The history of Costco here is a little interesting---apparently when the company was considering expanding to Japan they were told that it would not be a success. They were told that Japanese people do not buy in bulk. Based on my experience, I would have said the same thing. So many things here come in tiny packages--cheese, chocolate chips, powdered sugar, sour cream and gift/food wrap to name a few. Not to mention that all of the bakeware is undersized. Anyway, the Costco people couldn't convince a Japanese company to partner with them (which is how a lot of foreign companies get a foot in the door) but they went ahead and came here anyway.
Well....let me tell you....they were right all along. The Costco was wall-to-wall Japanese people. They were loading up their huge carts with their huge packages as fast as they could go. Chad and I split up and had to use our cell phones to find one another in the mayhem---always fun because whenever I start talking to him on the phone in a public place everyone around me goes super, super quiet to listen to my English. :)
I'd say the merchandise was about 60% imported, 40% Japanese. Most of the imported stuff I had seen here before but there were a few surprises and some welcome bulk packaging. I scored huge (and by "huge" I mean normal-American-sized) blocks of cheese and big (by anyone's standards) bags of oatmeal and tortilla chips. We got big bottles of juice and bulk Ziploc bags. I also found American-style Christmas wrapping paper, bows and tissue paper in bulk. The bakery rolls, fried chicken and pizzas seemed to be very popular with the Japanese people.
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| Japanese Costco |
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| Chad thinks you could stand here and watch Japan slowly super-size itself |
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| literally almost everyone had one of these ginormous pizzas in their cart..... so we got one too---it was pretty good which is fortunate because it will last all week long |
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