The battle lines are drawn: are you a Costco member or a Walmart shopper?

Blossom, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

I'll spare you my latest hilarious attempts (eventually successful, but it took me four tries) to find my local Costco. It's hidden away on Brighton Avenue just off Government Road in Burnaby and if you don't happen to be in the right lane when Cariboo unaccountably decides to veer to the right you can find yourself on the TransCanada heading for Hope. I found that even more unsettling than the two previous excursions when, much to my bewilderment, I ended up in Coquitlam. It was all worth it though, when I scored a delightful moss green linen jacket at the Coquitlam Value Village for the queenly sum of $8. So, sorry, I didn't actually spare you the story.

In my frustration to find Costco (my reasoning being not only that I was dying for some of the vegetable gyozas I can't find anywhere else, but there really was little point in paying even $50 for an annual membership if I was only going to use it once or twice a year), I actually contemplated heading for the Grandview Highway store because I was reasonably sure I could find it with a lot less difficulty than I was experiencing trying to find the Burnaby one. But I'm nothing if not persistent, and finally last Sunday I took all the right turns and thoroughly enjoyed my warehouse experience.

With my giant cart I mused about the fact that you can't always get what you want at Costco but that's part of what makes it fun to shop there. I'm not at the top of the pyramid when it comes to brand allegiances: if I went for coffee and the brand I usually buy isn't there, I'll still come home with coffee. That and the reminder of the sheer abundance we're privy to here in North America. While I can get exercised about how unfair it is that when you can afford to buy in bulk you can really see some extraordinary savings in not only money but time and effort, when I can afford to do it myself I'm delighted.

On the two occasions I ended up in Coquitlam, Lougheed Town Centre and its WalMart beckoned. I find it very easy to ignore the siren call of WalMart though.

It's not just because of the way they treated an American friend, who was used and abused in the grocery department for a couple of months before being transferred to the flower department. At six three and with size thirteen feet, I was thrilled that he was secure enough in his sexuality to gleefully announce, "I'm the new flower lady!" As an artist he was happy to work with flowers. And they were a lot lighter than the produce boxes he'd been heaving around 12 hours a day. Sadly, the glee didn't last long as his job sort of vanished. I thought it was only in government that when they wanted to get rid of you they put your desk out in the hallway or just took you off the posted schedule without in any other way communicating that your services were no longer required and you could sleep in if you wanted to. But apparently not. I'm not even going to go there in terms of what is wrong about this passive-aggressive method of communication. It's easy to imagine how it feels to be treated like a commodity no one wants to buy any more.

It's not the astroturfing or the greenwashing or the lack of benefits or the willingness to hire foreign (read: slave) labour at WalMart. It's not the fact that WalMart has acquired such an iron grip on the consumer imagination that not shopping there seems like heresy to middle- and lower-income earners. It's not the ugliness of the stores or the offensiveness of the very idea of the greeters.

It's all of those things. And so, while I applauded the WalMart victory in Squamish, and continue to support Squamish as a location for a factory outlet mall (what could be better, some of the country's most spectacular scenery on the way to one of the world's best ski resorts and incredible bargains on the way there and back), I won't be heading for the repurposed-Costco- which-will-soon-be-a-WalMart at the Grandview Highway location. WalMart can continue to get along without me. And I'll continue to spend my money on some of the brands Costco makes available to me even though they're probably never going to be household words. I'm sort of hoping I don't get addicted to Cafe Mbeya's coffee in case it was a one-time purchase. But I'm going to enjoy every last drop of the two-pound bag of beans I bought, knowing that it's not only organic but also fairly traded coffee. I'm not sure whether the Tanzanians who produce it are getting any more than the $1.36 per pound that's the minimum established for fair trade coffee the last time I researched it. I hope so.

For the CBC article on WalMart taking over the old Costco location:

www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/05/09/bc-wal-mart-vancouver.html

And for more info on Cafe Mbeya:

www.levelground.com