Going the Distance...

Whilst reading a recent post of PC Pinkstone's, I was reminded of a phenomenon we experience in this area.

Mrs."Smith" and I regularly go to Costco for household necessities, or HDTV's as the case may be (sorry Pinkstone).

There is a Costco store about five miles drive from where we live. This Costco is in what is considered an upper middle class city. You would expect the shoppers in that area to be polite, considerate and generally well heeled people. I assure you this is NOT the case.

The few times we have been to this store, I have been rammed with shopping carts (very much on purpose), cut off, cussed out and torqued off to no end. On our very first trip to the store several years ago, a very pregnant Mrs. "Smith" was pushed, prodded, and otherwise physically assaulted from behind by a very impatient female (I hesitate to call her a lady, and she was too old to be a girl), to the point that the misses shoved her elbow into the offender and told her to "back the fuck off". At the conclusion of that trip, we agreed we would never go back to that Costco. Aside from a few items that our Costco does not stock, we have kept our word.

The Costco we prefer is about four times as far away, and in a city that is considered to be one of the roughest in the Bay Area. It is in the area where we lived before we moved to our current accommodations, and it is the Costco store we have gone to for many years.

For being in such a notoriously violent city, the vast majority of the shoppers and employees there are actually polite, or at the very least considerate. We can go into that Costco without fear of needing an ambulance ride to the hospital after being mown down by a shopping flat being pushed by a local business owner in a mad dash to get to that last box of Tootsie Pops. I don't feel as though I am placing my life in the hands of someone who cares about nothing more than getting that 15 pound package of chicken boobs from the back of the store to the cash register in the shortest possible amount of time.

We have been shopping at OUR Costco store for years. We know the people there, and the wife and kids regularly get hugs from employees we have known from the get go. The boys walk around to all of the sample tables, and the ladies there marvel at how big they have gotten. It's like a big family.

I would frankly rather burn the gas to drive the extra fifteen miles to the farther Costco store, to be treated as a human being instead of a bumping post. I find it rather amusing that we go to the rougher city to be treated better.

Go figure...