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Header image: Interior shot of Costco behind the words “Notsco Warehouse Trips”

My family has shopped at Costco for as long as I can remember. When I was a nineties kid growing up in Napa, California, my Korean immigrant parents owned a diner, and Costco was a crucial source of supplies. Deluxe bottles of ketchup and mustard sold in sets of three, mega boxes of napkins, cases of takeout containers and plastic utensils, giant jugs of bleach and dish soap and disinfectant. All this and more got loaded into the trunk and back seat of my dad’s sedan, then stocked onto the shelves of my parents’ diner. Our house was also stocked with mass quantities of everything we needed and much we didn’t. This embarrassed me. When my friends opened our fridge and gasped at the giant vat of mayonnaise, I realized that none of their parents were making the forty-mile trek out of town to the nearest Costco and stuffing huge cases of toilet paper in the closet or a gigantic box of Bagel Bites in the freezer. Their fridges, I imagined, were stocked with speckled eggs, artisanal charcuterie, and dainty little rounds of unpronounceable cheeses made from the milk of local cows. The huge stockpiles of food and supplies felt obscene, grotesquely wasteful, emblematic of the American suburbia that also embarrassed me.

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