A friend of ours recently moved back to the D.C. area, and she ended up in this part of Arlington, somewhere in the Crystal City/Pentagon City area, where there’s no regular supermarket in walking distance.

That’s not an unusual thing in Northern Virginia, but Arlington is pretty dense, so there should be one or two neighborhood supermarkets. There is a Whole Foods and a Costco—I don’t consider those “regular” supermarkets and I think a lot of shoppers don’t either.

Because of her location and budget, Costco is her main store. And I kind of like Costco, so last time we visited her we spent awhile exploring it. My parents belong to the Costco in my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey, and I always like to go with them. I’m not blown away by it, but it’s fun.

The pre-cooked octopus tentacles? Really good. The meat? Looks very nice, but I wish they didn’t blade tenderize it, which the FDA says makes it unsafe to eat rare. Even their USDA Prime ribeye steaks are blade tenderized! The Flemington store had a basket of three 8-ounce salami sticks for $12—never seen them that cheap before. The refrigerated basil pesto sauce is pretty good, though it seemed like it had less basil the second time I bought it. I found a made-in-Japan electronic rice cooker for $70. My wife got some really cheap summer clothing. Etc., etc. I still wouldn’t pay a membership fee, but I’ll always tag along. (Just skip the rotisserie chicken—lots of supermarkets make a better one for just a little more.)

This location in Arlington had some different inventory, which is interesting. The stores obviously pay attention to local demographics. There were no salami or soppressata sticks here (not enough Italian Americans), but there were durian snacks and abalone (more unique Asian items—there’s a large Asian-American population here).

I also like this little display: gift cards for local restaurants in the area!

But—even thought I didn’t take any real pictures of the store because I didn’t think I was going to write anything—I was puzzling over something. You see, above the gift cards, how wide the aisles are? These stores are big—maybe not quite as big as a Walmart Supercenter, but very big, and pretty spacious too. As in, there’s a lot of space in between the aisles and displays.

At one point we stopped for a sample, and the sample lady asked us to move our cart inside the aisle behind us to not block the main aisle. I was a little bit surprised at realizing that one Costco cart could meaningfully block one of these big aisles. But that’s because the carts themselves are big, and there were a lot of people in the store. And most people who go to Costco are grabbing and filling a cart.

The whole time we were there, I was getting this feeling that the store was crowded. Too crowded. I always think I like bustling streets and packed stores. We love going to the mall at Christmas and seeing so many people out and about. But something about Costco made me feel claustrophobic—in a way that, say, a packed Trader Joe’s never does, even though that looks like it should feel much more claustrophobic. Maybe, I was thinking, Arlington is just too crowded for me. I sound like my parents.

But my wife and I were chatting about this, and she pointed out that the mall is a lot more crowded at the holidays than Costco on a random weekend, and we always like that. But she also agreed that the Costco felt crowded—whatever that feeling is. And then I realized, despite having thought about this before, what I was feeling.

Costco wasn’t crowded in an absolute numerical sense. Not with people, anyway. It was a store designed for large carts and large shopping trips. The large carts are less nimble than small ones, and certainly less nimble than people on foot. It doesn’t take a lot of these big, slow carts to clog up even the wide aisles. And Costco, to my knowledge, does not offer mini-carts or baskets, so even customers who might be there for a quick grocery run might still grab a cart. Just in case, you know. Or simply because it’s easier than carrying everything.

What I’ve just described—essentially—is modern American suburbia.

The wide aisles are our arterial roads and over-wide neighborhoods streets. The large carts are the automobiles, and particularly the SUVs. The absence of other types of carts or baskets is what we call “car dependence”—meaning an absence of options outside of the car. A basket, I suppose, would be analogous to a bicycle.

The thing we call “crowdedness,” and that sense of frustration and claustrophobia, is the feeling of sitting in traffic in a community that is not dense in an absolute sense, but in which all mobility demands a car trip. Such places never really “fill up,” but they feel full well before they reach high densities.

It’s absolutely fascinating to me how the basic design of an American suburb, and even its psychology, is reproduced in miniature in one of suburbia’s most iconic stores.

And here’s the thing—even I was fooled into thinking that what I was feeling was a kind of misanthropy or a dislike of crowds or “too many people,” when what I was really feeling was frustration with the oversized nature of the store and its tendency to fill up with lumbering shopping carts.

And if I could conflate those two feelings, then I’m quite sure a lot of folks out there do too, and never realize their understanding of these things is mistaken, or based on a narrative they’ve picked up that doesn’t accurately describe why low-density suburban places feel overcrowded.

Social card image credit Flickr/Lisa Pinehill, CC BY-SA 2.0

Related Reading:

Can We Bring Back the Neighborhood Supermarket?

Density Of Stuff

The Supermarket Downstairs

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