What do I  usually buy at Costco?

Like many others, I was a fan of Costco. Every month I would drive for about half an hour, arriving at Costco and loading between $90-$200 worth of goods for a family of one.

The stuff I buy regularly includes dry and frozen goods.

At the bakers’ corner,  I loaded mostly dry goods, nuts, and dried fruits in rotation. Nuts include walnuts, pecan, almonds, and dried fruits include figs, plums, mangos, apricot but excluding raisin, which is too sweet to my taste.  Along the aisles, sometimes I will also pick up steel-cut oatmeal—for breakfast. every six months or so, I will also purchase a bag of Almond flour and regular flour.  At the bakers’ corner, milled flax seeds, quinoa are also regular items getting picked into my shopping cart. Occasionally, I will pick up a gigantic can of tomato imported from Italy.  After a few times, I quitted because the can was too big and I ended up throwing it up after eating only a half can of tomato.    Every four months or so, I would also pick up a 2- or 3-pound bag of coffee beans.

For frozen goods, the three berries, corn, pea bags were the staple in my fridge.  A three-berry bag often lasted one month; while corn and pea bags lasted half a year. They often came to the rescue when I ran out of fresh vegetables and needed to make a quick stir fry.  Scoping some out, adding cubed tofu or meat, tossing them to a heated pan, stir-frying them together, seasoning with soy sauce, oyster sauce, vinegar, salt makes an easy and quick dish.  

At the meat and fish department, as a Chinese, I love pork.  The pork loin was extremely cheap relative to beef, but somewhat pork from Costco is tasteless. Compared with pork in my hometown, Costco pork was as bland as wax. If you buy them for their low price sake, be prepared to season and spice them up.  I bought them only once and they lasted for six months.  What I bought often was the cleaned trout and the bagged lam imported from Newzealand.  Trout is delicious with simple cooking.    Just steam it and add some soy sauce and chopped green onion and ginger on top.  The only problem is the size of the package; it often has six heads of trout. After stored in the freezer too long, trout tastes just like fish. No matter how much sauce, spice you use when cooking, you will be left with a mouthful of fish taste.    The Costco meat department almost changed me. Since I became a member, I ate only fish and lamb.

At the bakery department, Costco croissant was my favorite item, absolutely delicious, and a must-buy on each trip.    Samsclub also sells croissants, but the taste is not even half as good as those from Costco. I don’t know why, probably due to the difference in ingredients and baking procedures.

Fresh produce: the items I bought often at Costco were the bagged baby spinach and banana; occasionally I would buy seasonal produce such as Texas grapefruits or blueberries. Other vegetables or fruits often were not as fresh as those in Aldi or too much for me to consume within a week or 10 days before they went bad.

Eggs and dairy: I buy eggs at Costco, but milk is cheaper at Aldi as it sources from a local dairy farm.  

My vice food includes aged Cheese, prosciutto, and red wine.  As someone growing up in South China, I had never seen cheese before coming to the US.  However, as a novelty seeker, I tried over a variety of cheese. I find aged cheese alluring.  they taste like cured dried tofu only with a richer mixture of taste.  I grew up in a region where every family uses salt to preserve pork ham, so prosciutto is not a novelty food to me.  However,  I had not eaten raw thin-sliced cured pork ham before.    Coupled with a glass of red wine, pieces of thin-sliced pinkish prosciutti are a sure way for me to love myself on weekends.  Since those are vice items, I did not purchase them on every shopping trip.  And, this made them even more of treats and delights.

Other than those items listed above, I also buy sundries at Costco including toilet tissues, shampoo, and conditions, batteries, painting kits from Costco when they are needed. Before my annual China trip, I also loaded up multi-vitamins, fish oils, etc. for my relatives and friends in China. They are great gifts as they are sold at a much higher price back in China.

Thinking back to my Costco days, the alluring items or the excitement I got from Costco trips are actually the items at the bottom of the above list: wine, aged cheese, prosciutto, and perhaps croissant. 

Why did I decide to halt  Costco membership renewal?

The main reason is to reduce food waste, and not to punish me to eat the same food over and over again.  The fun or satisfaction we get from any food, delicious or otherwise, has a diminishing return rate. Initially, more is better; however,  beyond a certain quantity, the fun or satisfaction we obtain from food starts to dip, and, very soon you wish to give it up and  try other new things. Despite the food I bought from Costco are healthy,  and they taste good too,    the issue is that  Costco sells them in bulk, and all food has limited shelf life, especially when you live in a region with hot and humid summers    As a result, I simply cannot eat the three-pound bag of almonds up before moths and worms set in especially in the first half of the year when the weather is warming up.  Additionally, when the pantry is stuffed with food, we tend to eat more.    A three-pound bag of dried plum seemed undepletable,  so I tended to nimble them a few times a day whenever boredom set in.  Snacks in the pantry, healthy or otherwise, is the number one stumbling obstacle on your way to slim up.   

The verdict is that although Costco offers a lower per ounce price, I will be better off buying nuts and dried fruits from elsewhere, e.g., Aldi.    I will eat less, feel more satisfied, and of course, spend less. A   the second reason is that the nearest Costco store is a 30-minute drive away.    It will take me at least two hours for each trip.

Sometimes I am tempted to become a member of Costco again when thinking of the three delicious vice food I enjoyed most from Costco.    However, I have rationals to persuade myself not allured by them again.  First, I’ve decided to give up alcohol altogether, so red wine is out of my shopping list hopefully for the rest of my life.  As a first-generation immigrant in the US,  it is unavoidable to feel lonely and homesick sometimes. When coupled with stress from work, I am easily driven to episodes of low mood or depression.  According to experts,  alcohol and depression share the same neural pathway, so  I  quit drinking alcohol socially.  Instead, I started to make rice wine at home using fermented red rice, and use them mostly for cooking.  As to aged cheese, I know I am not designed to best digest dairy products as an Asian, so aged cheese can remain on my shopping list as an occasional treat, perhaps on holidays. If I crave it, I will buy cured tofu, these aged cheese allured me because they resemble aged or cured tofu in the first place, anyway.    As to croissants, I splurged $380 on a breadmaker, so for the years to come, I will use it to make all kinds of tasty bread, and perhaps experiment with it to make pastry as well.    

What happened after quitting Costco for a year?

First, I find my pantry is slimmed down; I no longer have to search all boxes if I want to look for a bag of dried mushrooms or dried dates. Second, moths are disappearing this year.  This eliminates the need to clean my pantry every other week or to hire a professional exterminator. Second,  my refrigerator is becoming empty, devoid of gigantic frozen corns and peas, and three-berries; there is no need to get a new bigger refrigerator.   

I am proud to say, stopping Costco lowers the inventory level of my food.    Lower inventory often means less waste and saving in grocery.    That’s certainly true in my own family economics; my monthly spending on groceries has been lower, around $100 a month, while in my Costco days, I spent on average at least $100 at Costco alone monthly.    

My life is lighter too without the pressure of eating food up before they go bad!   I recently use my Espin bike for grocery shopping; this helps me curb over-buying tendency and therefore reduce food waste further right at home, the second place where food gets wasted the most, following supermarkets.

Will I consider joining Costco again? Perhaps. Not until can shrink my pantry further down to a single plastic container just as when I was a student.  Hopefully, I can spread this lean and minimalist approach to groceries to another area of my life—my wardrobe.