The Scene

lirastin
Warehous

JILL DAVIDSON SKLAR
Special to The Jewish News

A

fter 30 years of living, it
took one trip to a ware-
house store to realize that:
a) my mother is way ahead
of her time and
b) I have become my mother.
As I was growing up as the sixth of
seven children, my mother used all of
her powers to stay within a minimal
budget. She made a lot of our clothes
and purchased the others during
JCPenney's red tag days.
She never spent a dime on a clean-
ing lady, insisting on doing all of the
work herself while eschewing expen-
sive brand-name detergents in favor of
ammonia, vinegar, no-brand dish
detergent, warm water and a lot of
woman power. Except for an annual
foray into Bill Knapp's, she made all
of our meals from scratch.
So you could imagine my surprise
when she became a member of the now-
defunct PACE warehouse club after
most of her kids had grown and gone.
In a single trip she would haul home at
least $300 in goods that packed her
Honda Civic to the point of bursting.
Brand-name goods not only

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1/15
1999

112 Detroit Jewish News

replaced the Meijer no-name
items but did so in quantities
that I am sure are still around
15 years later. After all, who
can consume -a-half-barrel of
Lipton Iced Tea Mix in any-
thing short of a decade and a
half?
My mother became such a
fan of warehouse shopping that
she continued her membership
when Sam's Club bought the
PACE warehouse. She enticed
neighbors and my sisters to go
in on huge quantities of food items and
paper goods, thus single-handedly
growing the cult of warehouse shoppers.
Originally, I attributed her insanity
to growing up in post-Depression
Detroit. Stocking up on goods and
food in massive quantities ensured her
peace of mind in case the stock market
took a sharp turn for the worse, I ratio-
nalized.
But recently I began to notice that
more and more of my friends were
doing the same. They began to drop
references to a certain Costco, much
as normal people would celebrity
name-drop. But instead of saying, "I
saw Jeff Daniels the other day in
Somerset," they would say things like,
"I picked up a cashmere sweater for
$39.99 the other day. At Costco."
These are not older friends either.
Kari, 26, is stocking her new home
with toilet paper and paper towels and
her wardrobe with cashmere sweaters.
Veronica, 37, is loading up on Pull-
Ups that will easily carry her son
into summer. Depression-era logic
does not apply to them.
Not too long ago, they began
speaking in code. One recent
conversation — I am not
making this up — went like
this:
"Sixty ounces of choco-
late chips, $6," Kari
said, catching Dias
eye. "Costco?" asked

A writer
in the ais

-

Didi. Kari blushed, smiled and nod-
ded. They both sighed.
I had to find out what was causing
my friends to act like this. I dragged
my husband with me one day last
month to find this shopper's mecca,
this temple to supply and demand of
which all of my friends had become
card-carrying members.
Joel and I vowed not to spend more
than $20 as we entered the store and
even debated whether to take a cart
with us, lest we succumb to messages
of consumerism we were sure were
piped over the PA system and dis-
guised as music.
And then it happened. Within
steps of the entrance, my husband
became his father, a collector of all
sorts of relatively useless tools. In front
of a pile of flashlights stacked to the
ceiling, Joel proclaimed his desire to
own a set of three flashlights selling
for $14.69. One is currently latched
to his key ring, another is in a closet;
we have yet to build a shed to house
the third which is roughly the size of a
spotlight.
"When are we ever going to find
a deal like this on flashlights again?"
he asked, looking like a 3-year-old
who wants a sucker as he fondled
the package.
My metamorphosis happened in
the baking supply aisle. An avid baker,
I use only pure vanilla extract, a four-
ounce bottle of which set me back
$8.49 in December. I spied a 16-

ounce bottle of the same brand for
$6.39, savings of over $27.
"I'll go through this in no time," T
\i
said. "Besides, it would be a sin to
pass up such a good deal."
It was then that I felt like a
Lilliputian in the land of the giants.
My eyes opened to the multi-gallon
tubs of mayonnaise, the Kikkoman
Soy Sauce in paint thinner containers
(I only briefly wondered what that
meant about the sauce's effect on the
human body), cans of albacore tuna
the size and heft of my head.
My mind spun with the wretched
excess of it all as a feeling I can only
describe as wild desire grew.
In a flash, our composure faded.
With silly "I can't believe the deals we
are finding" grins plastered to our
faces, we grabbed an oversized cart
and soon filled it to the point of over
flow. Into it went two massive jars of
peanut butter for $5.99, a half-gallon
of honey for $4.99, 80 pounds of ice
melter at $17.29 (never mind that to
that point we hadn't had a snowy day,
much less ice, but the last rwo weeks
proved our sageness), 24 "AA" batter-
ies for $11.29, a two-liter bottle of
extra virgin olive oil at $7.69, my v-7/
own 60-ounce bag of chocolate chips;
enough minty Listermint ($5.99) to
stave off bad breath into the new mil-
lennium and, I kid you not, 96 rolls
of Charmin for just under $12.
The further we got into what begat
as a sight-seeing mission, the harder

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