I was headed out of the door on Saturday when my wife asked if I could pick up a prescription for her. I was all too happy to oblige and asked her which pharmacy it was at. She replied, “Costco.”
Costco. The word froze my blood, sent a chill down my spine, and filled me with a sense of despair mixed with dread. Maybe it is the smell of the store or the cacophony created by so many people, but I look forward to a trip to Costco the way men look forward to prostate exams, which is to say, not with anticipation and optimism.
But as a good husband, I resigned myself to my fate and entered the dreaded Box of Doom. Fortunately, I only needed to do a flyby at the pharmacy and would be spared the purgatory of wandering up and down the aisles with only the samples to provide me any succor.
The prescription was not quite ready, so I faced a choice. I could sit glumly in a chair and scroll my phone or see if there was anything we “needed.” Of course, there was nothing we needed. We are empty-nesters and have no place to put a case of ketchup. We won’t go through a case of ketchup during the remainder of our earthly lives.
Aside from the noise, the biggest obstacle to successfully navigating Costco without incident is one’s fellow shoppers — the Horrible People of Costco. Something happens to people when they walk through the cavernous portico and into the belly of the beast. Their eyes become unfocused, and they lurch back and forth across the aisles like a drunk trying to make it home from the bar, hoping that the cops did not just see him cross the center line.
Then there are the kids. Entire platoons of Utah families clog the average Costco, with children running higgledy-piggledy, pell-mell, to and fro, hither and yon, and any other euphemisms you might recall. One wrong step could hurl a wayward child 10 feet backward, depositing them on their derrieres. After 15 minutes of kids missing you by mere inches, you begin to contemplate whether leash laws should include children.
Oblivious to their fellow shoppers, the Horrible People of Costco can go from lazy meandering to laser-like intensity in seconds, like a hawk zeroing in on an errant rabbit. One minute, they are engrossed in their phones, threatening to roll over you like Patton ahead of his tank column conquering German territory. There is a certain passive-aggressive element to the Horrible People of Costco. One moment, they are sprinting to get in front of you to be the first to rifle through a pile of off-brand jeans. However, once they have achieved pole position, they often slow down to crawl. This may be to gaze with wonder at the bounty surrounding them, or it may be to remind you that they consider themselves to be the alpha shoppers.
At times, I think that a trip to Costco is a bit like witnessing a Viking raid on a small European coastal town. Bands of merry adventurers plunder the stacks and shelves, every raider for himself or herself, before moving on to the abbey to steal the gold and silver chalices from the monks. I wonder if, as the store opens in the morning, Costco employees peer furtively over the parapets, like castellans dreading the arrival of Henry Morgan and his buccaneers on the Spanish Main circa 1668. The only things missing are sea chanties, musket fire, and casks of rum.
Heading to the checkout is also a dim prospect, provided you escaped your Costco experience with unbarked shins, unbruised knees, unfrayed nerves, and the bare minimum of body checks. Then you face a gauntlet of barge-sized shopping carts piloted by the Horrible people of Costco, who are apparently trying out for the local Rollerball team. Then, it is literally a matter of timing and inches. Any amount of space, no matter how small, is fair game for an interloper who wants to check out before you. Contact gear is recommended.
Once clear of the checkout lane, shoppers rush toward the exit as if trying to escape before the hole left by the iceberg lets in enough water to send the store to the bottom of the icy Atlantic. Women and children first? Perhaps on a good day. One young mother wheels her cart in front of me, nearly missing my foot. In her race to have her receipt checked, she slips out of her flip-flop and nearly twists her ankle. Outside is not much better. I stop behind her at the edge of the parking lot and have to navigate around her. I realize that she has no idea where she left her car. I leave her flummoxed and blinking in the sunlight. She is lost and limping, but she beat me and got to the door first.
The parking lot can be an adventure in and of itself. The Horrible people of Costco are either newly arrived raiders looking for a spot to land their skiff and establish a beachhead or those who have filled their holds with booty and want to get home to cache their treasures. Either way, one takes one’s life in one’s hands, attempting to get back to one’s car. Drivers seem oblivious to pedestrians as they are distracted, looking for an empty stall. Whatever rules of the road and civility evaporate as people become engaged in a somewhat subdued and low-key re-creation of the final scenes from “The Road Warrior.” Yes, the person about to run you over may not be traveling very fast, but they are still about to run you over.
My state, like many others that are nominally red, has seen an influx of businesses and people fleeing the depredations of blue-state governments. As a result, more strip malls and clusters of stores have sprung up. This, of course, means more tax revenue.
But in a rush to build new homes and retail outlets, no one seemed to have given any thought as to how to navigate the mean streets. So there are stretches of roadways that appear to have been designed by engineers who did their work amid an intense ayahuasca trip or had a running bet to see who could create the most complicated transportation plan. Sudden lane changes or detours because of an unforeseen missed exit are common. The most egregious example of this problem can be seen in the northern end of Utah’s tech corridor, or the formerly-ballyhooed “Silicon Slopes.” One could navigate a plate of spaghetti with greater ease than traversing the local lanes.
The result of the influx of people has been drastic upticks in incidents of road rage and traffic accidents. A green light is almost an invitation to a drag race. The Horrible People of Costco quickly morph into the Horrible People of the Highway.
But the truth is the Horrible People of Costco are not horrible at all. They are ordinary people who, on a very visceral level, realize that forces beyond their control are making their lives unrecognizable. They wince when they see gas prices. They know that the toilet paper they purchase is flimsy and more expensive. They have witnessed grocery prices skyrocket, and while their streets may be safe for the moment, they know that chaos lurks just a few miles away and is ready to stage an incursion into their neighborhoods.
They know that their chances of becoming a victim of crime, either at the hands of an illegal alien or a home-grown criminal, have increased exponentially. They may want to start a business or simply want to do business, but the chances for both are growing more and more distant on the horizon.
If they want to buy a home, they cannot. If they have a home, the possibility of keeping it becomes slimmer each day. On some level, everyone knows that China is sizing up Taiwan and that Putin, uncowed by an administration that could barely hold its own in a game of checkers, parked submarines uncomfortably close to the U.S. coast.
These people see their money evaporating and their families disintegrating. If their child comes home one day and announces their new pronouns and gender, they can do little more than grieve and hope that no one notices their tears. They know their world is spiraling out of control and heading to uncharted destinations. They know that they are drifting into parts of the map labeled “Here there be dragons” and that the dragons are of a kind that they could not possibly anticipate.
Whether they admit it or not, they are frightened of what is over the horizon. If passive-aggressive behavior in a box store or a roadway can suppress that dread, so be it. There are few refuges left in the world. They are angry and frightened. And they have every reason to be. Dread is a constant undercurrent in their lives.
They would like to be civil — they may even long for civility — but the world is becoming increasingly uncivil.
Even the most progressive among us, despite the flags they may hang from their porches or the “In This House We Believe” signs they post to keep the Angel of Wokeness from visiting their homes, know that there are only so many shibboleths left to utter. There is no denying that this generation’s “Great Uniter” has been unmasked as an avaricious fraud.
So the Horrible People of Costco are you and me. They are trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy and autonomy in a world in which, as Yeats put it, things have fallen apart and the center cannot hold. They are being forced unwillingly to slouch toward Bethlehem, and they only want to maintain some sense of themselves along the way and feel as if they have some measure of control over their lives.
