Buying in Bulk

Posted on April 9, 2010, 3:51 pm, by cocktailhag, under News Network.

Since I seldom need, say, a five gallon bucket of heavy duty mayonnaise, I don’t often go to Costco, but when I do, I always have a good time.

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16 Comments

  1. dirigo says:
    April 9, 2010 at 3:55 pm

    Is that a happy French tourist, shopping for bargains by the gross, or, a Big Gulp?

  2. dirigo says:
    April 9, 2010 at 5:29 pm

    S’funny, but she looks like Catherine Deneuve when I last saw her, waddling down the Champs Elysees a few years ago. Of course she’d lost a bit of her edge by that time; it was well after Belle de Jour and all that.

  3. William Timberman says:
    April 10, 2010 at 7:23 am

    Show me where else you can get genuwine parmigiano reggiano, saffron, coffee or decent olive oil at Costco’s prices, and I’d be happy never to set foot in the place again. It don’t matter if you don’t cook, I suppose, but if you do, those are just a few of the gems keeping a California boy happy among the rattlers and scorpions.

    It is a little sad, though, to see a woman in her 20s so big that she’s got an oxygen tube in her nostrils, or is riding on one of those motorized carts with her kids clustered around her. Out here though, I can see that any day of the week in my local Safeway.

    • cocktailhag says:
      April 10, 2010 at 7:46 am

      I confess I was a little disappointed; here in Westside LA, there are probably fewer obese people than almost anywhere else, and I had to do a lot of skulking and stalking to catch one. Had I been in, say, New Orleans, or even Tigard, Oregon, I would have had way too many choices.
      (Those carts are a particular horror; at what point does one decide that another bucket of chicken is preferable to continuing to walk?)

      • William Timberman says:
        April 10, 2010 at 9:14 am

        Well, they’re nice for the genuinely infirm — frail people in their eighties who would otherwise have to get someone to shop for them, or disabled folks. I have no objection to the carts per se, although it is a pain in the ass navigating around them.

        What really amazes me, though, is how many young people are using them, largely because they’re just too overweight to make it around under their own power. I don’t think I remember seeing such things even 20 years ago. Then again it may be because I lived in Santa Barbara around a lot of college kids.

        The wealth correlation is interesting, too. I remember seeing a photograph from the 1890s of some sort of celebratory banquet put on by a businessmen’s club at Delmonicos. There was a long, garlanded table with cut-glass decanters, and about twenty fifty-somethings in suits with little paper tiaras on their heads. Each had a fat cigar in one hand and a glass in the other, caught in the act of turning toward the camera in preparation for a toast. Every one of them resembled a beach-ball with legs. In contrast, the two waiters in the picture were lean, dark-eyed men with handlebar mustaches, and white aprons almost to their ankles.

        I bet that if you went into the Sunset Tower bar or restaurant today, you’d find the situation exactly reversed — skinny customers and fat bartenders. The waiters are probably still skinny, but be they male or female, I’d expect them to be specifically chosen by the management for their decorative qualities, and therefore, perhaps, not relevant to my point.

        • cocktailhag says:
          April 10, 2010 at 10:03 am

          Here, I think they must keep the fat in the kitchen; hard to sell $15 cocktails and desserts when one is a walking warning label of their potential effects.

  4. avelna says:
    April 10, 2010 at 11:34 am

    Sadly, it makes me wonder what the child in her cart is going to look like in 20 years.

  5. Denise says:
    April 10, 2010 at 12:10 pm

    Anyone seen Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution? He is a chef taking on the school lunch program in a West Virginia town. He went to the funeral home to look at the growing market for extra large coffins. They don’t fit through doors, and have to be loaded in a truck with a fork lift. They look as wide as a double size mattress. So sad, and you should hear what the Department of Agriculture says those kid should be eating. No wonder those kids have no chance of being a normal size!

    • cocktailhag says:
      April 10, 2010 at 12:52 pm

      The school lunch program has always been more about supporting politically favored food producers than it was about nutrition, tragically.

      • William Timberman says:
        April 11, 2010 at 7:15 am

        It’s easy to make good food, especially in an industrial-strength kitchen, which surprisingly many of our schools once had. It’s not so easy to get kids to eat it. When, many years ago, I learned what my daughter’s school was serving in the cafeteria, I started preparing her lunches myself. I can’t tell you how clever, how determined I was that she should eat decently.

        Years later, a grown woman, she talked to me about those lunches, which she still remembered in surprising detail. Oh, yeah, she said. I was one of the seven wonders.

        She then went on to describe how crowds of kids would gather around her, waiting to see what she had today, and waiting patiently as she auctioned off, or traded off the delights I’d so lovingly prepared. (I didn’t have the heart to ask her what she finally wound up eating, but I’ll tell you this: Jamie Oliver hjas a lot to learn about kids.)

        • William Timberman says:
          April 11, 2010 at 7:23 am

          Dammit, I meant to scroll down to the preview, but hit the publish button instead. Aplogies for the grammatical and typographical horrors.

          (Darling Hag, dare I beg you and CHNN’s technical department to implement WordPress’ clever after-the-fact editing plug-in for fumble-fingers like yours truly? I have it on my blog, and it seems to offer an added degree of confidence that no matter what happens, humble commenters can be assured of a second chance to retrieve their dignity and their reputations.)

          • cocktailhag says:
            April 11, 2010 at 7:53 am

            I’ll check with my administrator about that; it’s a privilege I wouldn’t want to extend to just anyone, if you know what I mean and I think you do….

        • cocktailhag says:
          April 11, 2010 at 7:52 am

          When I was growing up, I simply ate what was put in front of me, which made both school and camp food seem, if not wonderful, at least not unexpected. In those days any meal tended to be some sort of low-grade meat, some starch, and a canned vegetable of some sort. I worked in the school cafeteria, which allowed me to pocket the 45 cent lunch money my mother gave us each day…. kids who brought their lunches usually had a white bread sandwich of some sort, which I never envied, except for the cookies we never got with the hot lunch.
          Even if your efforts to influence your daughter’s diet were unsuccessful, at least, in her way, she clearly appreciated it, so what the hell.

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