Costco Allen Zimmerman
It's wonderful to experience an acclaimed thing for the first time, but especially when you’re an adult already. Would I have had as deep an appreciation for Disneyland if I had visited it before the age of 32? Probably not—as a child, I was too invested in my own misery. As an adult, I marvel at the architecture, the chowder, the brightened darkness in the artificial mountain.
Anyway, Costco. Became a member this week, had the hot dog, had the pizza, purchased liters of olive oil with the woman I love. Why did I have a great time? (I mean, beyond the meal, which was obviously excellent.)
The reason can’t be that we saved money—we probably saved $30 on groceries over the course of an hour and a half, and we’re economically advantaged enough that this was a nice thing but not exactly a lifesaver.
My partial spitball answer is: aesthetics. It feels good to shop at Costco. Why? Because it feels kind of bad. The bare formaldehyde-laden wood of shipping pallets, the stock climbing to the sky, the limited selection. It all registers as real, somehow, whereas Whole Foods feels like Cirque du Soyleil.
But this is all carefully generated. As this podcast makes clear, Costco was designed to feel like a non-retail store. No bags, because a true cash and carry wholesale operation wouldn’t have bags. (Is this true?) Not many staff offering direction—grow up, Costco seems to say, we should not have to explain to you What Are Pecans.
In other words, Costco presents a belabored idea of authenticity. It takes “rawness” as an aesthetic starting point, iterating on it until rawness is a coherent experience. It’s sort of like Bob Dylan, in that way. Dylan applied a filter to the raw folk songs of the West as already filtered by Greenwich Village. He made them both stranger and more palatable, synthesized them into a kind of sprezzatura, sketches of nostalgia for nothing that ever existed. Costco does the same, with different materials. And the result is a true pleasure, a true bitter pleasure.