On September 21, 2012, on the morning of my 35th birthday, I entered the YMCA in downtown Boise, Idaho, with the goal of setting a new personal best in the one-mile run. My record up to that point was 6 minutes and 28 seconds, reluctantly achieved during the middle school hell of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Presidential Physical Fitness Test. As I approached 35, I was running more than I ever had in my three-and-a-half decades on this oxygen-rich sphere, and I wanted to put my meat-coated skeleton to the test. Aided by climate control, LCD Soundsystem and the variable speed technology of a treadmill, I beat my previous record by 28 seconds, running a mile in 6 minutes flat. But I recently set a new Chad-speed record that I’m far more proud of, and that’s getting in and out of Costco with a cart full of groceries in under 13 minutes.

Shortly after moving to the Akron-Cleveland suburbs, we bit the bulk-food bullet and bought our first Costco membership. Blame the Veggie Bites. My parents, longtime Costco members, found this addictive delectable while searching for meatless treats to serve while we squatted with them until our new house closed. I had never stepped foot in a Costco, but the big, bright, retina-burning halogen image was already there thanks to my previous exposure to a competing retail wholesaler, the regrettably-named BJ’s. In college, a girlfriend briefly worked at BJ’s and tried to sell me on the virtues of bulk goods at bargain prices, but the early-20s version of me, a moody contrarian with a healthy distrust of bourgeois trappings, viewed this world of borderline-erotic American excess with a level of disgust. I wanted nothing to do with it, and I stuck to my price guns for two decades. My wife, Erica, was of the same mindset; we were not Costco people, and we never would be. Even if we wanted to be, we simply didn’t have the room to store all those bargain wares in our small house in Boise.

But when we got to Ohio and found ourselves with much more space, our stance on Costco softened to the point where we started considering a membership. But before we committed, we took a tour with my parents one Sunday afternoon during the peak of the post-church shitshow, quite possibly the worst time of the week to get anything done in public, especially when discount groceries are involved. Every aisle was crammed with lollygaggers, apocalypse shoppers and human roadblocks whose movements – or lack thereof – implied confusion or lack of purpose or somewhere in between. Unless it’s a record store, or Erica and I are somewhere east of sober and west of drunk, I’m not a huge fan of shopping, especially for groceries, and other humans are the main reason why. I go to the store on a mission, with a list in hand, and my strategy is to get in and out as quickly as possible, like pooping on a public toilet; metaphorically speaking, I want my grocery shopping to be like my ass barely touched the seat, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it over the years. If I were to put together a pandemic playbook for a future health crisis, the first line of the grocery store chapter would be, Shop old, shop odd, shop angry. Think of the odd loner who does his shopping at 10pm to avoid other people, the grizzled old man hard-charging from point A to point B with a baseline of contempt, hoping the world doesn’t piss him off any more than it did when he woke up that morning in his lonely bed with his lower back on fire. I’m not saying be a dick; it’s possible to be quick AND nice, and there’s a lesson to be learned watching the arm-pumping guy who looks like he’ll blow a gasket if he can’t get to the Diet Pepsi and get back to his cave before the start of Gutfeld!

I could tell from our parental-guided trial run that this approach would be tricky at Costco, where shopping is something like a hero’s quest with multiple narrative conflicts: man against man, man against society and, most importantly, man against self. In every direction, Costco leads you into temptation – vats of sugar and fat, tubs of chemical dipping goop, sensible slacks that share a brand name with the giant jar of minced garlic – and everything is priced to deliver you straight to the doorstep of your evil consumerist impulses. Shopping in this manner betrayed my better instincts, but oh, the cheap delights we found: bags of organic dried mango bigger than a Brooklyn apartment; jars of pretzels some god among mortals infused with peanut butter; and last but not least, Heavenly Hunks – and no, we’re not talking a daily desk calendar featuring the hard bodies of contemporary Christianity, but vegan oatmeal/dark chocolate cookies, and Jesus, they’re delicious. Which is to say, we were sold on Costco, and on subsequent visits as a card-carrying member, I found even more household essentials in mind-boggling quantities: a six-pack of romaine hearts, a container of 125 dishwasher cubes, a 12-pack of jumbo paper towel rolls, a bag of broccoli bigger than most newborn babies. On one hand, that’s a shit-ton of dishwasher cubes – I’ve had relationships that lasted much shorter than 125 wash cycles – on the other hand, dish cubes are now one less thing spinning on my carousel of worries. But the big-ass perishable bags of broccoli and romaine present challenges for a family of three even with the amount of vegetables we consume, but so far so good on our efforts to get through them before they stink up the fridge. I’m grateful for the teamwork. One of the most depressing aspects of being single was trying to get through a loaf of bread before it went bad. I could never do it. I always thought half-loaves could be a market to corner with the sad-bastard single set, but this is America and we go big here.

Which brings us to the falafel. One day, a few trips into my shiny new life as a Costco member, the organic falafel caught my eye in the open-air cooler. As much as I love falafel, we had never made it or brought it into our home other than takeout and I had never considered its shelf life, and anyway, two pounds didn’t seem that excessive. But I was quickly learning that good decisions get left in the parking lot at Costco, and that the gauntlet of gadgets and plush throws you pass through upon entry acts as a sort of neural disruptor. By the time you get to the grocery section in the back, your resolve is weakened to the point it’s no longer a matter of weighing a good choice against a bad one, because there are no bad choices inside the Costco funhouse, just good prices, and woo hoo, organic falafel, y’all. The big comedown comes at home, when you take a closer look at the packaging and read the line, Eat within five days of opening. And you think, okay, we can do this, so you get some pita and bake some falafel and when you’re done and everyone is full, it looks like you’ve barely made a dent in the container. But no matter, falafel is good and there’s nothing wrong with a rerun, so you ignore the next day’s diarrhea and do it again for dinner that night. But after more diarrhea in the morning, followed by a temperature check and a quick inventory of other potential causes, two days of empirical evidence suggests that it is in fact the Costco falafel balls giving you the runs, but you’ve already committed yourself to eating two pounds of them at an Olympic pace even as your colon begs you to stop. What’s the return policy on diarrhea? There’s nothing in the FAQ section of the Costco website to address this particular concern, so you think about getting the blender involved and wonder how much peanut butter it would take to mask the taste and make a tolerable smoothie, and the fact you’ve even gone down this rabbit hole of thought might be indicative of a larger problem, and you just hope your journey doesn’t end at urgent care with an anal fissure.

Is it all worth it, the stress of the crowds and the gastrointestinal distress? Are we really saving money, or are we canceling it out with all those sweet and salty add-ons? My parents warned that even if you go in to grab a few quick things, you still end up spending 70 bucks in spite of yourself. The whole Costco concept is something like the 10-hot-dogs/eight-hot-dog-buns trap taken to its logical capitalist conclusion, a riddle you aren’t meant to solve, especially when you’re lost in the hallucinatory spell of halogen lights and wholesale prices. Pumping my angry-man arms through the aisles and fast-walking my way to a new personal record, watching the sea of humanity around me fall prey to flatscreens and flat-racks of store-brand soda, pretending I’m not one of them as I reach for more peanut butter pretzels and goddamn Heavenly Hunks, I ask myself: Have I become the person I feared, or the person I was destined to be?

Pass the falafel.

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