BJ's Wholesale Club
Review: BJ’s Wholesale Club. Food prices these days are only getting higher, and shopping is getting to be more of a hassle. Companies are not only giving you less for your money, every other week some part of our food supply is getting recalled for some kind of disease or bacteria, most often because of contact with human feces, caused by immigrants pooping in the fields as they pick our crops, to bring down America so MS-13 can rape and pillage our society. Disclaimer: I don’t know if that is true, I just got it off of the brand new FDA website created by the Trump administration. Did you know that African Americans and ISIS are to blame for rising food prices, and breast milk gives your babies AIDS? Check it out, it’s quite an informative site.
But I digress. In these trying financial times, when we are all busy holding down several jobs to pay for our health insurance and mandatory stipends to corporations, don’t we deserve a break? Shouldn’t we take advantage of bargains where we can find them? Shouldn’t there be a no frills, warehouse style store, that you have to pay a yearly fee to shop at, where you can buy food in giant lots like you would if you were running a government internment camp? Okay, to be fair, there is an exciting new market opening up for goods packaged for sale to government internment camps.
Well, the good news is, that place has been around for some time now. BJ’s is a huge store that sells in bulk, in quantities that no one should need unless they have 14 kids, or a rebel camp of militiamen. Sure, you are saving a few dollars here and there, but whatever savings you get has to first cover that 55 dollar membership fee, not to mention the vast amounts of food you will throw away months later when it reaches its expiration date or gets freezer burnt because you couldn’t eat six pounds of cheddar cheese. It’s like some horrible, drawn out game/reality show, and don’t we already have too many of those? Kind of like the Bachelor, but with a twelve pack of Marie Callender’s pot pies.
Let’s say you’re fine with all that. Let’s say you don’t care about whether or not it’s cost effective, or that you grew up during the depression, and developed a need for hoarding food. You go to BJ’s, and wander about a huge metal warehouse, and your head spins from the shelves piled high with a dizzying array of foodstuffs. Look! A case of black olives! Over there! Four dozen packs of Tic Tacs! Gadzooks! A five pound jar of Ac’cent! Does anyone’s food need five pounds of flavor enhancing? Yes! Yours does, because you just purchases 20 pounds of pork chops!
Perhaps the math doesn’t work out, but what do you care? You just purchased four loaves of Wonder Bread! Which will inevitably lead to freezing some of the bread so it doesn’t go bad, and I will not tolerate frozen bread. Where am I, at my grandma’s house? Frozen bread never regains its original texture and consistency. Sure, some people will still claim it’s okay for toast, but for fucks sake, are we really that desperate to save a few pennies? It’s a loaf of bread. Buy it, use what you need, and throw the rest out. People still use the phrase “the best thing since sliced bread”, because being able to buy a loaf of freshly baked, sliced bread was so amazing that it is still stuck in our collective consciousness a century later. No one will ever say “it’s the best thing since sliced, frozen, then thawed a week or two later bread.”
Half the time you don’t know how much you’re saving anyway. Like I said, the place is a warehouse, and everything is stacked on pallet shelving. Tags are strewn haphazardly about, sometimes above the product, sometimes below. You can’t even find things half the time, because they either loaded it onto a shelf somewhere else when the latest shipment came in, or they stopped carrying whatever product you’re looking for abruptly, since they could no longer buy it in truckload quantities. Let’s not even think about the rabbit hole we could go down regarding the logistics of how BJ’s has to buy in even bigger bulk to get the prices to sell to you in bulk … my head hurts.
So let’s say you make it to the checkout with your six packs of aluminum foil you will need to wrap and freeze the food you will end up throwing out in a coupe of months. BJ’s further cuts costs by not supplying any bags for your groceries. Which kind of makes sense in a way, seeing as 50% of what you buy there would never fit in a bag anyway. Still, you get in line and take everything out of your cart, only to have it scanned by the clerk and put into a second cart, which you can then wheel to your car and stare dumbly at as you realize that you weren’t expecting to have to load it with stuff reminiscent of when you moved out of your parents house and into your dorm/first apartment/juvenile detention center/crackhouse. Before you do any of that, though, you will have to give them your BJ’s membership card to scan, and you will fumble for it in your wallet or purse because it is never where it is supposed to be. You fumbled for it last time, and you just shoved it back anywhere when you were done because you felt stupid, just like you will now when you finally find it, and the cycle will repeat itself.
BJ’s seems to be going to all self checkout, slowly but surely. Every time I go there, they have more self checkout lanes and less full service lanes. I think a lot of older people go to BJ’s. I base this on the fact that I am constantly battling my way past old people, old people who have all stopped in the entrance of the store to catch up, or stuck behind a line of old people slowly driving on rascals, like some bizzare indoor road construction reenactment. These old people also do not like having to go to self checkouts, because they are all wandering about at the screens, looking frightened and confused. BJ’s has a force of workers helping them through the complex technical aspects of passing a UPC code over a plate of glass, which is probably why there are no workers available to work the full service lanes.
You can also get eyeglasses at BJ’s. I don’t know. The fact that you can now get eyeglasses at places like BJ’s and Walmart says to me that either the whole optometry thing was a scam all along, or department stores really shouldn’t be dabbling in eyewear. They have signs like “Kids eyeglasses, two pairs for $69!” Doesn’t that sound too cheap, even for grocery store glasses? I get that you don’t want to spend a lot of money on glasses for small children, because they tend to get broken or lost, but shouldn’t you spend more than $34.50 on something as important as your child’s vision? Also, you know kids get mocked for wearing glasses in the first place, do you really want to saddle them with the Rustlers jeans equivalent of eyewear? Of course, these days Rustlers might be all the hipster rage, so maybe I’m way off on this.
The final indignity at BJ’s comes when you go to leave the store. You get in line, and wait your turn, until someone goes through your cart and compares it with your receipt to make sure you didn’t try to steal anything, like the Gestapo going through your belongings at the border to ensure you didn’t have Anne Frank hiding in a trunk. What BJ’s is basically telling you is that they view us all as thieves, just looking for a chance to sneak out with a five gallon bucket of ranch dip. Is this the treatment we deserve? Probably so, but it still hurts.
All that said, the worst part of BJ’s is the name. No matter how long it’s been around, someone is still going to make a blow job joke about it. People just can’t help themselves. The real joke is that for years now, regular grocery stores and Walmart have caught up to their prices, and you really aren’t saving any money anyway. You’re not getting oral sex, you’re getting screwed, and you have to bring your own bags and boxes with you when you do.
But I digress. In these trying financial times, when we are all busy holding down several jobs to pay for our health insurance and mandatory stipends to corporations, don’t we deserve a break? Shouldn’t we take advantage of bargains where we can find them? Shouldn’t there be a no frills, warehouse style store, that you have to pay a yearly fee to shop at, where you can buy food in giant lots like you would if you were running a government internment camp? Okay, to be fair, there is an exciting new market opening up for goods packaged for sale to government internment camps.
Well, the good news is, that place has been around for some time now. BJ’s is a huge store that sells in bulk, in quantities that no one should need unless they have 14 kids, or a rebel camp of militiamen. Sure, you are saving a few dollars here and there, but whatever savings you get has to first cover that 55 dollar membership fee, not to mention the vast amounts of food you will throw away months later when it reaches its expiration date or gets freezer burnt because you couldn’t eat six pounds of cheddar cheese. It’s like some horrible, drawn out game/reality show, and don’t we already have too many of those? Kind of like the Bachelor, but with a twelve pack of Marie Callender’s pot pies.
Let’s say you’re fine with all that. Let’s say you don’t care about whether or not it’s cost effective, or that you grew up during the depression, and developed a need for hoarding food. You go to BJ’s, and wander about a huge metal warehouse, and your head spins from the shelves piled high with a dizzying array of foodstuffs. Look! A case of black olives! Over there! Four dozen packs of Tic Tacs! Gadzooks! A five pound jar of Ac’cent! Does anyone’s food need five pounds of flavor enhancing? Yes! Yours does, because you just purchases 20 pounds of pork chops!
Perhaps the math doesn’t work out, but what do you care? You just purchased four loaves of Wonder Bread! Which will inevitably lead to freezing some of the bread so it doesn’t go bad, and I will not tolerate frozen bread. Where am I, at my grandma’s house? Frozen bread never regains its original texture and consistency. Sure, some people will still claim it’s okay for toast, but for fucks sake, are we really that desperate to save a few pennies? It’s a loaf of bread. Buy it, use what you need, and throw the rest out. People still use the phrase “the best thing since sliced bread”, because being able to buy a loaf of freshly baked, sliced bread was so amazing that it is still stuck in our collective consciousness a century later. No one will ever say “it’s the best thing since sliced, frozen, then thawed a week or two later bread.”
Half the time you don’t know how much you’re saving anyway. Like I said, the place is a warehouse, and everything is stacked on pallet shelving. Tags are strewn haphazardly about, sometimes above the product, sometimes below. You can’t even find things half the time, because they either loaded it onto a shelf somewhere else when the latest shipment came in, or they stopped carrying whatever product you’re looking for abruptly, since they could no longer buy it in truckload quantities. Let’s not even think about the rabbit hole we could go down regarding the logistics of how BJ’s has to buy in even bigger bulk to get the prices to sell to you in bulk … my head hurts.
So let’s say you make it to the checkout with your six packs of aluminum foil you will need to wrap and freeze the food you will end up throwing out in a coupe of months. BJ’s further cuts costs by not supplying any bags for your groceries. Which kind of makes sense in a way, seeing as 50% of what you buy there would never fit in a bag anyway. Still, you get in line and take everything out of your cart, only to have it scanned by the clerk and put into a second cart, which you can then wheel to your car and stare dumbly at as you realize that you weren’t expecting to have to load it with stuff reminiscent of when you moved out of your parents house and into your dorm/first apartment/juvenile detention center/crackhouse. Before you do any of that, though, you will have to give them your BJ’s membership card to scan, and you will fumble for it in your wallet or purse because it is never where it is supposed to be. You fumbled for it last time, and you just shoved it back anywhere when you were done because you felt stupid, just like you will now when you finally find it, and the cycle will repeat itself.
BJ’s seems to be going to all self checkout, slowly but surely. Every time I go there, they have more self checkout lanes and less full service lanes. I think a lot of older people go to BJ’s. I base this on the fact that I am constantly battling my way past old people, old people who have all stopped in the entrance of the store to catch up, or stuck behind a line of old people slowly driving on rascals, like some bizzare indoor road construction reenactment. These old people also do not like having to go to self checkouts, because they are all wandering about at the screens, looking frightened and confused. BJ’s has a force of workers helping them through the complex technical aspects of passing a UPC code over a plate of glass, which is probably why there are no workers available to work the full service lanes.
You can also get eyeglasses at BJ’s. I don’t know. The fact that you can now get eyeglasses at places like BJ’s and Walmart says to me that either the whole optometry thing was a scam all along, or department stores really shouldn’t be dabbling in eyewear. They have signs like “Kids eyeglasses, two pairs for $69!” Doesn’t that sound too cheap, even for grocery store glasses? I get that you don’t want to spend a lot of money on glasses for small children, because they tend to get broken or lost, but shouldn’t you spend more than $34.50 on something as important as your child’s vision? Also, you know kids get mocked for wearing glasses in the first place, do you really want to saddle them with the Rustlers jeans equivalent of eyewear? Of course, these days Rustlers might be all the hipster rage, so maybe I’m way off on this.
The final indignity at BJ’s comes when you go to leave the store. You get in line, and wait your turn, until someone goes through your cart and compares it with your receipt to make sure you didn’t try to steal anything, like the Gestapo going through your belongings at the border to ensure you didn’t have Anne Frank hiding in a trunk. What BJ’s is basically telling you is that they view us all as thieves, just looking for a chance to sneak out with a five gallon bucket of ranch dip. Is this the treatment we deserve? Probably so, but it still hurts.
All that said, the worst part of BJ’s is the name. No matter how long it’s been around, someone is still going to make a blow job joke about it. People just can’t help themselves. The real joke is that for years now, regular grocery stores and Walmart have caught up to their prices, and you really aren’t saving any money anyway. You’re not getting oral sex, you’re getting screwed, and you have to bring your own bags and boxes with you when you do.
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