She turns into the oversized lot that spans a veritable city block, parks in a space large enough to accommodate the door swing on a ’73 Grand Marquis coupe, trudges a quarter mile to the supersized entrance and collects a cart that comes up to her chin.
A petite woman is about to go shopping at Costco.
Like a biblical David, or perhaps just the height-challenged ager she is, she pushes the steel cart with trepidation. There are humans bustling everywhere, walking, lifting, turning blind corners and gazing upwards.
The warehouse ceiling is sky high. The shelves holding lifetime supplies of oatmeal, granola bars and tomato paste stretch well into the clouds.
Everything is big. Really big. And she has suddenly become one of Wayne Szalinski’s shrunken movie kids.
All her life she has struggled to reach things. Being 5 feet tall in a world that designs everything from sun dresses to drivers’ seats for people with 32-inch inseams is not easy.
She can’t reach the ATM machine without getting out of the car. She’s a regular at the tailor shop. And she has to laugh off jokes about whether she meets the height requirements to go on a roller coaster.
Grocery shopping poses a unique set of challenges that involves tippy toes and resourcefulness.
Once, she actually climbed into the freezer at a Jewel to retrieve a package of green beans in the way-back.
Most times, she can use a box of spaghetti as an arm extension to shove a bag of chips or container of frozen vegetables closer to the edge so they gently fall into her arms. If that doesn’t work, or if the desired item — say, a glass jar of marinara sauce — is heavy enough to knock her out if things go awry, she’ll seek help.
Recently, while shopping at Pete’s Market, she enlisted the aid of another shopper to grab a jar of raspberry jam from the top shelf.
“I do this every week for people,” he said in a consoling voice. And then he shared a recipe for raspberry shortbread cookies.
Being short is not such a hardship when it leads to a friendly encounter.
She is fortunate that her husband is over 6 feet tall and that, when he can, is willing to accompany her.
But most times, having to ask someone if they can help her reach something only makes her feel smaller.
Still, food is a necessity, and so week after week into the giant’s corn maze she goes.
Mariano’s seems the most accessible to her, followed by Meijer and Jewel. Pete’s, with its high shelves, is another story. Sometimes she promises herself she won’t look up while shopping. If you can’t see something gleaming from the top shelf, you won’t covet it.
Costco, the discount wholesaler, is the most challenging.
Not only do the warehouse shelves stretch to the heavens, each unit of food or cleaning supplies or toilet paper is extra big and extra heavy.
Still, times are tough and shoppers must be too.
She has found the cost of tomato paste, nuts, diapers for the grandchildren, meat and even floral bouquets to be worth the cost of membership.
Sometimes, she picks up a case of peaches or a bunch of bananas, which are not only affordable but, of course, delightfully huge.
And how can she pass up a juicy rotisserie chicken for just a few bucks? Of course, she knows they’ll be eating chicken for a week, but such a deal.
One can quickly fill a Costco cart to capacity, which is why some shoppers prefer to pile their goods onto a massive industrial cart. Our intrepid shopper has considered using one but worries, “What if I can’t push it out of the store and the quarter mile to my car?”
When she first started shopping at the megastore, she worried that a small person behind the wheel of a large shopping cart laden with oversized boxes of Swiffer floor wipes and supersized pots of marigolds could be dangerous.
But she quickly came to grasp the culture of this retail giant.
Yes, there are people with carts moving in every direction. But upon close examination, she quickly notices that these shoppers are extremely focused, perhaps consumed with the mental math of saving money or the coming engineering throwdown of Jenga-ing their goods into the car.
This is not to say Costco shoppers are inattentive. Rather, they don’t sweat the small stuff. If a petite person struggling to control a large cart with a mind of its own accidentally bumps into them, it tends to go unnoticed or is quickly forgiven.
It’s as if everyone understands there are bigger fish to fry when balancing jumbo purchases and jumbo savings.
Perhaps the biggest saving grace of shopping at Costco is that this comparatively small human doesn’t have to take things out of the cart and pile them onto a conveyer. The cashier simply scans the barcodes of the goods in the basket and off our consumer goes.
Getting things into her car and later, into her house — well, that’s another column.
Donna Vickroy is an award-winning reporter, editor and columnist who worked for the Daily Southtown for 38 years. She can be reached at donnavickroy4@gmail.com.
