I like warehouse stores because I can get bulk quantites of stuff and reduce the amount of packaging our household is contributing to the waste stream. Back when I started shopping at warehouses, when they were call “Wholesale Club,” and that’s exactly what they were, just dimly lit warehouses with signage that said where the stuff was. Everything stayed where it was, and you knew exactly where it was when you went into the store to pick up 10 pounds of spaghetti, a case of granola bars, one-hundred pounds of dog food and a twenty-five pound bag of flour.
You could browse if you wanted, but it was really a shopping place for the hunter who just wanted to go into the store and “kill” the items you needed.
Then warehouse stores caught on. My Wholesale Club was purchased by the WalMart empire. They added a checkout conveyor; so that instead of handling the merchandise once at checkout by taking it out of the cart you put it in, ringing it up and putting it into a new cart for you to drive into the lot. Now you get to put it on a the conveyor, they scan it and now I get to put it back into the cart to take out to the lot. Then they added all kinds of consumer goods, and movies, and books and stuff that you need one of.
Then they got some competition in Costco and they both got fancier and had more services and added more crap and had to “merchandise.” Fancy displays were added to tell me that I needed something, and there were food samples and more lazy people came who couldn’t push their cart back to the store arrived; and things deteriorated.
Simple got out of control; now we have to move things to the front of the store to “push” them, because we’re not in business to save people money by having bulk products that they need, but we’re convincing them to buy on where we place the merchandise.
So now when I go to Costco and I need a gallon of softsoap to fill the dispensers at home if it’s a “special” item, or it isn’t moving; it gets moved from it’s regular “warehouse” location to some more visible spot on the other side of the store next to the batteries where I would never imagined that it would be in about a million years.
How hard is it to leave the crap alone so that the hunters who shop there can just go in and kill what we need?