, the cards are a picture ID, but I can bring a friend with me.