Costco cart in hand on a Sunday afternoon, it all came back to me. I furrowed my brow, drew my children close, and prepared for battle. The unhappy cavalry of shoppers and pale-faced, run-walking employees closed in on us. Only a dozen feet away from the membership desk, I remembered what I had tucked away in my memory the last time we let our Costco membership lapse.

In my mind, Costco has always walked a fine line between rampant big-box consumerism and bulk-buying convenience. It would be easy— and perhaps not unjustified— to view these mega-warehouses as unsightly blights on the suburban landscape, threatening to kill off any Mom and Pop survivors of Walmart.

If you have been in one of these monstrous warehouses (riding the coattail of a card-carrying member), however, you realize that Costco is something different. A few minutes in a Costco will make most people realize that they can, indeed, use a pallet of facial tissue, and would be willing to pay bulk prices to get it. More than one Costco neophyte has come home with a membership card and a shelving system to store their newly purchased crates of fruit snacks.

For me, the reality is much simpler. I have kids. When you have kids, whether it be one or five, you deal in bulk already. Costco became a natural progression of that buying pattern, one that didn’t cause me a lot of sleepless nights.

My wife and I have been off-and-on Costco members for years, depending on our proximity to a Costco store. For our family, the inconvenient distance of the closest Costco meant infrequent visits, so we let our last membership lapse without regret.

Enter Burnsville Costco, newly opened last November. While the Burnsville store isn’t going to win any beauty awards, it has been stitched into an area where Big Box is becoming the rule. The close proximity made it a no-brainer. We signed up. Again.

I quickly remembered what I had forgotten; Twin Cities Costcos are some of the least friendly places in the world. The floor is cold, grey concrete. In spite of the hugeness of the warehouse, the short sight-lines can induce claustrophobia.

Shoppers hurl huge carts with the abandon of Black Friday deal mavens, single-sighted and singularly disinterested in your personal space. Lone patrons wander dazed, wondering where the rest of their families have disappeared to in the impenetrable piles of merchandise.

The employees aren’t much better. Apart from one very friendly marketing specialist and one very unfriendly membership clerk, they were all alike; un-uniformed souls scowling hopelessly at their feet. Even the sample ladies, the carnival barkers of our time, mumbled canned facts about their wares while trying in vain to keep their samples replenished against the ravenous hordes.

What had I done?

My jaw tightened. “Let me take the cart, honey,” said my wife, a woman much less prone to taking the myriad social slights of a Costco trip personally.

Trailing behind with my children, plucking large boxes of lunchbox fillers and massive pasta bags off of the shelves, I had an opportunity to contemplate the unbearable meanness of Costco. I tried smiling at the shoppers who nearly collided with me and my wife. Narrowly saving one of my kids from death-by-pallet-jack, I gave the soul-drained employee a jolly “whoopsee-daisy!” It was fruitless, of course, but it did give me some feeling of control, and I was able to keep my own crankiness at bay for awhile.

So what is it about Costco that draws away our kindness so easily, and yet packs the place every single night? Is it a requirement that saving big bucks in a cold, concrete-floored warehouse store also creates a vacuum of personal courtesy? And, hey man, I worked retail for many years. Does that name tag weighing down your collar require that you also be a jerk?

Minnesota nice, my ass.

If I had to boil it down to a comment card for our newly re-instituted friends at Costco, it would sound like a pillow note from the morning after a re-ignited affair, when reality sets in for a formerly scorned lover: “I thought you might be different now, years later. I even thought it might have been me all that time. But now that we’re back together, can you at least pretend that you’re happy to see me?”