Costco is that pretentious store that supposedly provides goods at wholesale prices. Most of its customers are not retailers but ordinary pretentious people who are stupid enough to pay £30 a year for a card that allows them to shop at Costco. It is always full of families milling round with their out of control children, rather than actual retailers.
The truth is that when an ordinary supermarket has a campaign on, they will always be cheaper than Costco. The trick is to know what store is doing what and then only buy from Costco when absolutely nobody is doing special offers.
Or, just shop in Costco because you are rich and pretentious, wearing your Costco membership card like a trophy.
Anyway, as you will realise, my pretentiousness forces me to regularly shop at Costco.
At the end of a hard day’s shopping and walking around the 5 billion hectares of the Liverpool store, there’s a strategically placed quick eats place just after the checkouts. A massive queue snakes around as people slowly shuffle forward to purchase either a bit of a just cooked pizza, or a huge hot dog, or a burger, etc., plus huge ice creams. There are then very messy and never cleared bench seats and tables upon which the food and drinks can be consumed.
So, the best routine in order to bagsy a table and get food is to split into two parties. One joins the queue and slowly makes it to the servery to order and receive the food. The other finds a table, clears the muck off it and the previous six or seven occupants packaging rubbish, and sits waiting, holding a taser to disallow any others from trying to bagsy it.
This whole task I’m better at than waiting in the food queue. The other week, I found an unoccupied table, full of bags of random rubbish, which I scooped up, ran to the nearest bin with, and returned to clean the muck off the surface.
Suddenly my chores were interrupted by this older Chinese or maybe Vietnamese lady saying, “Where my food?”
“There was no food here.”
“You lie, my food here.”
“There was no food here, just rubbish.”
“Wha you mean no food? My food, where is my food? No rubbish. You lie.”
“There was just rubbish, I put it in the bin.”
“That my food. You put my food in bin?”
She stormed off to the huge waste bin and dragged out a couple of plastic bags which, true enough, had the remains of Chinese takeaway food in them in battered containers. She returned.
“You very bad man. Why you throw my food in bin?”
“It looked like rubbish that had been left here.”
“It’s no rubbish. Why you sit on my table?”
By now I had caught the eye of a lady on an adjacent table who along with her family were watching and giggling, forcing me to lose the will to take anything seriously.
“It’s a very nice table. My favourite table,” I offered.
“It my table with my food, not your table. I go get tea and you throw food in bin, you bad man.”
Twigging on to something I replied, “These tables are for eating food bought here. That’s not food you bought here, is it?”
“That none of your business. None of your business.”
“But, the tables are for eating the food bought here.”
“Be quiet you bad man. You very very bad man. This none of your business, stupid bad man.”
With that she shuffled off to a recently vacated table some rows away, in order to enjoy the remains of the remains of her cold takeaway remains and her paper cup of tea she’d obviously queued for ages to purchase, now, no doubt, very cold too.
I felt a little bit bad. A little embarrassed. So, sorry little Chinese or Vietnamese lady (probably without a Costco membership card) who creeps into the Costco foodie bit to sit and eat her mushy whatever with a cup of tea. If I’d have known it was food still to be eaten, I wouldn’t have binned it or stolen your table. I was a very bad man.
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