Step one in that concept: Ducted fans.

They specialize in large quantities at low prices. A Gold Star membership probably wasn’t something you really needed.

At the Costgo I go to, it’s mostly big families stocking up on essentials. Aside from the quantity problem, there are damn few places you can get any of this stuff cheaper. I go there when it’s my job to serve snacks at my church’s coffee hour.

I like the place, although it has little for a family with two people and both kids away in college. My wife will buy something on impulse, like a cubic meter of sausages, and we get quite tired of them after a while. When I take her along, I have to have a nerf bat handy. It helps to have a freezer.

You take a cart in, fill it, check out, and you take the cart out to your car. Here, they check your receipt on the way out like they do at Fry’s.

You may be the first person in history to take a bicycle on a Costco shopping trip.

There is no map. In fact, they move stuff around constantly. I suspect they like the idea of making you run down a lot of aisles to find something you regularly buy so you’re tempted by an “impulse” buy. Especially with my wife along, it is difficult to resist sometimes.

Once you have the membership card, all you have to do is wave it at somebody when you walk in. Forging one would be a piece of cake.

If you go at the right times of day, the place is full of sample tables, and cruising those is a lot of fun, too. Try it. Take a cart around so it doesn’t look like you’re just getting lunch.

It’s not about who needs this stuff. It’s about who wants it. I go down the aisles of Nob Hill, and see exotic stuff that you wouldn’t think anybody would possibly buy. But somebody does. I can go into the store and find that one soap, the one that smells like camomile and is shaped like our shower soap dish. The one my wife really likes, on the shelf with dozens of other types. The ones that other people like.

Is this wasteful? I’m paying someone for it, and there are enough other people who like camomile soap that the company makes money. It’s not a big company either.

If we lived in a world of “efficiency,” there would be only one brand of soap, needing only one kind of factory. Much simpler. And somebody else gets to decide what kind of soap you like.

Every product in Costco has a customer. Every one. Or they wouldn’t keep it on the shelves. Imagine the logistics of a grocery store, cycling perishables through the system with minimal waste. The network required to deliver that soap to my store shelf is a marvel, and it was spontaneously developed and run by hundreds of voluntary transactions and arrangements across the country and maybe across the world.

I did a lot of thinking about how things work in my college years. I’ll throw you something for free: You aren’t going to learn what you need to know about the big questions in classrooms. Not nowadays.

Blog posts are automatically filed under an obscure taxonomy named “Members”, which is like the “Topics” taxonomy holding our forums, but marked not-public, so generally only I can see it. Code behind the scenes moves those posts into public view when you view somebody’s author page.

The interface for assigning posts to taxonomy nodes is pretty squirrely, an inherited artifact from WordPress that never imagined we’d be leaning on it as much as we do. Improving it is one more item in a long to-do list. Sorry it misinformed you about the status of that post.

I need to come up with a version of the recent-posts widget specifically for blog posts, so that people will know you’ve posted. I’m sure it’s frustrating to post to your blog and nobody knows about it.

You can cross-post a blog post to a forum, usually Community given the nature of blogs. In the editor window, scroll down to a section labelled “Topics”, and check “Community”. That’s what podrock did.

I wondered why my previous blog here didn’t get any responses. Figures.