Last week Manyu and I drove Manyu’s brother to Madison for a medical appointment. It was scheduled for 3pm, and the plan was for Clare, who lives in Madison, to grab some carryout Chinese food and join us for an early dinner before we headed back to La Crosse. I’d miscalculated the driving time, and we arrived early. The doctor saw my brother-in-law right away, and we were done at the clinic a full hour sooner than we’d expected.
Manyu immediately called Clare. She was already at an Asian food court near the East Towne Mall, but had yet to place an order. We told her to skip the food, but that we still wanted to see her for a short time before we started on our drive home. Clare said that as long as she was on the eastside of town, she was going to go to Costco. She knew that La Crosse did not have a Costco, so she suggested that we meet her there.
I would have rather gone to a coffee shop, but my brother-in-law and his wife wanted to shop at Costco. On the drive over, I didn’t remember ever having been to a Costco. I should have been more interested in seeing one than I was.
Clare met us outside the main entrance, because customers can’t even go into the store without a membership card. Once she brought us inside, I realized that I had been to a Costco before, but it had been just after my family moved to Taipei in 2008. I’d been to a Costco in Taiwan, but never in the United States.
After Clare gave me a tour of her Costco, I wished La Crosse had one. The aisles were wide, the employees were friendly, and other big box stores would do well to have as many staff members on the floor to help confused shoppers. The seafood looked good, and my sister-in-law got excited when she found octopus.
Manyu bought an oversized bottle of vitamins, and my in-laws half-filled a shopping cart with meat and seafood. Clare picked up a few grocery items that she can’t get elsewhere, and she also got a life-sized Pikachu stuffed toy. Until then, I didn’t know how big a life-sized Pikachu was. I bought a wedge of Jarlsberg cheese and a three-pound container of peanut butter pretzels.
I don’t usually buy peanut butter pretzels, because I tend to eat them until my stomach hurts. Now I have a year’s supply that might last me a month. I consider peanut butter pretzels the best snack food innovation in my lifetime. When I got home that night, I googled peanut butter pretzel and found an old NPR story about their origin. “The technology to make a hard pretzel shell stuffed with peanut butter didn’t even exist until the 1980s… It’s a process called co-extrusion — basically, an outer tube pumps out pretzel dough, while an inner tube pumps out peanut butter filling onto a conveyor belt. The whole thing is then sliced up and baked in a giant 100-foot oven.”* The article did not explain at what point in the process the salt goes on. Maybe that’s common knowledge.
Recent Comments