My First Trip to Jetro, and the Economics of Buying a Year's Worth of Toilet Paper

I’ve always been fascinated by big box stores, as I find them to be a peculiar novelty of the middle American life I might have led in a bizarro-Midwestern-white version of myself. And I so seldom get these experiences, that each time I go, I’m endlessly enthralled by the minutest of details. My brother and I went to Jetro (Korean pronunciation: jeh-tuh-ro; Brooklyn pronunciation: jeth-ro) in Gowanus on Saturday. Jetro is the retailer’s version of Costco—you buy a yearly membership, and have access to wholesale prices and quantities of food—vats of macaroni salad, cases of Vitamin Water ($21.99/per 24 units), Tylenol (price TK), bok choy (TK), Quaker Oats granola bars (TK), etc, housed in a fashionable warehouse-chic décor (sans the fashion).

Unlike Costco, where the bulk of the customers is your average consumer stock-piling sausage wienies and barrels of pretzels for their households into their minivans; Jetro is where convenience stores, delis, restaurants, and other mom-and-pop’s outlets stock up on their supplies, because they’re usually too small to be handled by a distributor. A blue-collar haven, if you will. Except Jetro is not the consumer-friendly store offering free fried food samples on toothpicks, with soccer moms in high-waisted jeans and aisles teeming with little kids screaming their heads off; the space is dark, items are heavy and hard to find, and you’re steering this clunky orange U-boat that refuses to comply with you and inevitably crashes into an aisle, a person, or another U-boat.

So we joined them in their weekly pilgrimage to Jetro’s just under the BQE (Brooklyn Queens Expressway). For bigger retail stores like my parents' store Food* (note: some names have been changed to protect their privacy), we would usually do emergency pop-overs to Jetro’s if we ran out of Snicker’s bars and the delivery guys wouldn’t be there for another day or so.

Obba (Korean translation: older brother, in relation to younger sister; not to be confused with the Greek onomatopoeia often heard at weddings) was on a mission to buy a long loin of filet mignon (an awesome deal at $9/lb, grade A) for Mother’s Day dinner. He decided at somewhat last minute to make steaks, so we didn't have time to order it with Food's butcher. We got to the meat section, and it felt like we were literally walking into a meat locker—the space is freezing, and slabs of plastic-wrapped cuts are just hanging out on top of boxes, out in the open, no refrigerator. Well, a refrigerator would have been redundant, but besides the occasional peak into the butcher section of my parents’ store, I’ve never seen such huge parts of cows, pigs, and lambs just out there in the open, which you can pick and prod to your heart's content.

Highlight of the trip: my brother treated me to a year’s supply of toilet paper. Despite the growing “green” movement with NYT articles about New Yorkers who go a year without it. I probably use about 1 roll of tp per week. Don’t judge: (a) I have such few indulgences in my life, that a fully-wiped bottom is one pleasure I refuse to forego (b) I am so stingy with other paper products—reusing paper plates and plastic utensils, milking multiple nose blows with the same stupid Kleenex, recycling my old business cards and scribbling recipes on the back, etc and (c) if installing bidets in tiny studio apartments were back in fashion, I’d be one of the first to sign up. My preferred brand is Cottonelle, which retails in most drugstores at $3.79/4pk. Which they were selling in a 48-pack, two-ply, for not much more than the retail price. Meanwhile Marcal’s Sofpak was selling a 48-pk for about fifteen beans.

“You’re the daughter of a grocer," my brother said to me. "How can you not know which is a better value?”

“Yeah, well if you gave me like, two seconds to think, I could do the math," I retorted. Needless to say, working in book publishing, I've found that all arithmetic skills I once possessed (I did get a 740 on the math portion of my GRE's--not bad for an English major) have completely deteriorated.

Anyway, I'm now happy to report I now have a year's supply of toilet paper in my studio apt.

*Photo courtesy of jetro.com