Sense of community at the Costco

We often joke with friends that, in this town, trips to the Costco are social events. You look forward to them.

At the Costco, you almost always bump into someone you know. And if you don’t, it’s easy to strike up conversations with total strangers. Somehow because it’s the Costco, they are less strange, and more friendly.

Once I dropped a camera I had purchased at the Costco the year before. So I took it to the service counter thinking a big operation like this must offer a repair service. “Oh sir,” the clerk said as he pulled up my records, “you bought this eleven months ago, so it's within one year; just go pick out another one.”

What?

“Just pick out a new one, sir, and bring it back here. We’ll work out the difference.”

I ended up with a more advanced model of the same camera, and it was selling for less than what I had spent on the older model. So they gave me the new camera with a refund.

Now, I’m no dummy (I don’t think) and I understand marketing strategies like cultivating customer loyalty. But come on.

At the Costco everything is sold in bulk. For example you don’t just buy a head of lettuce; you buy five of them in one bundle. You don’t just buy a box of cereal; you buy a carton with boxes of cereal in it. At the Costco, shoppers push oversized carts. Some dispense with all modesty and push around pallets stacked with oversized merchandise. Muscles strain. You get a workout shopping at the Costco.

But whatever calories you work off are easily replenished by the free food samples dispensed along the warehouse-like isles.

At the Costco, I feel a sense of community, a sense of place.

Horrors!

The community planning experts think of big box stores like the Costco as symbols of all that is wrong with American urban environments: oversized cars in oversized parking lots along oversized highways littered with oversized box stores selling food that make people oversized.

Well they may have a point. But when I'm reading what they have to say, and (rarely) when I actually meet a community planning expert, I never feel at home. At the Costco, somehow I do.

Logos2Go

No specific passages spurred me to write this, but it strikes me that kindness, respect, and basic goodness to others go much further in creating “sense of community” than regulatory prescriptions, zoning laws, tax abatements, and so on. So here:

Zechariah 7.9 Thus says the Lord of hosts, Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another …

Acts 28.2 The native people showed us unusual kindness, for they kindled a fire and welcomed us all, because it had begun to rain and was cold.

Galatians 5.22-23 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.