Costco Stupidity

July 2, 2009 by Keli.

Out on a mission to Costco, I scoured the overstocked aisles for chopped garlic in a jar for a friend, when suddenly my cart runneth over with five pounds of honey, enough corkscrew pasta to feed a wedding party at the Son’s of Italy Grand Lodge, and a huge jar of kalamata olives that required a dolly before it would consider budging. But no chopped garlic.

I asked a passing employee about the garlic’s location. She replied,

“We don’t carry garlic.”

Costco offers every general food item known to humankind, as well as many foods instantly recognized by several animal species. To claim they didn’t carry garlic was preposterous. Unless, of course, said claim was made by a stuper (that’s right; short again for a haphazardly stupid person). Then it is to be expected and circumvented.

I paced the aisles on the lookout for an authentic human who worked at Costco. I passed a maintenance man scrubbing the Frozen Foods displays’ glass doors; of course, he wouldn’t know.  I happened upon a serious looking, mature woman wearing a Costco tag that said “manager.”

“Do you know where the garlic is?” I asked hopefully.

“If you don’t see it here,” she said, waving her arms vaguely in the air, “we don’t carry it.”

She left me open mouthed, trying to formulate the right stream of words in response. I shouted after her. “Oh, yes you do!”

I knew my statement to be true because the friend who’d sent me on this challenging expedition bought a jar of garlic a week earlier, but conveniently forget, in her Costco shopping daze, from which aisle. I asked another passing worker if she knew.

“No, but uh…,” she said while frantically looked around her. “You gotta find someone who works the section that it could be in.”

This time the worker didn’t abandon me, but bade me to follow her, leading me directly to….

“Mario, this lady has a question.”

Now the employee abandoned me, leaving me with Mario, the maintenance man still in the midst of rigorously scrubbing the glass display doors in the Frozen Foods Department. Within eight seconds, Mario whisked me a few aisles away to the garlic. There it was. All 4000 jars. Mario knew it all the time. Who better to ask than an employee in charge of cleaning all of the aisles? I handily dismissed him as a mere janitor when he held the key to what I wanted.

Who’s the real stuper here? The Costco employees who gave me the wrong answers or the stupidity specialist incapable of asking the right person? You decide.

Keep thinking.

Keli

Keli@counterfeithumans.com

Posted in My very own stupidity, Plain Old Fashioned Stupidity | 4 Comments »