Out of Stock

San Diego, a Thursday in the middle of April, 2020.

I was in the lot at ten to ten with the engine off and the phone in the cup holder, face up, because the batches go to whoever is closest when they drop, and the closest you can be to a Costco is the parking lot of the Costco.

The one I sat in was the Morena one. You could see the whole lot from the row I liked, out by the gas pumps, and the line along the front wall, and the old roof. I had shopped there with my mother since I was in a car seat. I had never been paid to until the first of April.

The phone lit at 9:52. One customer. Forty-one items. Delivery to La Jolla, 4.8 miles. Then the two lines you read before you read anything else. Batch pay, twenty-two dollars and change. Customer tip, forty-eight dollars.

I took it. You get a few seconds and then it goes to the next car.

Here is how it works, since nobody explains it to you and you learn it in the lot from the other shoppers with their windows down. The customer orders on her phone. The app offers the order to us, with the pay and the tip shown separately, because the pay is Instacart’s and the tip is hers. You take it or you don’t. A Costco batch is heavy, forty pounds of cat litter and a flat of water and a case of oranges, so nobody takes a Costco batch for the pay. You take it for the tip. And the tip is hers all the way through. She can change it after you’ve delivered, up or down, for three days.

I knew that. Everyone knew that. I had been a server for six years at a place in Hillcrest that closed its dining room on the sixteenth of March and let all of us go on the seventeenth, and a server knows what a tip is. It’s the part they don’t have to give you. The difference was that at the restaurant I found out at the end. Here I found out at the start, and I chose by it.

The line ran along the front of the building in squares of blue tape, six feet apart, since the week the county said six feet. A man at the door counted us in with a clicker. A woman behind him wiped the cart handle with a disinfecting wipe out of a tub and handed you the cart damp.

Inside, the building goes up and up. People who come for the first time look at the ceiling, and the ones who’ve come for forty years don’t, but I did that morning for some reason. The trusses are older than the company. They were put up in the war to hold a roof over airplane work, before anybody thought of selling mayonnaise by the gallon under them, and they still look like it.

The app sorts the list by aisle, and I didn’t need it to. I knew where the forty-one things were because I had known where they were since I was nine. Bananas by the door. The Kirkland water on the pallet past the televisions, two cases to a member, said the sign. The rotisserie chickens went into the case at ten and the whole back of the building smelled like them by five after. The limits were on little paper signs taped to the shelf edges, two of this, one of that, and the signs had been up long enough that their corners had been pressed back down more than once.

I shopped it fast. The app counts your items an hour and shows you the number, and a good shopper at Costco does better than a good shopper anywhere else, because at Costco the items are big and few. Forty-one items in a Costco is a full flatbed and a cart. I had both.

Her brand of coffee was gone. You scan what’s there, and you offer the replacement, and the phone goes to her. Kirkland, three pounds. The phone buzzed before I was out of the aisle. Approved. She was watching.

Eleven of the forty-one were things you had to decide about, and I decided about them. Smaller eggs. A different cheese. The same oranges from a different pallet because the first pallet had been handled by half of San Diego. She approved every one in under a minute. I liked her by the second aisle, how you like a table that’s easy, and I took it for a sign about the forty-eight.

The TP was at the back. It always is. They put it where you have to walk the whole building to reach it, and in April of 2020 they put it on one pallet against the wall with a sign that said one per member, and by ten past ten on a weekday there was a line for the pallet separate from the line for the door.

When I got there, there were two packs on it.

The item on her list was Charmin, thirty rolls. The packs on the pallet were Kirkland. I had already decided she’d approve the substitution; she’d approved everything. A man ahead of me took the second-to-last pack and put it under his cart, where it fit best, and looked at me, and at the vest, and at the phone on the handle, and said, “You people get here early, huh,” and went.

I stood there with the last pack.

We had been out at home for nine days. My mother had a system that I’m not going to describe. I had been inside this building eleven times in sixteen days, carrying other people’s TP out to my car and up their steps, and I had bought none, because by the time I had shopped a batch there was none, and when there was some the limit was one per member and the card in my pocket was not a membership. It was a payment card with Instacart’s name on it, and it bought what was on the list and nothing else.

So I did two things. I scanned the pack, and where the app asks whether you found the item, I touched the button that says you didn’t. And I took the pack to the next register over and paid for it with my own card, on my mother’s membership, which is in my wallet because she doesn’t drive anymore.

The checker on that register had been there since it was Price Club. He had the hands for it. He took the card and looked at the photo on it, my mother at sixty-eight, and at me, and at the pack and the vest, and ran it through and said, “One per,” and I said, “One,” and he gave me the receipt, and that was all.

I’m telling it as it happened. I’m not going to tell you what I thought, because I didn’t think very much. I thought: there is one, and it is in my hands, and the list is somebody in La Jolla.

Her order came to three hundred and nine dollars and forty cents on the Instacart card. The man at the exit drew his line down the receipt with the marker and counted the flat and the cart and let me through. I loaded it into the back of the Corolla in the order I’d unload it, heavy on the bottom, eggs on top, my pack on the front seat where it rode like a passenger.

Then Morena to Garnet to Soledad Mountain Road, and up. Her street was on the shoulder of the hill with the cross at the top. Hers was a driveway that went up at an angle a flat of water does not like. There was a sign by the door, hand lettered, that said Deliveries Please Leave At Door Thank You, and I was glad of it. The app said the same thing. Leave at my door. Take a photo.

Forty-one Costco items is three trips from a driveway to a porch. Two cases of water. The litter. The flat of oranges. I had it timed by then: three trips, four minutes, no sweat if you don’t stop.

The door opened while I was setting down the second trip.

She was in her fifties, I’d say, with good hair and a mask pulled down under her chin so she could talk, standing in the door with the screen between us. Six feet, more or less. The app had her as a first name and an initial.

“I’m just checking,” she said. “There wasn’t any paper?”

“No ma’am. The pallet was empty.”

“At ten?”

“There were two when I got there and a man took them.”

“Two.” She said it like she was writing it down. “There’s always paper at ten. That’s the whole reason I tip for ten. I’m not going to stand in that line. I’m not going to stand in the eight o’clock line with the old people either, I’m sixty-one years old, that’s what the tip is for.”

“Yes ma’am.”

I went down and got the third trip. The litter and the oranges and the eggs. When I came back she was still in the door and the screen was still shut. I set them down by the others and took the picture the app wanted, the bags on the mat and her feet in the corner of it, and marked it delivered.

“You know they do that,” she said. “Your company. I’ve read about it. The shoppers hold it for themselves and mark it out and then it’s in their car.”

“I don’t know what they do.”

“I’m not saying you.”

“You’re saying it to me.”

She didn’t like that, and she wasn’t going to stop, either; she had a screen door and the high ground. “I put forty-eight dollars on this order,” she said.

“I know. I read it.”

“I put that on so it would get picked up. So somebody would come at ten and get my paper. It’s not a tip until I say it’s a tip.”

That was the rule, and she had it right. The app says tip, and the app lets her change it for three days, and I had read that too.

I said it anyway. I said it louder than I’d said anything in a month, through a screen door, to a woman I’d been liking for an hour in the aisles.

“You put forty-eight dollars on it so somebody would take the trip. I took it. That’s forty-one items and three trips up your driveway and three hundred and nine dollars of your groceries on your mat, and I’m going to be in my car in thirty seconds, and you do what you want.”

She said, “I will.”

I went down the driveway. I didn’t run. The pack rode home on the front seat.

My mother wanted to know if there was paper, and I said there was.

The notification came at twelve minutes past six the next morning, while I was in the lot again, waiting for the first drop. Tip adjusted. The new number was four dollars and eighty cents, which is ten percent of forty-eight, and the kind of number a person arrives at by doing arithmetic.

I still have the receipt from the second register. It’s in the glove box with the other ones, where the Instacart ones are not, because those go to the app and aren’t mine. It’s the only Costco receipt in my car with my name on it. One pack of bath tissue, Kirkland, thirty rolls, one per.