How a Once ‘Blithe Spirit’

Contracted Club-Store Fever

Is buying in bulk an attempt to fill the empty nest or just some stocking-up hormone that kicks in later in life?

By Susan Littwin

hen our nest began to empty a few years ago, I finally had a real, unalloyed guestroom—not a den with a foldout couch. But nature abhors a vacuum —and maybe a guestroom, too. 

     My first thought now when I hear overnight visitors are expected is: What will I do with all that toilet paper?  The “guestroom,” you see, currently hosts a 24-roll pack of unscented white, a 12-pack of jumbo rolls of paper towels, a towering stack of Kleenex boxes, gallon jugs of laundry detergent, bleach, and Simple Green, and cartons filled with sponges, scrub pads, rubber gloves, shower gel, razor blades, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, and, if my arithmetic is right, 1,875 Q-tips.

     Is there some hormone that kicks in at middle age and stimulates a biological urge to stock up?  I know this isn’t the real me who has bought all this stuff—or at least it isn’t who I used to be, a semi-blithe spirit who lived for the day and didn’t believe in the value of  saving except when I wanted to buy a round-trip plane ticket to a wine-producing country.  “A penny here, a penny there, by the end of the year, you’ve got a dime,” my father often said.

     That was not my mother’s credo.  When she died after a sudden heart attack at a card party, she left behind eight cans of Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee, six bottles of Heinz ketchup, and a freezer full of meat, all bought on specials and ultimately given away to embarrassed—but acquiescing—neighbors and relatives.

     Travel light, I thought.  Don’t count on the future.  Even if you’re around, you may want to change brands. Besides, when you’re 20-something, there’s always the hope that tomorrow will be entirely different.  Before you use up eight pounds of coffee, you may move to some distant land and drink tiny cups of dark roast, served by handsome waiters.

     In the early years of my marriage, I lived in New York and stopped at stores on the way home from work and bought what I needed for dinner.  Sometimes we ran out of things and made an extra run or just did without.  Then life changed.  We moved to California and the suburbs and had children (who regarded markets as arcades; their favorite game was to run away and turn themselves in as lost boys).  I learned to shop for the week.  When there was a “special,” I might buy one extra item, but any more was hoarding, even hubris that might invite the wrath of God.

     Conversion of a Discount Shopper: When the warehouse stores first rose up like squat mushrooms next to freeways and railroad tracks, I made fun of the news images of happy couples wheeling garage-sized boxes of detergent and cereal—unbagged—on flat-bed carts.  I played skeptic with friends who talked of excursions to these concrete caverns of discounted everything.  “You really drive to Burbank for chicken breasts?” I asked a friend who made the trip in a Mercedes and stocked her haul in a Sub-Zero refrigerator.  Another friend told me of spending an amazed Saturday afternoon in the first club store on our side of the freeway.  “What did you actually buy?” I asked, sounding like the last holdout in America, a woman who maybe did laundry on a washboard with brown soap and pecked away at an Underwood.

     Two-quart containers of Neutrogena Rain bath were the net booty of that voyage of discovery.  Somebody else reported great buys in liquor, which was tempting, but you had to settle for the brands they happened to have, and life already required too many compromises.  Anyway, it sounded daft—a half-hour of driving, then pushing one of those industrial dollies across a warehouse to save a few dollars.

     So I continued to resist.  But my husband needed tires last summer, and an office colleague persuaded him that only madman and spendthrifts went anywhere else.  He enrolled us.  A lot of what happened next is a blank, a numbing blur, a waking up with a trunkful of unbagged bundle-packs.  We needed a vacuum cleaner, a stand mixer, things that cost too much for the fun they bring.  Why not check out the club store?  Once the appliance is home and whirring, its provenance doesn’t matter.

     A Lifetime’s Worth of Anything for Only $7.89: The big carts, the concrete vastness were as intimidating as I had imagined, but once I flashed the membership card at the entrance and saw the aisles, brimming with great stacks of legal pads, video tapes, computer software, bottles of 1,000 ibuprofen (a headache a week for 10 years, only the expiration date comes too soon,  I calculated quickly), I could almost feel my brainwaves change, my pulse speed up.  This was serious stuff, a chance to accumulate an abundance of things that we always ran out of.  The rule of thumb seemed to be that for $7.89 you could buy a lifetime’s worth of anything (Q-tips, definitely).

     My husband, who had given me my first fix, so to speak, seemed bored and uninvolved on these trips.  He mostly pushed the cart and waved at cute children with blinking lights on their sneakers, though his interest sparked a bit when he saw two taped-together, oversized cans of WD-40.

     The chicken breasts were deep in the rear, and I didn’t see them until the fourth or fifth trip—yard-long Styrofoam trays of them, pink and perfect, glistening, at half the supermarket price.  I took them home and rewrapped them in pairs in the bargain plastic wrap I had also bought there.  Still, they formed a giant mound in the freezer that made my mother’s little butcher-wrapped parcels and pound cans seem dainty.

     It was around that time that my 22-year-old refrigerator gave notice.  In the normal scheme of things, it was time to downsize, but that was out of the question now.  I needed a bigger freezer.  That guestroom, too, had become a potential tomb in which my sister-in-law might be buried alive.  Did I need extra space, a dedicated toilet paper room?  Is that why so many retired couples stay put in suburbia while young families are stuck in apartments?

     Is It Cents or Sensibility? I’m not oblivious to the economics.  The math (square footage, larger refrigerator, energy costs, price of gas, etc., vs. the savings) is beyond me, but I grasp the principle.  A social theorist friend, who idealizes pre-automobile village life, says that discount stores simply pass on to the consumer the cost of storage and transportation.  

     So why do I continue to compile lists?  It’s nickel psychology to say that I am becoming my mother.  Or that I am filling the empty nest—though there is a nice irony in the idea of filling my sons’ part of the nest with cleaning products.  Is it a survivalist syndrome, like those end-of-the-world-ers keeping canned goods in their basement?  Maybe.  We do get floods, fires, and earthquakes where I live, and that takes its toll.  But the last thing I want when the next disaster strikes is a lot of chicken breast thawing when the power goes off. 

     Maybe it’s just a fear of looming frailty, a shoring up of security, a re-feathering (re-toilet -papering, really) of the nest.  All my creature comforts are here.  I can thumb my nose at the vagaries of supermarket supplies and prices, since I now have more than they do.

     Or—thinking more positively—perhaps I have finally learned to look ahead, to accept life’s realities.  Tomorrow, next week, next month will come, and I will still be here and have the same boring needs.

     How mature.  But that tower of toilet paper and sponges gives rise to pangs of regret—to a piercing nostalgia for my young, improvident self who could do without and live off whatever was around and dreamed that tomorrow everything would be different and I would move someplace far away and not need any of that stuff.

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Author of “The Postponed Generation,” Susan Littwin has written for many magazines, including TV Guide, McCall's, Redbook, Rosie, Us, Los Angeles Times Sunday and Los Angeles magazine. 

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