Costco - Don't You Dare Go All Wal-Mart On Me!!!

I had to check the sign on the building today. Was this dirty, overcrowded, understaffed store I walked into my beloved Costco? The lure of gas at $3.01 a gallon and a need for more paper towels and bottled water sent me there for my bi-monthly trip.

When we walked in it was difficult to find a cart without trash in it. And, I don't mean little "sample cup" trash, I'm talking empty bottles bags, trash. Yuck. I thought for a moment of cleaning the carts myself to protect Costco's pristine reputation, but then realized that was a little on the ridiculous side seeing as how the inside of my van looked much worse than the carts did.

When we got inside, the lines at the registers almost made me walk back out the door. Then there was the one lady yelling (to no one in particular), "Nobody ever came back to help me! Nobody! I've been waiting all this time!".

Yikes.

On the bright side, #3 tried and sort of liked eggplant ravioli. That's a vegetable serving, right? She also tried and LOVED fiery buffalo wings with a whopping 5 fats grams per piece....she licked the bone clean (that's my girl!).

I walked through Costco marveling at the fact that it looked as if locusts had devoured most of the items I came there to buy. There were no good flavor combinations of muffins (corn and chocolate? Ugh!). Only 3 "take and bake" pizzas were in the empty case and I wondered what is wrong with them that those were the 3 that were not chosen? I moved on and decided on frozen pizzas instead. I was starting to become afraid. Am I on some weird hidden camera reality show? I hope not, because I had my hideous puffy coat on to hide the stain on my white shirt.

Lastly, the little Clementine oranges were in utter disarray. That is because there were two brands of them and the brand on the top of the pile was rotten. There was an orange that was completely a white fuzzy deflated ball similar to what I used to grow in my own refrigerator when I was a younger, more food-wasting mom (sleep deprivation was the culprit for all the London broils I left in the car trunk for several days and all the fresh fruit I was too tired to peel). After I used strength the equivalent of 100 horses, I managed to grab a box of Clementines from the middle of the stack only to find many of them were slightly green.

Costco!!! Have you lost all sense of who you are??? I do not pay $100 a year to shop at Sharp Shopper and that's what you were starting to remind me of today.

Thank goodness, at the snack bar I had a delicious churro and a 58 cent fountain Diet Coke or I would've gone all postal on you today. Oh, and the fact that #3 ate something with eggplant in it. Those were your only saving graces, I'm afraid.

I hope for your sake it was a fluke. Tsk, tsk!

Seriously though, it would take some major life-altering circumstance to make me stop shopping there!