I miss Costco... There I said it

Living in a country with only 22 million people makes a few chores a little more difficult than I was expecting, namely shopping for clothes.  Things that I took for granted back in the states are turning into un-needed adventures.

Take this weekend for instance, I went out to try to find a few suits and came back empty handed.  I found a few, but none of them fit.  The size I'd normally buy in the store was way too big and the next size down fit with the exception of the sleeve lengths.  I swear, it came halfway up my forearm.  That was just the jacket too, I didn't even bother trying on pants at that point.  It didn't even seem like there was enough fabric to let out the sleeve length to make it somewhat normal.  And I haven't had to have many suits tailored to know how big is too big where they can't take it down a size.  So needless to say, I'm still looking.

I then went to look for a few dress shirts and pants.  Easy enough you might think.  Wrong.  Since Australia only has 22 millions people, imagine that half of them are men and then, at most, half of them wear business shirts on a regular basis.  That means they only need to make shirts for 5.5 million men.  With that small of a number, I quickly found out they don't do dress shirts based on neck size and sleeve length.  They do them based on Small, Medium and Large because they don't have the demand to make them all in specific measurements.  Frustrating, but at least the sleeve length was normal.  That and there aren't many options seeing as there are only 5.5 million people.  So you walk down the street and see everyone wearing the same shirt.

Then I went looking for undershirts (and this is where Costco comes in).  Buying in bulk has it's advantages.  Buy a six pack of undershirts for what, $30 maybe $40?  Not so down under.  The only package of undershirts I found had 2 and was $90.  I was blown away to the point where I couldn't justify buying them.  I'm sure in a few days I will just accept it and buy them.

The other reason I miss Costco, bulk food (and the samples).  I've stopped paying attention to prices at the grocery store because there aren't any other options, but here's a little run down of what some typical foods cost:

• Half gallon of milk - $4.19
• box of cereal - $6
• Pint of blueberries - $10
• Tomatoes - $5/lb
• Ground beef - $7.50/lb
• 2 liter of coke - $3.50
• loaf of bread - $4

Thankfully there is a farmer's market on Saturday's outside my apartment, but it's pretty small and rather inconsistent.  But, you take what you're given I guess.