Cheaper by the Scanner
Costco, Efficiency, and Human Connection
It should come as no surprise that we go to Costco most Saturdays.1
We have two kids, we’re in our 30s and live in the suburbs, and so obviously we are at the life stage where a good Saturday involves pancakes,2 laundry, and a Costco run.
I am married to a self-described extreme extrovert. My extroversion is a little bit more like truffle oil: refined, but a little goes a long way and perhaps you should just admire from a safe distance and with some Parmesan cheese. Accordingly, I found an iPhone note from the first year we were married that is signed (duh, we’re both lawyers) and dated and says, “Alexandra can spend time by herself.”3
So, for most of our marriage, I have let my husband go to Costco without me. He takes the boy and I get some stuff done around the house. Yay.4
But lately, I’ve been coming too. Something about the baby being able to sit in the cart next to her brother and knowing that fake sugar in a protein shake as a sample doesn’t count5 and, not to be a sap, but family time. And recently, our Costco added little membership card scanners instead of just having someone look at your membership card. But to enforce that you have to scan the membership card, they have someone standing next to the scanner.
That’s right. Where you used to have two olds6 standing at the entrance to Costco to check to make sure only members7 came through, now you have two scanners, supervised by two olds, to make sure that only members come through. And now, actually, the olds aren’t standing there watching the crowd to make sure that everyone scans their card. They’re watching the scanners, either to make sure they work or to avoid eye contact or because technology has a bewitching property that makes us look at it regardless of what else we’re supposed to be doing.
So it’s not just less efficient, it’s also less welcoming, and you’ve lost the eagle eyes of real people because they’re now just watching scanners scan.8 And they’re already scanning your membership card when you check out. So unless it’s a meaningful metric to be tracking the number of people with a weird combination of a lot of self control and nowhere else to be on a Saturday, who come in to Costco and leave without purchasing anything, then your scanners at the front are not providing you with either data or a service.
This kind of stuff makes me crazy. Quit putting technology there when it’s just adding work and making everything less efficient. Just go back to the system of having some real humans at the door — because you still have the real humans at the door. But let them be humans and not scanner monitors.
This is part of why I think I’ve started going to Costco. Being together can’t always happen, and there is no replacement for the eagle eyes of a mom. And otherwise I’d have to completely cut out seed oils.
I mean, a really good Saturday would involve waffles, but see footnote one in this post and appreciate what a world we’re building here. And note that if you don’t click on the self-referential link the first time, I will keep giving you opportunities to drive web traffic.
Incredibly, the traditional wedding vows do not include “for extreme extroversion or grumpy cat introversion,” which just proves that marriage is an older institution than the Internet.
Footnote to the footnote: it is, incredibly, still technically correct to capitalize “internet,” and I admit I hate it. So I pretty much don’t do it here. But I did it there at the end of footnote 3.
People are always saying stuff like “your 30s are a time when getting enough sleep and doing your laundry sounds fun” or “this is adulting: eating right and paying your bills” or “it was so nice of my spouse to do some chores with the kid so I could do some other chores with the baby” and like, I don’t know what to tell you. All of this is true. Also no one is actually having fun not getting enough sleep, not doing their laundry, eating junk food, and being chased by debt collectors. Admittedly it is easier to run from debt collectors if you don’t have kids, and probably 50/50 on whether your spouse is ultimately just blindly supportive of you and helps you run from the debt collectors or whether you married an adult who is like, “she’s in the closet; she couldn’t drive anywhere; her car broke down; please only break one of her fingers or the girls at work are going to be mean.”
I mean, this is a concept that we explore much more fully in my book One Thousand Calorie Salads and Other Regrets—which can only be published if you dutifully click links and make your friends subscribe—but basically I don’t believe that small things can/should count. So like, sure, fake sugar is bad for you, but a sample is such a tiny amount of fake sugar, probably your body won’t notice. You know that scene where Indiana Jones has to swap the idol for the bag of sand and he’s just a little bit off and the mechanism notices and the temple of doom or whatever tries to kill him? I pretty much think that is not at all how the human body works. So, calories and fake sugar and seed oils don’t count in samples.
Speaking of which, the MAHA thing is really something. Today, there was a sample stand at Costco that had, I kid you not, a jar of vegetable oil. I jokingly said to my husband, “what, is that a seed oil sample?” But he didn’t hear me because he was being a good husband and was already in line to get us a sample of seed oils. He came bouncing back with a chicken wonton! Absolutely the most premium sample item of the day. And I thought about it for a minute and how I had literally just said it was a seed oil sample, and they had prominently displayed the seed oils they were cooking it in, and then I remembered that my body can’t register the calories or seed oils in a tiny little chicken wonton and I popped that delicious morsel into my mouth. The three-year-old politely declined his. That kid is going to live forever.
I mean this in the loving kind of internet way only. Also, alarmingly, some of the people scanning membership cards at our Costco are not even old. They’re like barely middle aged. Around the age of your friends’ parents when you were in college, so I guess like however old parents are now, minus like 10-15 years? I don’t know what you call them. Middles? Other people’s parents? Mr. and Mrs. Williams?
Unlike some places on the internet, this is OnlyMembers, not only fans. (Please please please do not Google that).
“Watching scanners scan” has to be like 1200% less interesting than “watching who all comes through the door of a Costco in Ohio,” and yet I know that if I were a Costco scanner, I would almost certainly be watching the scanner scan despite the incredible kaleidoscope of humanity passing through my domain on their way to get protein shake and wonton samples. And if you think of this less as the entrance to a wholesale warehouse with a bunch of people’s carts crowding in, and more as a “domain,” there are really some exciting bridge troll opportunities.
Everyone always thinks little girls want to grow up to be princesses, and boys want to grow up to be heroes, and maybe thanks to years of antihero propaganda there are some kids who want to grow up to be dragons, but very few kids want to grow up to be bridge trolls. But might that also be a problem of representation? There just are not a lot of movies about bridge trolls and very few opportunities to interact with bridge trolls in real life. But if you would settle for being a Costco Entrance troll, I think you could do big things. Like what if you made people answer a riddle as they scanned their membership cards? Or guess what card you had behind your back? Or perform a feat of strength? Some real possibilities here.