A lot of people I know go to one of the warehouse clubs (Sam’s, Costco, BJ’s) for great deals buying in bulk. It’s always a good feeling to get four servings of something for the price you’d pay for about two in even your most economical supermarket.* Of course, you have to take the good with the bad when you shop those warehouse clubs, and the bad, in this case, is that you usually end up shopping with about 2500 of your closest friends. This is most evident when you are ready to check out and end up fifth in a line of stuffed-to-the-gills shopping carts.
I have found a better way.
My trip to the Costco Business Center
I had heard of the Costco Business Center before now, of course. Our office got our most recent coffeemaker from there after its predecessor was destroyed in what I am sure would have been a great story if I could have remembered it.
That’s pretty much what I thought when I thought of the Business Center: lots of appliances and things for businesses, especially restaurants. (It is called the Business Center, after all.) And a lot of the items there are certainly geared toward business owners big and small (even stocking huge boxes of snack bags for vending machines, for example).
So, when I was asked by my wife to pick something up there (for the simple reason that it is much more convenient to my office than to the house), I really didn’t know what I was going to see. She told me that the club location we frequent was dropping the chili powder we like to pick up there. A Costco employee told her that chili powder was still being carried at the Business Center, and so I made a slight detour after work to check it out.
The first thing I noticed when I arrived at the Business Center, around 5:00 on a Friday afternoon, was that the parking lot couldn’t have had more than 20 cars in it. This played out inside; there were minutes at a time when I passed no one in the store. (And it was even more obvious when I was able to walk right up to a checkout lane.)
Now, I will say that the store, for the newcomer, is not easy to navigate. It isn’t laid out like a normal Costco (which, again, should be obvious given the name). There aren’t the typical clothing or media displays, and they don’t have the consumer electronics section I am so used to seeing the moment I walk in. Also not present are the café, the optical department, or the pharmacy, all departments which are geared toward the individual shopper, rather than the business owner.
Eventually, I found the spices. As might be expected, there is more of a selection of spices here than in a regular club, since restaurants need more spices than your standard consumer. And, sure enough, there was the chili powder, still available and well stocked. To my great surprise, and that of my wife’s, there were also nice large containers of cumin as well. Cumin, we had been told by one of the local regular Costco stores, was not carried at Costco at all in our area. Yet here it was, and at such a nice price that we have no intention of ever buying the little bottles of cumin at a standard grocery store again.
After such a stress-free shopping experience, my wife wanted to see it for herself. The next morning, we were there again. She, of course, was able to find lots more things that are not available at a standard location. As you might imagine, she intends to make regular (every other month or so) visits to the Business Center from now on.
Interestingly enough, Costco’s main competitors, Sam’s and BJ’s, do not appear to have a similar concept as a business center at present. (Sam’s used to have one, but it closed years ago.) If you want to check this shopping experience out for yourself, you will have to become a Costco member.
But, at least for me, this sort of thing makes that membership very much worth it.
* And, of course, you would pay even more at certain other supermarkets. *cough*Safeway*cough*
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