Growing up, one of my favorite things to do with my family was “sample lunch” at Costco, even though I don’t think my family ever had their own Costco membership.



For those of you who are not familiar with Costco, it’s a wholesale warehouse store where you can get a mega-size of anything from storage sheds to a year’s supply of emergency food to actual coffins ( (if the apocalypse prep doesn’t work out for you.) I think the coffins are regular-sized, not mega-sized, but I digress.



The deal with Costco is that you have to pay a small annual membership fee in order to access their extraordinary savings/10-pound tubs of butter. I was told that you had to also be a business owner - which is why my family pretended to be our business-owning neighbor. Honestly, I think we were just frugal. It was easier to commit these small crimes back in the ‘80s/’90s. Early digital photo technology was so bad that my mother, Anyu - a perpetually worried, statuesque brunette Transylvanian woman - somehow managed to pass herself off as Humberto Jose González-Villaseñor - a barrel-chested, long-haired Latino man with an infectious grin. If questioned, she’d say that the picture was of my grandma, Nagymama, who had not smiled since 1955. Anyu said that the picture was just really, really old. At 24 pixels-per-inch, either the Costco greeter either couldn’t tell the difference or did not want to risk angering my Nagymama.

I have included a rudimentary illustration to indicate how ridiculous this was:

I’m the little one in the hat dancing because Costco had ice cream samples that day.

I’m not actually sure what the heck we bought at Costco. We were a small family, so I doubt we would have been able to go through five gallons of 100% Pure Vegetable Oil or afford the 10-pound bag of fish sticks. “Vild caught!” Anyu would say, “Just like your fadder and the po-lice, ahahaha.”I’m pretty sure that the number one reason for going to Costco was for Sample Lunch. You see, Costco has vendors come in to do product demonstrations, which usually comes with a free sample. We could have smiled, thanked the vendor, and enjoyed one sample per item per person like normal humans. The thing is, there is no limit on how many samples you can take. So per usual with my family, there was always some kind of scheme.

Here’s how it went - my mother would “distract” the person handing out the samples. Meanwhile, I would pull out my oversized sweatshirt like a sort of parachute so Nagymama could load up sample after sample into my shirt. (Though unrelated to the scheme at hand, it’s worth mentioning that she’d always check first to make sure that my undershirt was tucked into my underwear so no torso skin would ever be exposed to refrigerated air, lest I catch a “kidney cold.”)

When my mother was done being distracting, we would combine the samples into a piece of tin foil that Nagymama had been saving since the war and go for a loop around the crate of frozen peas. I’d usually eat a few before they went into the tinfoil and Nagymama would yell at me for eating too fast because the sample was too hot/too cold. Only room-temperature foods were safe. Then, Nagymama would put on her glasses, thinking that she as a 5-foot-tall lady who looked exactly like George Washington in a babushka wasn’t enough of a disguise, and we’d round the sample aisle again. And again.

We did this so often that the vendors started to get to know Nagymama. She even asked if she could bring the perfume sample vendor, Marlene, to my choir recital, even though I have no idea why she hung out in the perfume sample section since Anyu was allergic to perfume. “Vrap them up in a plastic in case we can give them as a gift to somevon,” Nagymama said. As little as we had back then, Anyu and Nagymama were oddly generous about collecting as many things as they could so they could give gifts to other people.

A part of me also thinks that Anyu knew that we could get as many samples as we wanted without all the trickery, but simply welcomed the time to commiserate with another adult human being. Sure, they were paid vendors, trapped behind a booth and forced to be nice to her, but isn’t that also what 90% of therapy is?

Anyu: “Nobody appreciates how hard I vork.”

Vendor: “You do work hard. Why not treat yourself to Totinos Pizza Rolls™?” Anyu: “…and I told him, you get out!”

Vendor: “The great thing about Totinos Pizza Rolls™ is that your deadbeat husband can take them even when he’s on the go!”

Anyu: “…and you know vhat? He doesn’t even pay child support ”

Vendor: “The Totinos corporation understands that money is tight sometimes. That’s why it is just three dollars for 150 Totinos Pizza Rolls™. And yet, they technically qualify as food!”



I poked fun at all of this even at the time, but flash forward 20 years and I am not any better. This is my food diary entry from today:

Bibigo Steamed Vegetable Wonton (½)

Kirkland Orange Juice (2 ounces)

Dark Chocolate Coconut Almond (3 almonds)

Organic Chickpea Puffs (2 & ¼ puffs)

Haagen Dazs Vanilla Milk Chocolate Almond Ice Cream (like a thumb size?)

An indeterminate number of sausage pieces (each skewered with ½ pretzel stick! This is a good idea. Remember to do this at parties so people don’t waste plastic forks. Add to a different list of things that I’m supposed to remember)

Weird Chicken Salad Thing ( ½ oz)… man that sucked, why did I even get that? I knew it was going to be bad but there wasn’t a line. Now I know why. Who wants to lap tepid chicken salad with low-fat mayo out of a cupcake liner? I should have gone back for another piece of wonton instead, but there was a lady standing there, causing a bottleneck, talking to the vendor about her sciatica and…. OMG! I think other people do the thing my mother did! Remember to write blog about this.

Etc.

At least I actually pay for my membership now, and I never take more than 2 at a time - one for me, one for my husband, who I swear exists (even though he refuses to wear an oversized sweater.) I may or may not do multiple laps.

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Costco samples photo by Tim Boyle/Getty Images

