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Plastic bubbles of beets, high-end olive oil and fancy kitchen devices awaited this warehouse novice
We send a shopping warehouse novice and a veteran to pick up a few things,
A giant white warehouse. Soaring metal shelves, painted bright orange. Guards stationed at the entrance to check identification as people file in to join a massive crowd.
No, I’m not describing the setting of the latest dystopian young adult novel. I’m talking about Costco.
For the unaware, Costco is a multinational corporation known for selling products in bulk in its enormous warehouse locations. As only those with memberships are allowed to shop there, this chain has always held a sort of countryclub style mystique for me. Until this summer, I’d only been in Costco once, because it didn’t exactly register as a place for someone like me: a grad student without a car living with one roommate in a small apartment in Toronto. But with the aid of a Costco member and guide (my roommate’s mother), I was able to gain access recently to a location on Warden Ave. in Scarborough to find out just what the deal was.
I selected seven products ranging from practical to fun to just plain strange. Peeled “Love” Beets Is this the epitome of laziness or progress? I spent five solid minutes just holding this package asking, “why? Why does this exist?” This is a plastic box of pre-peeled, pre-cooked, or- ganic beets for $8.69 that have been encased in yet more vacuum seals of plastic. It is literally plastic bubbles of beet. I suspect I’m going to get boiled in hot water myself by a lover of Love Beets for this statement, but this is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen. Does it get rid of the hassle and redstained hands that come with preparing beets on your own? I suppose.
But I’d rather cry “Out! Damn spot!” a thousand times while scrubbing my hands in the comfort of my own kitchen than add to a plastic landfill by purchasing these.
(My guide suggested to me that someone could take a beet bubble to work as a snack with this packaging style, and honestly, I’m too terrified to argue with anyone powerful enough to eat beets by themselves as a snack. I’ll concede that point.)
Bulk buy savings factor: If age or disability make pre-peeled and cooked beets a valuable time saver, go for it, but if not, I guarantee you can find 1 kg of beets for less if you buy them in their natural packaging — their own skin!
Weird and wonderful factor: checking every box here! Himalayan Pink Salt Slab Have you ever thought to yourself, “Boy, wouldn’t it be nice to own a slab of pink salt so heavy I would crush the bones in my foot if I dropped it on myself?” No? Well, same here, which meant, of course, that I had to get this to write about. This is the cornerstone of the subsection of Costco offerings that surprised me the most: the products that appeared to be aimed at either strangely welloff, Instagram-loving millennials, or middle-aged couples who really want to impress their new vegan neighbours at their next cookout. According to the internet, Himalayan pink salt slabs are some sort of bougie cooking device—you can use them to cook on and to display food on, and the salt infuses the food with subtle flavour. It holds heat and cold equally well, and I can confirm the cold end of that for sure—after an hour in the freezer, the slab was so icy to the touch that it felt like it was sucking the moisture from my hand, and it still held some of that coolness four hours later. The fact that the lightly glimmering soft pink is very lovely to look at certainly doesn’t hurt either.
At $20, this was the most expensive thing I bought, but the pricing I found on Google suggests that I still got a deal. And while I don’t know enough about cooking for this to be useful to me as much more than a pretty paperweight, it’s good to know that if someone breaks into my house, I will be able to knock them out with a wellplaced and esthetically pleasing swing of this strange thing.
Bulk buy saving factor: It’s one object, so it’s not exactly in bulk.
Weird and wonderful factor: Maybe chefs would find this perfectly normal, but I definite- ly find this in the realm of fancy frivolous luxuries!
Fancy Olive Oil I spoke too soon when I called those beets the most ridiculous thing I’d seen, for on my Costco journey, there was one product that filled me with an unmatched sense of immediate bewilderment, joy, wonder and awe, and that was: extra virgin olive oil in a glass container shaped like a giant bottle of perfume, right down to the stylized “No. 3” on the label (surely a reference to the classic Chanel No. 5 scent). As soon as I cradled this bottle in my arms, I knew it was so stupid and inexplicable that I had to have it. It wasn’t much more expensive than the other types of olive oil around it, and when I used it to make eggs, they tasted exactly the same as always.
“As soon as I cradled this bottle in my arms, I knew it was so stupid and inexplicable that I had to have it.”
ALEXANDRA JONES
COSTCO ROOKIE
The only thing that really sets this olive oil apart is that it happens to look like something I’d delicately spritz on my neck instead of pour into a frying pan, and that’s the kind of benevolent chaos everyone’s life needs.
(It should be noted that two of my co-workers thought this was a bottle of alcohol at first glance, instead of perfume, so I would just like to caution everyone who frequents Costco to read labels carefully, and not take a swig of olive oil thinking it’s tequila.)
Bulk buy savings factor: at $12.99, I’ve seen cheaper for 1 litre of olive oil.
Weird and wonderful factor: catch me on my next date accidentally dabbing on Eau de Olive.
Bulk microwave popcorn Now, I realize this is junk food, but I’ll say it: this is the most practical thing I purchased all day, and it’s the best deal I got. It’s 44 bags of microwave popcorn. It’s not really packed with intense butter flavour, but it is perfectly serviceable popcorn that can be seasoned any way you want, or enjoyed plain, if you’re lazy like I am. This is a great example of something that makes sense to buy in bulk no matter who you’re feeding or where you live. It’s a snack food that basically doesn’t expire, can be prepared quickly with only the aid of a microwave, and can be stored compactly. And if the box it comes in is genuinely too large for your downtown studio apartment that costs so much that microwave popcorn is sometimes the only food you can afford, you can always take out the individual packages and tuck them into the spare cracks of space in your underwear drawer.
If I had any doubts whatsoever about my choices, this one was definitely validated when a woman in the checkout line excitedly asked me where I had found the popcorn. When I told her, she ran out of the line to go snag a box of her own.
Bulk buy saving factor: A price tag of $12.99 puts it at around 29 cents a bag, making this one of the best microwave popcorn deals I’ve seen.
Weird and wonderful factor: It’s basic popcorn.
Eggo Waffles It turns out 72 waffles can fit inside my freezer, but the reality of it is haunting me.
I could now have two waffles everyday for breakfast for a month and a week. If I wanted to drown in maple syrup and completely put myself off waffles forever by eating two waffles for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I still wouldn’t run out for 12 full days, almost two weeks. It’s great. It’s brilliant. It’s ... definitely too much for one person. There’s no way I can eat all of this before freezer burn renders it inedible. Help me.
Bulk buy savings factor: if I did the math correctly, each waffle is only 18 cents in this $13.99 box. Savings!
Weird and wonderful factor: I mean, it’s just waffles. But a lot of them.
Surface avers household kit Anyone who is as familiar with the aisles of a dollar discount store has seen something like these before — nothing fancy, just those little felt pieces you stick to the bottom of furniture to protect the floor from scratches. But have you seen a package of these with 310 pieces in varying sizes before? This thing is called a “Household Kit” and I am honestly struggling to envision what kind of Toronto household has so much furniture in it that you would require 96 circles of a specific size of felt. Some rough calculations, based mostly on the assumption that the majority of chairs and pieces of furniture either have four feet or four corners, tell me that I now have enough “surface savers” for approximately 64 pieces of furniture. Who am I, royalty?
Bulk buy savings factor: Are you in charge of protecting the feet of every single chair at your office? For $9.79, the solution will be in your hands.
Weird and wonderful factor: Pretty commonplace, practical stuff, if you ignore the amount.
INTERLUDE Inside the store, seasons mattered not — mittens are sold beside the door, with snowsuits farther in — and hours squashed down into what felt like minutes as we explored countless aisles.
It had that feeling of an indoor city where capitalism is god.
And the best part? The samples. In the space of three aisles we tried six different things for free. One employee brought out full-size Popsicle samples, and a crowd of people descended on him so fast that within 30 seconds he was shouting that he was all out. Carts were getting into traffic jams in front of a sample stall of garlic chicken.
A family whizzed by me with two carts, a woman balancing a 40 pack of toilet paper on her shoulder.
At one point, in the baked goods section, I found myself just turning on the spot with my hands on my face like a confused figure skater.
“She’s hit the Costco overwhelm,” my guide said.
Giant Craft Jar This was the very first thing I picked up because it was the first thing that gave me that “wow!” factor (apologies for sounding like a guest judge on a fashion reality show.)
Upon spotting this colourful plastic monstrosity, my inner kindergarten teacher lit up with sublime glee. I was inundated with visions of leading a gaggle of easily-distracted, paintstreaked, pint-sized terrors in a dazzling array of crafts as outlined in the jar’s complimentary book, which promised me 100 different crafts.
However, I soon discovered that it was not quite as packed full as I had been lead to believe: a large curl of construction paper hid a smaller box in the middle, leaving a lot of empty space around it.
I was supplied with around 17 different types of crafting materials, but there wasn’t really enough of each thing to support a lot of crafts (I made one of the crafts outlined in the book—tiny penguins — and had to make their feet pink because I wasn’t given enough yellow foam to match the picture of the craft in the book).
Bulk buy savings factor: You might be better served by taking your $18.99 to the dollar store craft aisle instead, as this jar looks like it’s meant to serve more people than it actually can.
Weird and wonderful factor: It’s a colourful plastic jar the size of my torso. Enough said.