Bulk buying: full pantries all the time

The Baltimore Sun

The two visitors from Ireland peer into our refrigerator and gasp when they see the huge gallon jar of Mount Olive dill chips, which gleams like a barn silo in the harsh white light.

"Is it that you love pickles?" asks one of the visitors.

Then they stare at the 114-ounce tub of Heinz ketchup, enough to do the backstroke in, and the 96-ounce jug of Tropicana orange juice, which must have wiped out at least 3 acres of orange groves in Central Florida.

"Dear God, you people must pack it away!" says the other visitor.

I can feel my face redden.

But how do you explain the Sam's Club concept to a foreigner?

What words can describe the experience of wheeling a groaning shopping cart over the bare cement floors of a busy wholesale discount club the size of a penitentiary?

How do you convey the feeling of awe as you stroll through vast canyons of pallets stacked with giant bags of On the Border tortilla chips, 1,000-packet boxes of Splenda, mega-size jugs of Sunny Delight, 40-ounce tubs of Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing?

See, there's nothing at Sam's Club that comes in a normal size, I want to tell the Irish.

Everything is bigger, wider, heavier -- a supermarket on steroids.

Sam's is the place to go when you wake up in the morning and think: "You know, I could really go for a metric ton of Nilla Wafers about now. ..."

Pretty soon they'll get rid of shopping carts and provide the customers with forklifts to haul the food out to their cars.

Let's go back to the pickles for a moment.

You want pickles at Sam's?

Oh, they have pickles, all right.

Except you have to buy the gallon jar of Mount Olive pickles, which holds what, 10,000 pickles? 20,000? Who knows how many it holds?

Some day I'm going to dump a jar on the kitchen table and count them, like pennies.

What I don't tell the Irish about Sam's Club is that soon I'll have to take out a home equity loan to kick out the walls and expand our kitchen, so we'll have some place to store all these huge bags of food.

Apparently, we'll also need an industrial-sized refrigerator, too.

Right now, for instance, there's no room in the freezer section to keep our 60-pack of Kellogg's Eggo frozen waffles, which is probably considered the "starter" size at Sam's.

Sure, you can buy all these Eggo waffles for just $7.68.

But then where do you put all of them?

We cram them in every possible nook and cranny of the freezer: jammed in with the hamburger meat, nestled in the ice-maker tray, wedged between the salmon fillets.

On cold winter nights, I'm tempted to store the waffles in my car's glove compartment.

There's no room in the pantry for the nonfrozen stuff, either. In fact, the top shelf alone is now occupied by two enormous 64-ounce containers of Mrs. Buttersworth pancake syrup.

Yes, at Sam's Club, the deal is that if you like Mrs. Butterworth, you have to buy two 64-ounce tubs of her syrup.

Do you know how much syrup there is in two 64-ounce tubs?

There's so much syrup that you will never, ever have to buy syrup again for the rest of your life.

The syrup we have now, I think we bought that in, oh, 2002. And there's plenty left.

If you ever need syrup, let me know. Seriously. I'll run a few bottles over to your house. No, honest, it's no trouble at all.

Anyway, I tried explaining all that to the Irish, but they just didn't get it.

They come from County Roscommon, where you go to the market and come back with a couple of shopping bags filled with rolls and blueberries and that's pretty much it.

Hah! At Sam's, you're just warming up when you drop a 5-pound slab of chopped sirloin the size of a fireplace grate into your cart.

I watched a man drag two 50-piece bags of chicken wings from the freezer case and I just knew he was thinking: "OK, we've got tomorrow's breakfast covered."

I told the Irish that the next time they come for a visit, I would take them to Sam's Club so they could get a first-hand look at the intoxicating atmosphere of the bulk shopping experience.

In fact, as a little going-away gift, I gave them a 66-ounce bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers.

That's enough to keep them occupied on a dozen flights back and forth to Ireland.

Only the bag is so big, they'll probably have to check it in as luggage.

But that's their problem, not mine.

kevin.cowherd@baltsun.com

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