Did you stock up with stuff you don't need for today's game?

Gerard Vanderleun writes at American Digest,

...I don’t know why Wal-Mart is taking all the heat for box-store degradation of truth, justice and the American Way of Really Rich Americans. A brief tour of Costco reveals it is a much cheesier organization with the exploitation of the aged, the infirm, the alien, and the disabled more obviously on display. But who knows why some companies become fashionable to disparage while others get a semi-pass? It probably has to do with the jerking knee that says either, “Biggest is baddest,” or “The deepest pocket is the easiest to pick.” It may also have something to do with Costco’s founder jamming his overflowing sewer pipe from his money bin deep into the gaping orifices at the eternal Obama campaign….. but I digress.

The Wal-Mart stores that I’ve been in have the charm of a Swiss village compared to the Gulag atmosphere of CostCo. Oh, Costco has a look. The look is as if the Costco “Decor” vice president decreed, ”Hey, just pour a slab of concrete, drop bunches of crap here and there on the grid, and be done with it. Huh? Oh, okay slap up some industrial shelves so the bodegas of the world can find their salsa stock. And bolt some airport landing lights on the ceiling so you need to put on sunscreen before entering. Just light that sucker up so that nobody can smuggle a buttload of pretzels out the door.”

It is also evident to a single person in CostCo — in about two nanoseconds — that he or she needs to rent a family of 12 illegal aliens to get any real value out of the place. I mean, I like pickle relish on hot dogs just fine, but a two gallon container is probably enough that I can pass some on to my heirs even if I live another twenty years.

But all this carping arises from, as Wordsworth decreed, “Emotion recollected in tranquility.” The truth is that the moment I entered the measureless cavern of Costco my brain was colonized by its Conquistaconsumadoros and I was plunged into a fugue state.

I glanced at the recommended “small televisions” and rapidly lost interest. Still, my reptile consumer brain said, “You’ve come all this way and the bargains abound around you. You have to get something. Shop, shop, shop, my precious…. your eyelids are getting heavy, your wallet is getting light….. shop…. shop…..”

Then, just as my degradation deepened, I was saved. Saved by the bell. My cell-phone rang…. loudly and vibrating at the same time. (Hard to ignore the vibrating ring in your pants.) I answered it. It was a fellow Pajamaista (who assumes that I am always in front of the screen) about a detail on the home page. He was startled when I told him I wasn’t in front of the computer and could only mumble, “I… must… shop… must… shop… must.”

He said, “Man, you’re in Costco on the Saturday before Super Bowl? Are you crazy? Flee. FLEE!”

He hung up and I found that, suddenly, I’d been slapped back into reality. And it was grim.

The horror. The horror.

I realized that I had, in my fugue state, placed myself in the back of a gigantic box-store with minor in big screen TVs and a major in massive portions of food on the Saturday before the Super Bowl.

...How do you market yourself as a national pastime when you allow — and encourage — players to protest the flag and the national anthem that pays tribute to that flag? —
Don Surber

Still, there I was, blind and gulping like a cave fish in the deepest depths of the Costco caverns, the part back by the Topless Temple of Toilet Paper, 24 hours before kick-off, and around me countless hordes were preparing to feed even larger hordes.

I shoved my way through the cartlock around the beer and hot dogs to the center aisle where I could see, barely, the front of the store. In one horrified glance I saw that the Superbowlers were clogging the register lanes to a depth of about 500 fathoms. A quick consultation of my check-out line algorithm determined that if I joined the line at that very moment with my cart I might reach the parking lot with my crap around the end of the April.

This is the kind of blood-simple shopping moment that makes grown men ask, “How bad do you want the stuff you’ve got?”

Hard to answer since, frankly, I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d put in the cart in the first place. A glance down into the cart let me see my shame. It seems that in my shopping daze I’d decided I needed, out of everything on offer in Costco, two large Orchid plants and eight low-energy light bulbs. I have no idea why I put them in. Perhaps because the orchid plants made it easy to spot the cart in order to put nothing else in it.

Two orchid plants and eight light bulbs in a cart at the back of Costco equals one abandoned shopping cart, and me back in the car and heading to the nearest dive bar in order to clear my mind with six tequilas, three qualudes, and a cup of ether on the rocks.

But first I called my colleague back to thank him for snapping me out of it.

As I left the parking lot I had to drive carefully between the endless hordes pushing large carts filled with mountains of mediocre food and very large television screens. There would be a lot of cooking and assembly and swearing far into the night. I wished them well.

Now I’m back online and much more interested in what’s going on today. It’s so calm here. Just me and you… and you’re pretty quiet.

Read more here.