Costco

...is fantastic. Truly, marvelously, fantastic. Especially when you're living in a foreign country.

I went today for the first time since being in Taiwan, and it, like most other large international companies whose branches I've visited here (Starbucks, Subway and McDonald's, for instance), was an eerily familiar-yet-utterly-different experience. For starters, gone is the standard massive stretch of open aisle set-up. It's still warehouse style, but melded with Taiwanese grocery store, meaning the aisles are relatively narrow, and the store flows sequentially between two floors: you begin on the ground floor with household goods, bottled drinks etc, and then line up for the escalator to the second floor full of the *real* foodstuffs.

Which brings me to the lines. According to Rachel, who has been to Costco here several times already, today was not a crowded Kaohsiung Costco. In fact, it was the opposite. Yet, due to the aforementioned narrower aisles, I still felt like I was in rush hour at the Costco back home. This impression was only amplified by the Taiwanese Costco Amble--because here, Costco is not just a store, it's a social experience.(TM)

The strangest thing for me, though, was the odd mix of entirely familiar foods--it took me til the end to realize that several of the items I purchased, like the cheddar cheese, had only English on their labels--and utterly different ones. Consider, for a moment, the famous Costco hot dog deal. If you've studied business, you know that this little concession item is actually a cornerstone/symbol of their company's business strategy: sell a great quality, cheap-looking item in the hope of luring customers to buy other things. In America, its glistening photo features prominently at the front of every store, along with the words "100% All-Beef!" Because, as Americans, we love our beef almost as much as we love our fatty meat byproducts stuffed into synthetic casing (sorry).

Wait, you say, do they not have hot dogs in Taiwan? Well yes, actually, they do--and they are proudly labeled "100% All-Pork!" Which, in America, would seem to typify the worst possible variety of the worst possible type of meat. But here, pork is the meat of choice at every meal, so why not?

In the meat section, I found one variety of ground beef and one of ground pork; no ground poultry was anywhere in sight. In the frozen meats section, I found squid balls and skin-on, bone-in chicken breasts, or skin-free, boneless chicken thighs, but no skin-free, boneless chicken breasts.

But I still found pesto. And whole wheat bread. And cheddar cheese. And Goldfish, for that matter, though I resisted.

And loads and loads of candy, including miniature candy canes because, as the daughter of a teacher, I learned long ago that the best way to a kid's heart is to feed them sugar, even if you have to pay for it yourself. (Which I did, for some of it.) Here's the candy I bought--300 small candy bars, 150 Hershey's minis, 300 Dum Dum lollipops, and 620 candy canes. The grand total (for the candy, not including the real food) came to roughly $2,100NT, or about $70US. Trick-or-treat, kiddos!

For scale, that's my bed to the left.

Wow, this blog post certainly took an unexpected turn towards the cynical. So let's just bring it back to the basics here: I love Costco. I love having access to Western food, I love being able to get holiday stuff (way too early), I love knowing that some companies and company cultures stay pretty much the same across cultures, and, most of all, I love that I got to have a cheese-and-wheat-bread piece of toast just now for a late-night snack.

And really, little differences aside, what's not to love?