Planking at Costco
By Chris King
November 25, 2025
Nymah Kumah was a fully acculturated man in the Grebo tribe of Liberia when he immigrated to Massachusetts in the 1950s. By the time I met Nymah at Walden Pond in the 1990s, he was a long-displaced Grebo elder still deeply puzzled about his adopted country. He frequently dwelled on comparisons between his people’s folkways and those of Americans, in stories that always began: “Chrissy, I don’t understand American people.”
When I recently took my elderly mother shopping at Costco, I thought of one of Nymah’s stories. “Chrissy, I don’t understand American people. American people pay money for gym to exercise. They pay money for maid to clean their house. In the tribe, there was no gym. There was no maid. In the tribe, we cleaned our own house. Cleaning house is very good exercise. Don’t pay for gym. Don’t pay for maid. Simple. Happy.”
Shopping at Costco might seem to offer limited opportunities for exercise. Of course, you expend some energy pushing your cart around the big box and filling it up with large containers of the things you need and want, but that does not compare to the energy expenditure of cleaning an entire house. However, under the new circumstances of taking my elderly mother shopping, I innovated some new forms of exercise at Costco.
My mother, known as Tootsie, is a tiny woman further bent over by all the years and chronic back trouble. She now walks with a cane and very slowly. A lifelong fan of shopping, she loves shopping even more now because the shopping cart provides a heavyweight walker. Leaning onto the shopping cart is about the best support imaginable for her to walk now. Her gait has slowed to the pace of an escargot. She almost does not move forward at all, yet she does move. Over time—more time than it takes anybody else at Costco to move down the aisle—she comes within view of more and more new products.
We recently moved Tootsie into an independent living apartment in Glen Carbon, Illinois, after decades of living alone in houses on the east side. There is no Costco in the Metro East, so being driven to a Costco in St. Louis County was all new to her. Every single item in every single aisle was of at least cursory interest to her. So, as slowly as she was moving, often she was not moving at all, but rather stopped dead to look over every aspect of every product in every aisle. This provided challenges and opportunities for me, in terms of what to do with all that time.
I brought a book, an early anthology of Seamus Heaney’s poetry, but there was just enough going on—keeping my cart out of the way of other shoppers, helping make sure my mother remained mindful that other shoppers needed to get past her cart—that I could not focus on poetry. I did not want to be the guy in public surrounded by other living, breathing human beings, peering into social media on my phone. So, I decided to do like the Grebo people and get a free trip to the gym while shopping at Costco.
I figured out how to plank without dropping to the ground. I figured out how to plank with the assistance of my shopping cart. I simply put my forearms on my shopping cart handle, as I would against the floor were I planking on the floor, and I let my shopping cart roll out in front of me very slowly, very slowly putting more and more tension on my core. As I nearly flattened my body in relation to the plane of the floor, leaning on the shopping cart, I was basically planking at Costco. I was getting a solid core workout while pushing my shopping cart unbelievably slowly down the aisle at Costco.
I had support on this mission. I needed my girlfriend Heather for tactical support. She was doing the detailed work of actually shopping with my mother while I trailed them in a second shopping cart to load up our household’s purchases. Heather is not a nag, but I have internalized the voices of past partners who were intensely impatient with my unusual and improvisatory approach to life. Those voices intoned in my head, “Stop planking at Costco.” So, I gave up on planking at Costco and decided to attempt a new form of exercise that was a little less flamboyant: the heel-to-toe slow walk.
Again with the support of the shopping cart, which was just as useful in my exercise as in my mother’s mobility, I would extend one leg and put pressure only on the heel. Then I would push forward slowly onto the foot, slowly shifting the pressure forward on the foot, until all the pressure pivoted to the toes. Then I would push the pressure slowly up to the front of the toes, slowly extending each joint of each toe, joint by joint, toe by toe. It was less exercise, more deep stretch, but it felt good.
Then the internalized nagging of imagined past partners sent me the psychic energy to “Stop doing the heal-to-toe slow walk at Costco,” so I decided to wrap up my trip to the gym and focus on the people around me.
We were shopping at the Costco in University City, Missouri, in central St. Louis County, which is an agreeably diverse place for someone with my interest in all kinds of people. It is like the United Nations of grocery shopping. I enjoyed seeing the peoples of the world stock up on necessities, snacks, frozen foods, booze and even clothes. It turns out I find it relaxing to watch strangers try on jackets, especially when the first jacket does not fit so they keep trying, and you get to see them become more comfortable in their new jacket. But the adults were not the main event.
Costco is the best place I know where I can enjoy other families and especially their children, now that I do not have a child in my own home who routinely brings other children into my life. At all costs, one must avoid appearing to pay any unwanted attention to any child. This poses a problem if, like me, you have no intention whatsoever to interfere in any child’s life, yet you take abundant joy in seeing almost any child.
I have developed a playbook of stock quips to break the ice with the family long enough to enjoy the child. If it is a very small child, the quip is “Well, that settles it. We have a winner for cutest baby at the Costco. Now everybody else is just competing for second place.” If it’s a slightly older child being carted around inside the shopping cart, the quip is “I guess this deal comes with a train ride for some of us.” If the child is old enough to help drive the train, to help push the cart, the quip is “Oh, you’ve got quite a copilot there.” I recognize these are not even groan-worthy quips, but in my middle age, I have decided that even the most embarrassing grandpa joke hits better than raising any red flags for being a creepy old man.
What I never do, even when I see the parents of the cutest baby at the Costco loading a giant bag of diapers or dog food onto their shopping cart, is tell them this Nymah Kumah story.
“Chrissy, I don’t understand American people. They pay money for diapers. They pay money for dog food. In the tribe, there was no diapers. There was no dog food. In the tribe, you let the baby go along, and, you know, do its thing on the ground. Then the dog would come along and eat it up. Don’t pay for diaper. Don’t pay for dog food. Simple. Happy.”
