Half Empty: A little shopping trip of huge proportions

I did the stupidest thing I think I have ever done, which isn't easy.

I went to Costco last Sunday morning.

My friend Joey lectured me about this. He goes to Costco every day, mostly to sample the food that comes in those little white cups used for medications in hospitals. Because he is from a small Southern town, where many hours are spent each day talking to the waitress about what is better today - the egg salad or tuna salad sandwich - he also enjoys small talk. As a result, he and the other regulars are quite up on the latest in Costco offerings. He has also studied the store's traffic flow patterns closely - I think of him as the Costco equivalent of an air traffic controller - and he said Sundays mornings can be life-threatening unless you get there the night before.

I should have listened to my friend Joey, but it is impossible for me to take anyone with a Southern accent too seriously. I figured I could go to Costco on Sunday morning around 11. I assumed most people would be in church, until it dawned on me that most hoagie and cheesesteak places are not open. When wife No. 3 was still here, she was the one who had Costco duty; when I asked her how Costco went, as husbands inevitably do while lying on the couch watching television, she knew right then and there she was going to take that job in the Middle East.

I drove to Costco out along Route 309. I think it was in Montgomeryville, but between the Best Buy, the Montgomeryville Mall, the Whole Foods, the Trader Joe's and all sorts of other retail outlets housed in such creative American architecture, it was hard to get a sense of place.

I have been to Costco before. I like the company because it offers its employees decent wages and health benefits. In order to accomplish this, they go easy on the décor. The place reminds me of a well-stocked Graterford with vats of mayonnaise big enough for swinger pool parties piled on top of each other instead of inmates, and I always have this feeling that the towering gray walls are just going to crumble. Costco experts like my friend Joey, I have no doubt they would escape in time, leaving only the neophytes to be crushed since we tend to be overwhelmed and sometimes paralyzed. Timing, I have learned, is everything at Costco.

The prices are remarkable, or at least they seem remarkable since you have to buy everything in very large multiples. The marketing concept is pure genius, since the Costco folks know that beginners will go down every row looking for deals, inevitably buying something of no use.

I needed one 9-volt battery, but I could only buy an eight-pack that I promise to leave in my will to my children. My friend Joey, who in addition to being Southern is becoming repetitive - a rather toxic combination - has told me at least a thousand times that the filet mignons are the best he has ever tasted. I passed, but did buy a very long pack of Lean Cuisines that would make a good cricket wicket.

I stayed away from any foods you had to prepare on your own. Since wife No. 3 left for her job, I do not like cooking just for the dog and myself. A dog will eat anything, and I have utilized the stove four times in five months. On three of those occasions I cooked soup, until I said the hell with it and started eating out of the can.

I bought the requisite 24-pack of Diet Coke and the 12-pack of Bounty paper towels that are really 22 because they have apparently been injected with some sort of paper Botox and are supersized. I bought a huge jar of Utz pretzels even though I don't particularly like pretzels. I bought the 18-pack of Scotch-Brite scrub sponges, only to discover when I returned home that I have 15 left from the last time I was there. The worst miscalculation was with the Ziploc bags, where I bought a 216-pack in the quart size and 117 in the gallon size. As it turns out we never use the quart size and needed the sandwich size.

I went to wait in line, and my friend Joey's dire warning proved to be correct. Shoppers with their oversized carts snaked halfway down the store. I thought of yelling, "ALL BOOKS BY ANYONE EXCEPT DAN BROWN NOW FIFTY CENTS!" but I don't think it would have created much of a stampede.

Still waiting, I decided I needed a case of Bufferin for my dog's ailing hip. I was right next to the drug aisle, far longer than Broad Street with nobody parking in the middle. I accidentally brushed a man with one of those Philadelphia faces that looks like a stop sign seriously shot up by a BB gun, and he was not pleased. I apologized on the way back. I am stupid but not entirely stupid.

Back in line, as I looked at my cart and pondered why I was purchasing 160 ounces of Liqid Plumr to fix a single shower, I understood.

Have friends overseas interested in visiting America? Tell them to skip Philadelphia or New York or Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles.

Send them to Costco on a Sunday morning despite what my friend Joey says. And when they walk away with a set of tires for a car they don't own, tell them they are only doing what the natives have been doing for years. Then show them your garage.