Hidemi's Rambling No.171

I shopped at Costco for the first time yesterday. Costco has only 9 stores in Japan and it takes 80 minutes by train and bus for me to get to the closest one to where I live. Several years ago, when I first stopped by the store, I didn’t agree with the store policy that made a customer pay the annual membership fee to shop there. The fee was way too expensive for me. I had never visited the store since then. Recently I’ve found a few websites where I could get selected items from Costco and bought snacks and chocolates online because their prices were much lower than the ones of the supermarkets I usually shopped at. By this way, I was able to get Costco’s items without paying the membership fee and the not-so-cheap transportation cost. Last month, a credit card company sent me a one-day free passport to shop there as their promotion. So I went. I saw their actual prices and got stunned. They were impossibly low, beyond my imagination. I felt like I was in low-price wonderland. Even after adding the membership fee and the transportation cost, the prices were still much lower than the ones of online shops. I thought I had been saving money by shopping online but in reality, I had been losing it. I hurriedly became a member. I can’t believe I was passing through this wonderful place for years…