Adventures At Costco

For the expats living in South Korea, Costco is a lot like the oriental food shops that import Chinese, Japanese, and Korean food to supply the little Chinas, Koreas, and Japans of North America their favorite dishes. The promise of the taste and smell (the Costco smell) of home draws in teachers, engineers, and business people tired of the taste of rice, kimbap, kimchi, and soju. Jamie and I, for example, travel there once every two months to buy such sorely missed goodies as: North American style bacon, gummi bears, sour cream (virtually impossible to find anywhere else in Korea), bulk mixed nuts, cheese (you can find it, but not the familiar brand names), sandwich meat, macaroni, Fruit Roll-Ups, Reese's Peanut Butter cups, and Cheerios.



The adventures had at the Costcos in South Korea are pretty similar to the adventures had at the Costcos in North America, except for one difference: The Koreans get free food! I don't know what the CEO of Costco South Korea thinks about the degree of cheapness Koreans reveal when they eat at the Costco hotdog and pizza cafeteria, but I'm sure they have written it off as a cost of doing business. And for Costco, any cost beyond the cost of selling you bulk items is a big cost.

A majority of Koreans, when they shop at Costco, buy a hot dog combo or a slice of pizza, just like North American customers; but there is one defining difference: when they get to the toppings section to add ketchup to their hot dogs, they seem to think that the onions, ketchup, and mustard are free. First they add some onion, ketchup, and/or mustard to their hot dog, like normal. They then proceed to shred out a huge pile of onion onto their plate and drown it in mustard, ketchup, or mustard and ketchup. They then take it to their table and eat it with a fork. It is by far one of the most disgusting public displays of culinary crudeness that I have witnessed. And I lived in the States for 8 years!

But it is understandable. When you eat at a restaurant in Korea, you pay an unvarying fee for your meat - say 22,000 Won for five portions of pork - but your side dishes are different; you can have as many side dishes as you want. The Korean patrons of Costco simply think their piles of condiment covered onions are side dishes that Costco should provide...




...You should have seen the look on the guys face when I asked him if I could take a picture of his plate. He was getting up to put it in the compost bin when I asked him, and was visibly flabbergasted that a foreigner would want to take a picture of his soon to be garbage.