Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

Adventures In Warehouse Shopping
It's Not The Five-Gallon Mayo That Worries Me

I belong to two warehouse shopping clubs. Shopping at a warehouse club is both uplifting and unsettling; I experience the joy of getting some truly good deals or the gluttonous warm glow of purchasing five pounds of chocolate chip cookie dough all at once, only to be confronted with conflicting urges to embrace and to flee the commercialized, stylized, turtle-waxed underbelly of popular culture.

Part of me wants to buy a Sam's Club "Members Only" black nylon windbreaker, a piece of clothing that says "I paid money to get into a cavernous Wal*Mart where they sell tires and they don't bag your purchases" at the same time that it says "I paid so little for this jacket that I might as well have had it weaved by child slave labor in Borneo, and I spent the money I saved on a five-pound plastic tub of cookie dough." But just when I begin to revel in the thrill of buying flavored water by the case, or when I'm standing in one of the New York State Thruway Median -sized aisles trying to figure out how Beth and I are going to fit my shrink-wrapped pack of twenty frozen Mama Celeste's pizzas in our freezer, I am confronted by one of the products that is so frequently spawned by the commercial culture that makes warehouse shopping clubs possible.

I've already ranted at length about the Big Mouth Billy Bass and its ilk. Tonight I was confronted by something far, far worse: a battery-powered stuffed reindeer that flaps its animatronic mouth and sings "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer" over and over and over again. This product -- a vessel brimming with Christmas cheer comparable only to the annual lighting of the Christmas tree at Auschwitz -- is only slightly less Satanic than those motion-detector-activated anthropomorphic miniature Christmas trees with eyes and mouths that sing and scare the living bejeebers out of you when you innocently walk into your local Mail Boxes Etcetera innocently hoping just to mail a package, and did you expect a creepy talking Christmas tree to make you soil yourself and make everyone at the office wonder if you've been drinking on your lunch hour?? No, I didn't think so... But I digress.

There is a madness inherent to commercialization for which one must be ever vigilant. As a staunch Capitalist I would be the first to admit that the urge to Impulse Buy is strong with me, and I don't see commercialization itself as a bad thing. But when the madness strikes, we are tempted to believe that reindeers that sing "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer" or Big Mouth Billy Basses or the Beverly Hills 90210 PC-Compatible CD-ROM companion are actually a good idea -- when they most certainly are not. Losing the ability and the taste to judge certain products as a bad idea comprises the dividing line between sanity and buying one of those baseball hats covered in plastic bird dung bearing the whimsical silk-screened legend, "Darned Seagulls!"

I've seen the madness strike. Just tonight my wife and I saw a married couple, people our age, standing in one of the gigantic aisles of Sam's Club, their attention riveted by the display of automatic tooth brushes. The husband held a plastic pack of five of them, and was pressing the button on each one in turn to test its bristle speed, or some such thing. Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz -- he tested each one, then worked his way back the way he'd started across the row of battery-operated toothbrushes.

These are the people who purchase "I am with Stupid" t-shirts. These are the people who eat enough Spam to require Spam Lite in order to cut calories. These are the people who are not ashamed to carry or wear in public products licensed by the World Wrestling Federation. And they are not simply consumers; they are also producers. They sit at home or in offices thinking up ideas like the Rocky Mountain Lobster, and somehow get these ideas implemented. Their commercials make me want to buy the AutoHammer and the Garden Weasel and that lawn rake that folds in half so you can rake leaves, pick them up, and dump them in a wheelbarrow six leaves at a time.

The single most alarming item for sale at Sam's Club was the King Kooker. The King Kooker is a device designed -- I am not making this up -- to facilitate the deep frying of an entire turkey. An entire, whole turkey.

What kind of soulless monster would you have to be to deep fry an intact turkey?

As my wife pointed out, what kind of bizarre, serial-killing, clown-suited pervert nutball lifestyle would you have to be living if you actually deep fried enough turkeys to justify buying the King Kooker?

I shop at warehouse clubs. I enjoy it. I admit it. They're fun stores, and they're useful stores. But I -- and all of us -- must never forget that stores of this kind are sprawling breeding grounds for the types of merchandise that kills your will to live and makes you fill the rear windshield shelf of your car with stuffed animals. Lose your focus for an instant, drop your guard for a moment, and the commercialized Black Plague will claim you.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to inject a whole, breaded turkey with mozzarella and deep fry the sucker before Pizza Hut beats me to it.