When they walled up the Costco

Costco Wonderland North
London, ON
April 2021
Photos originally shared on Instagram

I took these photos six months ago today. Provincial rules banning big box stores like this Costco from selling anything more than essentials resulted in this surreal scene.

The giant-walls-of-merchandise blocking aisles of supposedly non-essential goods were an epically creative solution to a particularly vexing problem, and they strangely brought me comfort during a time where I - indeed all of us - felt anything but comfortable.

It was but one of countless surreal moments during this surreal period in history, and I felt like I needed to record it in some admittedly trivial way before getting back to the very serious business of quickly fetching what I needed and getting the heck out of dodge.

The restrictions were lifted after a few months, and the store has since returned to its usual crowded, salmon-swimming-upstream-amid-countless-other-drunk-and-clueless-salmon vibe. For the record, shopping, here and elsewhere, is now sheer hell.

I wish we could go back to these giant stacks of boxes. I wish we could go back to before everything changed. When we were all blissfully unaware of what lay ahead.

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