I was originally going to write this post in a rush of rant, and call it something like, "Costco: where the frothy milk of human stupidity is churned into the curdled butter of simian incompetence." But I didn't get to write it while I was still in the mood to vent, since I was busy cooking and washing clothing and putting away groceries and working on D3 site stuff all afternoon and evening. And now it's
12 24 hours later and I'm typing this
late night the next day, while sipping
soup and yawning water and sweating, and as is the case with most torrid flings, the bright early passion has cooled to a more contemplative, mature analysis. With that in mind...
I've complained about Costco in the past, and today I'm going to do so again. (Just be glad I don't shop at Wal-Mart, or this sort of thing would be every third post). Well, it's more that I complain about the customers I am forced to endure while buying crap in bulk at Costco. Obese, gluttonous, free-sample grubbing sluggards who thoughtlessly leave their carts mid-aisle to waddle to the next tiny cup of complimentary calories, perfectly demonstrating why the "fast lane" so seldom is, though there's usually more than enough pavement for all the cars to move at considerable speed.
Costco, like the freeway, is worse during rush hour, simply because it's more crowded. But like the freeway, during rush hour most of the traffic is comprised of professional drivers; people who drive every day. Usually to work. They're used to driving, they've got someplace to go, and they'd like to get there ASAP. Weekend drivers are generally less skilled since they don't drive to work every day, plus they've generally got nowhere to go and are in no rush to get there. In fact, they're often in an anti-hurry, actually wishing to not get there, since when they get to wherever "there" is, they'll have to do chores, or housework, or put up with their inlaws, or pick up their bratty, Coke-hyperactived kids from their play date.
Costco during weekday afternoons is equivalent to freeways on weekends. The roads/aisles are the same, but even though there are fewer people, they're so much slower and less competent and aware that they 1) take up more space, and 2) are far more annoying as they do (fail) it.
To indulge in an ironic digression, the worst person at Costco today wasn't that slow. Her sin was physical unsightliness. She was a woman of about average height (she was actually rather tall for a Hispanic), but of considerably more than average girth, the majority of which could be found below her belt. Not that she was wearing a belt, which was part of the problem. She was wearing a tight white t-shirt on top, with black low rise panties down lower, which were in turn shrink-wrapped by dark red tights. This might have been a delightful
site sight, if she'd contained oh... half the mass?
Not so much.
She had to be somewhere north of two bills. Maybe 100kg, but Kardashian-like, she wasn't
that disproportional. Just overstuffed, like a walking, loudly-talking, bottom-heavy, faux-leather recliner. Or perhaps a
sumo chair. The vexing part was that she seemed to be reverse following me. Three different times in 10 minutes I turned onto an aisle, or approached an aisle I wished to turn down, and she was there, just ahead of me, facing away from me, and chattering away at her 1/3rd size Mini-Her accomplice.
Did not want!
I literally turned around one time, and moved on past the aisle she'd claimed two other times. My only good look at her came the first time, when I found myself staring in something approximating horror. It was a lingering, train wreck-esque stare. What was so bad about walking behind her? I can only answer with another analogy: Late last night, when I got back from the airport and carried in all my luggage and the loudly protesting Jinxie, I turned on my computer for the first time in nearly two weeks, after spending 8 days in San Diego and 3 more in Anaheim at BlizzCon. It nearly blinded me.
My monitor is large, old, and very bright. I run it with the brightness on 0 and the contrast on about 50, and don't have white as any default color, since it's dazzling. I'd used a number of other computers during the past week; my Dad's, my Mom's, and several borrowed laptops in the press room at BlizzCon, and they'd all looked fine. This one, in comparison, was like the surface of the sun. I've been blinded by it in the past, but I get used to it since I see it every day. After not seeing it for so long the difference was very clear, and rather than squinting and bearing it I resolved to decrease the brightness. I could not turn down the monitor any further short of installing some of that bubbily, DIY tinted glass plastic wrap you see in the back windows of rice rockets, so I went into the nVidia control panel, where I slid down the brightness and gamma, and tweaked the contrast a bit. It looked a bit dingy, but the sample images were okay. However, when I started surfing and catching up on various sites after nearly a fortnight w/o, I found myself peering in confusion at a lot of images. Anything with a dark shape on a dark background was indecipherable. I saw shapes and curves and outlines, but it was impossible to make out what images were, or to recognize enough of the key features.
I ignored it, until I tried to watch some football highlights on NFL.com, and found myself unable to make out anyone's face under their helmet. Black guys were just blanks in the shadow behind their facemasks, and even the white guys were pretty well shrouded. So I turned up the gamma a bit and upped the brightness on my monitor controls, and found a more manageable level.
My expression while trying to recognize anything composed of dark brown on black was the same face I made when first looking at that woman's ass in Costco today. My mental state was quite similar as well. I sort of squinted, and turned my head from side to side, like
the RCA dog. I've seen asses before. In fact, the prospect of seeing women in tights is the thing that gets me to the gym before 9 most nights, since it's a dispiriting sausage-fest past 10pm. I've made something of a study of that portion of the human anatomy, and I'm reasonable certain that I know how they are formed. Two legs, thighs, hips, etc. Indeed, this woman contained the usual components of a human's lower body, but with each leg perhaps double the usual circumference, and so tightly hugged by her impossibly-inappropriate garment, it was as eye-baffling as the dark images had been on my recalibrated monitor. I could see the shape, but the revealed details didn't match my preconceptions.
In retrospect, I think it was the all-too-clearly visible panties that really disturbed my visual estimate. They were a large item of clothing. If they'd been men's underwear there would have been at least one "X" in the size. Probably 2 or 3. A normal woman would have put both legs through one leg hole. This lady wore them like a rubber band around a chocolate chip muffin, and as a result I found my horrified eyes roaming helplessly back and forth, trying to account for the square footage of hip and thigh that swelled, in all directions, past the tortured black elastic and beneath the equally-tortured red spandex. You ever seen a tree limb that's grown through a chain link fence? Like that. But moving behind a shopping cart. In broad store-light.
I've seen plenty of fatter people, but virtually never in such a form-hugging garment. I hope never to see one again.
Between that (repeated) sight, the amount of crap I had to buy after eating or otherwise disposing of most everything in my apartment before my vacation absence, the general feeling of malaise I had at being back home after some relaxing time away, and the numerous weekday afternoon, CostCo-filling old people who all seemed to be standing cluelessly mid-aisle while their palsied hands shoveled free bites of semi-food into their dentured mouths, I was in a pretty bleak mood. It was not improved when I finally reached the cashier, after an interminable wait in line, and beheld his assistant using the comically-inefficient "cart switching" method. I've seen that in action a few other times at CostCo, and always figured it was an in-store joke.
When I used to work at the stadium in San Diego, the vending stand managers would occasionally amuse themselves by sending a new and gullible employee off to retrieve the "left-handed crescent wrench." Everyone knew the game, so when the new guy would trudge over to C-37, wouldn't you know that they'd just lent the wrench to U-16. Which had sent the hardware snipe down to B-32. And so on. I assumed that most guys caught on pretty quickly, laughed at the initiation joke, and waited their turn to use it on some new employee even dumber than themselves. So I assume it goes with the backwards cart technique at Costco.
All the sensible cashiers there simply scan the bulk item crap and put it back into the cart, sometimes taking a second longer to stack it into a box of some sort. If there's heavy stuff, like cases of water or soda or 50lbs of dog food, they scan it while it's still in the cart, which is the whole reason they've got those price checking guns on cords; so they don't
have to lift the heavy stuff out of the cart. It's such an obvious and simple approach that it's not even worth the sentence of description I just gave it. Giving instructions on that is like telling someone how to take a shower; you don't imagine anyone would ever need to be told, since it's so self-evident.
Which makes the backwards cart method all the stranger, and is what makes me think it's the Costco version of the left-handed crescent wrench. When they get a new and particularly stupid employee they start him off on cashier assistance, where he has to do nothing more challenging than turn heavy items so the SKU is up and scannable, and put the crap back into the cart after it's been scanned. I'm quite certain any of the higher primates could be trained to perform that job adequately, and suspect that your average gorilla, or bonobo, would be better at it than the pimply high school students Costco usually has toiling away at the task. I further suspect that you could not get an ape to use the backward cart method, since the animal would see the stupidity of taking each cart, turning it around backwards, and laboriously transferring everything from each customer's cart to another cart. The Costco employees? Not so much.
Let me clarify. The backwards cart mechanism requires an extra, empty shopping cart. It's turned backwards, so it faces the incoming carts. The cashier's assistant takes everything out of each shopper's cart, puts it on the conveyor belt to be scanned, and then puts it into the second, backwards cart. Then, when the customer has paid and is ready to go, the second, freshly-loaded cart is backed around the end of the cashier's table, the handle conveniently facing towards the customer who is about to roll it out the door.
That's not so bad. What makes it left-handed crescent wrench-comparable is the wasted prep time. Once they've loaded a cart and delivered it unto the shopper, they've got to turn around the other cart, the one the last customer wheeled up to the cash register. Better yet, this method defeats the entire purpose of those "leave heavy items in cart" signs they have near every register. It wasn't so bad with my cart, since I just had one brick of Diet Pepsi, and a 10 lbs bag of potatoes in my cart. Not too hard to switch over, though the bag boy had to squat down and slide the sodas from beneath my cart onto the new one.
The guy before me in line though, had 4 cases of soda, plus a large pumpkin in his cart. Any competent cashier would just have wheeled it through, scanned the prices, and been done. Not Mr. backwards cart man. Nope, he hunkered down and dragged those 3 cases of soda from the underneath tray over to the underneath tray on the other cart, and followed that by lifting the 4th case and the pumpking out of the cart and putting them into the backwards one. He then had to scramble to stuff all the guy's other items into his new cart, since the cashier had already rung him up, and all that pointless soda dragging had taken some time.
I watched this US Army-level inefficiency as I always do, with one eyebrow slightly raised and a half smile affixed to my mouth. As Malaya once pointed out, when it was already too later to matter... if I had an LOLcat totem,
it would be this one.
The only possible benefit of this technique is that the customer's cart is backwards once loaded, which lets the cashier's assistant push it around the end of the cashier's table so the handle is right at the customer's hands. The alternative is to pull it through forwards, so it has to be wheeled out a whole step, then turned to the left so the handle is at the customer's hands. That difference is both pointless and negligible, but it's something. The really inexplicable part is why they switch things to a second cart every time. Why not just turn around the customer's own cart? It would be equally pointless, but at least it wouldn't require all the items to be shifted from one cart to another. Plus, what do they do when someone comes up with one of those flatbed, six-wheeled carts that look like escapees from a home improvement store? People get those at Costco when they're shopping for a summer camp or a restaurant, and need to buy like, 20 cases of bottled water, or 5000 rolls of toilet paper. Not only is the volume of goods on those push carts too great to be transferred to a regular shopping cart, but the backwards cart is in the way once the flatbed is rolled through.
Flatbed carts aside, try to imagine how awkward it is to squat down beneath a shopping cart and slide 36-can cartons of soda or beer from the bottom of one cart to the bottom of another one? Wouldn't you realize the stupidity of that after doing it like, once, and realize that no, there wasn't actually a left-handed crescent wrench, and stop humiliating yourself by walking all over the goddamned stadium in search of it?
Of course you would. And that's why you don't work at Costco, or if you do, you aren't fool enough to use the backwards cart method.
Unsurprisingly, after bag boy clumsily muscled my caffeine and aspartame delivery devices and taters into my "new" cart, he started to dump the black olives and frozen pizzas and lettuce and mushrooms and other stuff right into the cart.
"Can you put those in a box?" I said, surprised, and yet not surprised, that I had to ask him to do so. He kind of grunted, then squatted down again and pulled out a box that had once held a lot of pecan halves (it's still sitting by the door, since Jinxie was sprawling in it all night and I was too lazy to carry it out to the trash tonight). Which was fine, except that box was large enough to hold maybe 1/3 of my loose items. Which defeated the whole purpose of putting the stuff into a box... so it wouldn't take the customer (me, in this case) 11 trips to carry it all from their car to their fridge.
I let him keep going, and wondered if he'd see any problem with putting just a giant tray of mushrooms, an 8-pack of canned black olives, and a bag of lettuce into the tiny box, while stacking maybe 10 other items loosely into the cart. Nope, it all looked fine to him, and when I caught his eye, flicked my eyes to the loose heap of stuff in the cart, and said, "Think that box is big enough?" he just sort of stared at me for a second, before rolling my (new) cart backwards around the corner, where I could grab it while he hurried to turn my former cart around backwards, to get it ready for the next lady in line.
Back when I worked at the stadium, I don't recall ever noticing any strong correlation between general job incompetence and left-handed crescent wrench gullibility, but in retrospect, and with today's data factored in, it certainly seems likely. Lots of humans just don't think. Or aren't smart enough to evaluate their actions in any sort of impartial fashion. Self awareness and intellect don't necessarily share any more correlation than gullibility and incompetence -- but I think there's got to be a fairly robust overlap between both sets of data. I do not think there's such an overlap between intellect, self-awareness, and success. The ability/likelihood of learning from mistakes does not require an individual to apprehend them in their entirety. In fact, such contemplation and navel-gazing (the type I enjoy indulging in) is quite possibly/probably an obstacle to improvement, since it's easy to over-analyze what you've done, and why, instead of just doing something different/better in the future.
I'll have to give that some thought... oh wait.
Labels: obesity, shopping
