This rebroadcast originally aired on March 18, 2025.

Rebroadcast: In the U.S., shopping is almost a religion. For Emily Mester’s family, Costco was their Sunday ritual.

In her new book, 'American Bulk,' Mester tells the story of how her family struggled with the desire to own everything they possibly could.

Emily Mester, author of American Bulk: Essays on Excess.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Americans have a lot of stuff. Consider toys. The U.S. is far and away the biggest consumer in the global toy market. In 2024, Americans spent some $40 billion on toys. That's almost 40% of all toys sold in the world. But we've only got 3% of the world's children.

Now a lot of that mismatch has to do with having the biggest economy in the world, the spending power of the dollar, and standard of living. But it also has to do with our deeply ingrained culture of consumption. It has to do with a uniquely American need for abundance. Or as Emily Mester writes, quote, 'Shopping offers the lulling comfort of permanent volume, the same bulwark against scarcity that draws us to the all you can eat.

The buy one, get one, the unlimited refill. The endless, the bottomless, the lifetime guarantee. These promises are not to be underestimated, because their flip side is terrifying. To want a boundless supply means also to acknowledge a boundless need. We are inclined to hunger.' End quote. That is from Mester's new book, American Bulk: Essays on Excess.

And let me stop you before you presume this is just another snobby, chiding, cultural critique, tsk tsking the behavior of the mythical average American. It's quite the opposite, in fact. Mester's book is more a memoir, and she writes lovingly, delicately, and often humorously about her own family's relationship with stuff, and how that consumerism shaped their relationships with each other.

And she joins us now. Emily Mester, welcome to On Point.

EMILY MESTER: Hi.

CHAKRABARTI: I was wondering if you could actually start us off by reading directly from the book, and it's about a place that was very important to you and your family when you were growing up as a young girl. Can you read us that section there?

MESTER: Sure.

"I have known Costco longer than I have known most of my friends. I have spent more hours roaming its aisles than I have spent with several of my first cousins. My family took our first Costco trip in November 1998. The company had brought a store to the suburbs of Chicago, and we went on the very first Sunday of its opening.

"I was eight, and every single week for the next six years, my mother, my father, my grandma, my three brothers, and later, when she was born, my sister, would pile into our red minivan, and later, a brown SUV, and we would return to that Costco, always that Costco, always together, and always on Sunday. We were nominally Catholic, but nobody ever went to church.

Costco was our mass."

CHAKRABARTI: Costco was our mass. So that's Emily Mester reading from American Bulk. I can't think of another place other than religious houses that people go to regularly every week. The only other place is folks' favorite stores. Why was Costco such a place of pilgrimage for your family?

MESTER: For us, stores were one of the few places we could be together without pretense. We didn't really do family game nights. We wouldn't all go to the park or the movies together. But shopping, that's an activity that you have to do. And I think it was like our play, and it still is.

We find ourselves going to Costco when I go visit my parents, or going to the mall in between activities if we're visiting a place, it's just a place to return to and be together, but you have a reason to be there.

CHAKRABARTI: When you said the word play, that reminded me, this is a major theme that you explore in the essays.

When you're a kid, you play because it gives you joy, it lets your imagination wander, it puts you in a completely different state of mind or even state of being. Is that the kind of experience that even you had as a little girl walking through the gargantuan aisles at Costco?

MESTER: Yeah, it was, yeah, a reverie.

Costco particularly is just this labyrinthine, castle-like place. It's got these giant shelves filled with items. The birds are perched in the ceiling. It's got food, it's got pillows, it's got drinks, it's got snacks. It's got kind of everything you would need. It's like its own little city.

And yeah, there was just a real sense of possibility when we walked around there. What could, they could have anything. They could have a giant stuffed bear, which they did. And for some reason I was, that was like the one thing that they would never get us at Costco. But there's so much to do there.

And I think my dad felt that same sense of childlike reverie. It brought him back to being a kid. But except he had the money to buy anything he wanted. He would just fill a cart like a kid on a sweepstakes.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, okay. So you said something, we'll talk about your dad in detail in just a minute, but you said sometimes even if they wouldn't buy you things you wanted, meaning that your dad or your parents every week, it wasn't just an experience to go to Costco.

MESTER: Oh, yeah. There was the things we needed. There was like cereal or the big trays of croissants. But really, as I say in the essay, Costco doesn't have everything you need or it doesn't have it in the quantities you would need it in unless, you have 12 kids. My mom still had to go to the grocery store and get a lot of our groceries, but beyond the stuff we needed, there was definitely also stuff he wanted, or things that were often duplicates of other things.

He really liked to buy tool sets or maybe like a box of sharpies, or another thing of vitamins. None of it was very sexy items, but it was things that I think just the fact of there being a lot of it was really exciting for him. And yeah, we would get stuff too. Usually books. Books were always the thing you could get without qualification. Sometimes they had funky socks or little activity kits. But yeah, it was, that was a lot of the fun of it, was the sense of reverie transferred onto us.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And when you said the fact of there being a lot of it is what led to this excitement, or I would say even, what, sense of safety?

Comfort? Because the title of your book is American Bulk, but what you're really talking about is our nation's passion for abundance.

MESTER: Yeah, it's very safe, bulk. It's very comforting. Just being in the Costco and being surrounded by this fortress of toilet paper rolls. There's something about it that feels like, I guess it feels like you're in a padded cell, but maybe in the better sense of the word, if there is one, I don't know what there is, but a lot of people don't quite need that sense of comfort in their day to day lives, but I think often they'll turn to it during times of unease.

I know when the pandemic started, everyone, all of a sudden, everybody became a bulk shopper and started freaking out and needing to collect things and the shelves got empty. And then we were all just, Oh my God, why weren't we stocking up on toilet paper? And that's why there's so many, there's a whole movement of people that are doomsday preppers or even just regular people that are keeping big stockpiles of stuff in their house, preparing for what?

I don't even know if they quite know, but it's nice to have.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I have to say, I look upon preppers with sympathy because I'm like a baby prepper myself. Not in terms of preparing for Armageddon or Doomsday, but I feel like everyone should have a little bit of, like a go bag of some kind, in case you never know what kind of emergency might befall you.

I'm saying this as a public service. I'm thinking of the folks in Los Angeles right now.

MESTER: Little bit of potable water, some shelf stable food. Why not? You never know.

CHAKRABARTI: Food for your pet. But getting back to, that's not what your book is about. Your book is about our national passion for overconsumption, and I feel like a lot of it has to do with a sense of security, because you were talking about toilet paper in the pandemic.

At first, everyone was like, ha, look at all these people buying bulk toilet paper, but then I thought, No, the entire world had been upended around us and using the bathroom as a moment of fragility, of vulnerability. And I think it made a lot of sense to me that the last thing that people wanted was to run out of this key home staple, that whether we'd like it or not, contributes to our sense of personal dignity.

And I wonder if you felt like with your father, it was something that deep, because you talk about in the book about how he bought a lot of stuff, but it's not stuff that he used.

MESTER: No, and it wasn't stuff that was, to me, particularly exciting. Like he bought I think it was a retail pack of Leathermans, like the little cardboard box of Leathermans that you would put in a store to sell Leathermans, or just so many cords and chargers and phones when we had landlines, nothing, most of it was not quite exciting.

But it was there for some unspecified emergency. And I think when I see him, both, when I see him the most pleased, it's when someone is like, Oh, I have this specific issue, and I need this specific tool for it. Or do you have something that does this? And he's, I do have it and let me go find it. And then when he, someone is, do you have this thing?

And he doesn't have it, I can see him. I can watch him open up his phone and nervously order it, because the next time that happens, he's going to be prepared.

CHAKRABARTI: What was your home like then?

MESTER: Yeah, it was a weird in between of I wouldn't call it a hoarder house in the classical sense.

It didn't really look like that. But it was like clean clutter, like definitely the dining room table was never used, because it was just piled with new purchases and we'd clear it off, whenever we had like a holiday and then it would slowly accumulate stuff. And the garage. I read a statistic that I think said 25% of people who own two car garages can't fit two cars in them.

And that was ours. And then what we would have to do, because eventually we would run out of space, is we would have these like big, a whole weekend, we would spend like hauling stuff out of the attic and bringing it to Goodwill and writing it down ostensibly for a charitable donation.

But that wasn't really it. It was just a mourning process. So it was very cluttered. But livable cluttered or it wouldn't really end up on a TV show cluttered, but there's tons of stuff and I definitely when I would bring friends over in college, they would be like, Oh my God, and just wander the aisles.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm not laughing at your family, because just in the hearing you talk about it. Memory is a different thing than the actual experience, right?

MESTER: Yeah, it's funny, too. I feel like even they would be like, Wow, this is pretty crazy.

CHAKRABARTI: So what, when you were growing up, though, what did you think about it? Or was it just the water you swam in?

MESTER: Kind of the water I swam in. I think I resented having to call it out because my dad saw that as the typical sort of duties of a family member, like setting the table or cleaning the bathroom. And I saw that as, I saw it as something that was like his stuff to deal with.

But yeah, mostly it was used to it. And then, like I said, I both got the spoils of it sometimes, and also, I saw that, those impulses in myself.

CHAKRABARTI: But I suppose when you're like 8 and 9, it's not really a common thing for an 8 and 9 year old to think, I don't need this. But I want, like I want it, but the thought of need doesn't cross your mind.

But we've got to take a quick break, Emily. So hang on for just a second. When we come back, there's a lot more to discuss about your new book. It's called American Bulk: Essays on Excess. We'll be right back. This is On Point.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI:  Emily, we started off the conversation with your family's weekly Sunday pilgrimage to Costco. So you don't just write about your family, but you also write about the store itself.

And you actually, in that first essay, taught me a lot about Costco that I'll admit I did not know. That you point out that because you can buy things in massive bulk in Costco, in a sense, it's not a place that people who are impoverished can go. Because you have to pay for a lot of stuff. But at the same time, it's not necessarily considered an upscale American store.

So I was wondering if you could read from the book that section of the chapter.

"But Costco doesn't seem upscale. In the hierarchy of retail aesthetics, Costco sits at the unsexy bottom. It lacks the earthy, bourgeois glamour of Whole Foods, or Target's warm graphic buoyancy or the hot American urgency of 7-Eleven.

"Even the average supermarket shelf stimulates, an eye pleasing array organized carefully by color, flavor, and brand.

"By contrast, a Costco store carries all the visual allure of a warehouse. Everything within its walls is large, limited, and random. Where your average grocery store carries about 40,000 different products, Costco carries a tenth of that amount.

"There are two types of mayonnaise, and they both come in tubs. You can buy an 18-piece artisan spice rack, but not a jar of oregano. Even the 14-year aged cheddar comes in huge blocks whose size to price ratio seems to throw the cheese's rarity into doubt.

"Where a supermarket greets you with bursting crates of produce, inclined at an angle toward the shopper, as if to say, welcome, Costco's produce, though equally fresh, sits at the back of the store in a frigid locker, prepackaged in plastic sleeves and cardboard boxes, unsqueezable.

"In other words, Costco is quality without the usual trimmings of quality. Even the luxury goods seem utilitarian, leeched of their sheen. Spanish saffron is the costliest spice in the world, and the finest variety comes from the Castilla La Mancha region, where the flower blooms and dies in a single November day, its delicate red spindles harvested by hand.

"Costco is the world's largest importer of genuine La Mancha saffron, and in the warehouse, you'll find it under pallets of tube socks, in blister packaging, the words Kirkland Signature emblazoned across the front.

"Their affordable vodka is rumored to be made at the same French distillery as Grey Goose, but by now you can guess whose bottle features a magnificent glacial landscape dotted by white wings, and whose simply says, in block text, vodka."

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Emily Mester, reading from American Bulk: Essays on Excess. Emily, when I got to that section in the chapter, I have to say, my mind was blown. I thought I knew a lot about Costco, but I had no idea that it was the world's largest importer of this very fine saffron. When you found that out, what did you think?

MESTER: I think I realized the scale of Costco. I think I thought of it almost as my family's little store. And in researching, I was like, Oh my God, this is truly, I forget what percentage it is of Americans that have a Costco membership, but it was pretty surprising when I saw it. So yeah, Costco has a lot of power.

I know that, I think they're, in order to change, to keep the price of their rotisserie chicken consistent, because it's always been like five bucks, they've opened up their own giant chicken processing facility that is supposed to usher the chicken from birth to packaging in plastic.

But yeah, I was also like, oh, Costco has pretty good taste, okay?

CHAKRABARTI: The juxtaposition of Spanish saffron up against tube socks, it's a very vivid way I think of getting at something that is profoundly American in terms of how we shop, right? Because you're right, in such insightful language, you talk about how the shopping is, of course, and for a long time, has been an experience driven activity for Americans, which is why we buy much more than we need. But because of that, the experience isn't necessarily, I went to this place to buy specifically this rare item or this high quality item, and seeking out that quality was part of the experience.

That's not what it's about at all. If we can have Spanish saffron on the same shelf as tube socks. It's about something else entirely. So what, do you think that's particularly American?

MESTER: I think people like the idea that there is just a variety of things in this one familiar place. There's a lot of Instagram accounts and YouTube people whose whole brand is basically, Yep, you can find that at Costco.

And there's a joy in being like, No, we've got that there. It's almost, Oh yeah, we've got that at home. I feel like Costco is maybe a little bit like your extended pantry. And the idea that all of this is available in this one superstore is both convenient and also maybe this physical manifestation of plenitude.

You're like, wow, what else are they going to have? And yeah, the stores have been getting bigger and bigger. Sometimes I'll go into a Target or a Walmart and they'll have added on like a whole nother wing for some other like function that they've added to their stuff. And I essentially, they're just going to become, they're just going to become probably their own malls.

CHAKRABARTI: I have a Target story if you don't mind me sharing.

MESTER: Oh, please.

CHAKRABARTI: Are you sure? It's okay. I'm actually a fan of Target. I actually like it as a store. My, the Target closest to me is one of those small, urban ones, so it's very, it's like a postage stamp size in comparison to a regular Target, but let's see.

This was before Christmas, just like a week or so before Christmas. I went to a regular Target, which I hadn't been in one for a long time, and it was so vast, Emily. It was enormous. And it was crowded, people were just trying to buy last minute Christmas gifts. And I actually got a little panicky in the store.

Because I'll be totally transparent. I went there with my son because he wanted one kind of candy that I think only Target sells.

MESTER: That's how they get you.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes. And I was like, wow, I just drove three towns over spending money on gas, polluting the environment, just so I can get my son one candy that Target sells.

This is crazy, but I did it. So I'm just as normie as everybody else. But I was walking through the store and all I could think of was all of this stuff, this one store with millions of items, it's going to end up in the landfill. It made me feel nervous and twitchy. And yeah, I'd been through stores like that for my whole life, but there was something about it this time that really hit me.

I'm wondering if that, if you ever felt that kind of response, maybe as you grew or do these fond memories of family outings, did that always stay with you?

MESTER: No. I started feeling that same feeling. I think it was around grad school and maybe, at this point I had moved enough times in and out of dorms and in and out of apartments that I began to be like, I think I was moving again, and I was like, Oh my God.

I'm putting a bookshelf on the side of the road, or that feeling of, you have a plant that's basically dead and you throw it away and it feels violent. Everything, yeah, everything I threw away, usually I felt like it was truly jettisoned from me, if I threw it away or if I recycled it, but it started to feel like it all stuck to me, like that game Snake where you eat something and it just adds to your tail and you got to avoid it.

It felt like that. And I do often feel that. When I'm in there, more than the kind of, the reverie, which I can still get into, but I am like, where is this going to go? What are we doing with all of this? I just imagine it as a physical pile, which I mean, it does turn into, just sitting somewhere, festering.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I just kept thinking, I don't need any of this stuff. And yet I was thinking that while I'm in the car, in the Target, getting candy that I don't need either, and my son doesn't need it, but I was there anyway. So this is the thing that I really appreciate about how you approach this issue of American consumerism, of consumption, is that you tell this national story through the stories of your family.

And I'm just wondering why you decided to do that, because these are also people that you love.

MESTER: Yeah, I think that when I initially, the Costco essay was the first essay I wrote, it launched the book, and I was just going to write about the store, but then I really couldn't write about the store without writing about my family's relationship to the store.

And then when I wrote about my family's relationship to the store, I was also writing about, I think, a lot of Americans relationship, so it became difficult to tell the story of bulk without my family, and I also felt, I had read so many, there's so much writing about consumers and there's no lack. But a lot of it, it's either, a clinical psychologist analyzing why we buy, or it's something, it's a finger wagging thing about overconsumption. Or occasionally, it's just really nostalgic like I remember this store we love that and there wasn't anything that kind of talked about consumption the way I understood it, which was just an intimate part of my life.

It was like a family member to me, and consumption was the language that my family's disorder and joy and all that stuff spoke. So I think I felt like I needed, to write about one, I had to write about the other and I felt like it was contributing something that I hadn't really seen in the kind of vast landscape of writing about buying and consuming and capitalism and all that.

CHAKRABARTI: I think you're exactly right. And I really appreciate you taking this approach in the book also. Because I'm about to say something that's so obvious that it's like, why are you even bothering to say it? But in the United States, one of the biggest ways that we show each other that we love each other is through buying each other stuff, right?

It is as normal as stopping off for a cup of coffee somewhere. We don't even think about it. I just want to say thank you for allowing us insight into your family to tell this bigger story. Can you tell me more about your father? Like, how he grew up and his life, and if any of those experiences as you understood them, do you think contributed to what ended up being this very powerful relationship with Costco?

MESTER: Oh, yeah. Yeah, he grew up in western Iowa, in a rural town that was mostly dominated by its meatpacking plant. And he actually grew up pretty comfortably middle class. His dad owned like a very small kind of gas station and his mom was a schoolteacher. And they did fine, but this is his sort of origin story, is that they were so frugal that he thought he was poor.

And it was these like cartoonish stories of deprivation he would tell. They wouldn't buy me a baseball glove, or they made me fish my gym shoes out of the trash because I needed a new pair. And yeah. He grew up with this sense of deprivation that actually wasn't really accurate to his family's socioeconomic status, but I think he also grew up working.

He's been, I think he's had a job since he was like, probably like eight, whether it was a paper route or cleaning off the meat slicer at the Super Value. And I think he's always, I think hard work has always been the thing that will pull him out of his family's frugality and deprivation.

And I think he's just always been seeking that. And he became a lawyer, made a lot of money, and he's always just loved to accumulate things, even before he made money. I think when he was in grad school. He was, I think going into some credit card debt of just buying like As Seen on TV stuff or like pizza ovens. And it's yeah, it's a pretty direct line of not having access to things as a kid and connecting that access to a general feeling that maybe his parents didn't want him around or regretted having him.

And I think yeah, this stuff was very much a corrective for that. I think you can see it no more starkly than in Christmas. You would think, mostly when your kids get older, Christmas becomes this sort of ornamental affair. You buy each other one or two gifts. It's not a big thing.

But actually, Christmas has scaled up as we've gotten older. And it's all coming from him. And it is really. It's staggering, but it is also sweet, and I understand it. He just, he loves to just see a room filled with presents, like a Norman Rockwell Christmas card and I think it's really correcting for what he experienced as a kid.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, he, was it, I can't remember if it was as an undergrad or a law school? He went to an Ivy League school, right?

MESTER: Yeah, for both of them.

CHAKRABARTI: For both of them, okay. And didn't have the greatest experience?

MESTER: I think he, yeah, he met my mom there, so I guess he liked some things.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) Okay.

MESTER: But when he got there, he felt very alienated, and he did not tell me this. I think in his story, his sort of bootstrap story when he was talking to me about, just gritting your teeth through college or high school, he was like, I just did it. I won. But then I talked to my grandma, and she was like, Oh, he called me in the first week and was like, I want to transfer back to Iowa State because there was so much wealth there and not just wealth, but cultural capital.

There was so many things he didn't even know that he didn't know about fanciness. And I think he's, yeah, he's carried that sense throughout his life. As he's made money, his cultural kind of positioning hasn't really changed much. He hasn't become, he doesn't read the New Yorker, or I don't know, shop at Whole Foods or whatever.

CHAKRABARTI: To be honest, most people don't read the New Yorker . (LAUGHS)

MESTER: That's true. Yeah. I feel like he aligns pretty closely with like most people. Yeah. In his taste.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I do definitely read The New Yorker, but I have to be rigorous in the fact that most people don't. But the reason why I asked about that background from your father is because conspicuous consumption of any kind.

My feeling is that it's an action that's being partially driven by trying to fill some kind of need. It's not, and it's almost never a material need. And I just, because you point out in the book that your father used to walk around the house saying, it's my money. And it's not just like that he was able to spend the money on these things, which is a significant kind of declaration in and of itself. But you said you later on came to think that he was meaning something else when he said, it's my money.

MESTER: Yeah, I think those piles were the money made flesh, and that's why I mean his preferred, his spending habits tend towards physical objects and a lot of physical objects.

It's very kind of quantity over quality and he doesn't care as much for, or he had to learn to develop a taste for, I don't know, more intangible ways to spend money, because he was like what's the point of going out to dinner? I can't put that on my dining room table.

I can't put that in my attic. He really wants it to be like a physical manifestation of wealth and, having enough.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. The way you describe it, it sounds like, we all know someone like this. Do you think that?

MESTER: Yeah. I think the most surprising and really interesting thing in writing this book is all the people who come up to me and are like, I have a relative who, you know, over consumes or I over consume, or I have a relative who has trouble with hoarding.

It's so common, and I think I didn't quite realize until I published the book how much people don't feel that's represented in kind of a humane way in public. Television shows about it, but I don't think a lot of people are publicly copping to it in a way that sort of acknowledges both the kind of pathologies of it, but also the empathetic side of it.

I get why people do this. I do this.

CHAKRABARTI: It's a national pathology and it's been like put on steroids with the online world. So I want to talk about that with you when we come back in just a moment. I'm speaking with Emily Mester today. Her book is American Bulk: Essays on Excess.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Emily, I know we've been focusing a lot on your dad and your family and the stories that you pull from them about our, I would say, national relationship with consumption. But you talk about so many other things in the book, including your own, like, experience in working in places where you're working in companies where their sole goal is actually to get us to consume and buy things.

One of those places is Ulta. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience there.

MESTER: Yeah, I was working there after college. I felt aimless. And at first it was a novelty, which is partly, completely a mark of privilege. I had never had a job like that before. But I think it was also that, as a consumer, it was really exciting to see the curtain pulled back and then to be the thing that was getting people to buy things. Like being like, we just can't keep this in stock or be like, Oh my God, that is a my lips, but better color on you.

That is your color. It felt narcotic to be able to convince someone to buy something. It felt like the ultimate confirmation of, I don't know, my charisma or my taste. But then, yeah, it quickly the shine wore off and you can guess what it was, the sort of dehumanization of being paid minimum wage and being treated as a product by both your manager and the customers.

CHAKRABARTI: There's a section of this chapter, which I'd love you to read to us. And before you start, do you want to set it up a little bit?

MESTER: Sure, so around the time I worked at Ulta, a video went viral of a woman who had gone to Bath & Body Works searching for a particular candle and it was out of stock.

And it was called, I Might Boycott Bath & Body Works Rant, and it went totally viral because this woman is telling this Shakespearean story of where she sought deference and had been denied. And it became, before Karen, became a thing, it was a proto-Karen story.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So go ahead and read that section from the book then.

"Years later, the world would become obsessed with people like Angela and give them a name. Karen, a breed of high strung, entitled, affluent white woman who demanded servility from everyone around her. When everyone was talking about Karen, I thought back to Ulta. In telling us to put on our Mount Pleasant, my manager suggested that the degree of chipper, coddling deference we showed to the customers was directly proportional to their wealth.

"The richer you were, the more you wanted from us, the thinking went. But what I quickly noticed was that I acted the same no matter who the customer was. As long as they were buying something, they were also buying me. To be a service worker is to be in constant deference to Karens, yes. But in retail, a Karen can be anyone.

"Karen is a mindset born less of class, gender, or skin color than of the relationship between employer and customer, which is not unlike the relationship between product and customer. The rich were no more or less demanding of my hospitality, no more or less insistent that I go check in the back, no more or less indignant when the crumpled $3.50 coupon they'd fished out of their purse did not apply to their purchase. Because, as I had to explain several times a day, those coupons never applied to prestige products, only mass.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Emily Mester reading from American Bulk: Essays on Excess. You pinpoint something there that I'd never thought about before.

That regardless of one's income class, what have you, background, sadly, stores are one place where we all try to exert power over someone else, right? Power over the employee. Did you experience that on a daily basis?

MESTER: Yeah, and sometimes it was outright rudeness like someone who on our guest survey was like, I drove very fast from my job to get here, and your shelves looked like Walmart.

But more often, it was just this feeling that I was in deference to them. I remember one time I talked about this in the essay, I accidentally shorted a woman like $20 on her change, just miscounted. And I was like distraught for an hour. She walked away and didn't realize. And I was like, Oh my God, I'm so dumb.

I feel so, like I was just imagining her being like, I can't believe that worker. And she came back. And when she, and I kept being like, I'm so dumb. I'm so dumb. I'm so sorry. She was like, everybody makes mistakes. It was like hearing that for the first time. I think it's just such a weird relationship that you only experience in a job where this person. Yeah, ultimately, the customer is always right. And your manager is also always right. And you're caught in between.

It was just this air of like being subordinate to everybody, more than individual people yelling at me.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And you write about in the book how we've taken that presumption of customer superiority to new levels with like things like online reviews, which I mean, I actually don't take most reviews seriously anymore. Because I cannot trust that this person simply wasn't just given the product. Sometimes they say that, right? Like I was given this product for free, but a lot of times they don't, which is a brand-new form of like mass consumption, just like writing reviews just to get free stuff.

But can you talk about you as a product, a product reviewer too?

MESTER: Oh yeah, my dark past. No, yeah, I think like a lot of people who shop and who have a lot of thoughts about what they buy and genuinely want to help other people navigate this like very vast and confusing retail landscape. I was like, okay, let me share my thoughts with the others.

And I come from a sort of a line of reviewers, like my dad, I think, basically, wasn't into restaurants until he learned you could review them on Yelp. And my brother was, participated in Epinions, which is a really proto user review site. There's something about reviewing that I think it's like bearing witness to this thing that we're all experiencing.

That it has a raw appeal and it has a utility, too. You want to know what people are saying. It's essentially started as just like a word of mouth, like asking a friend what they thought of something. And now, yeah, it was the antidote to advertising. It was the true facts and the genuine source of what a thing was like.

And now it's just like ads again. It's been infected because wherever money grows, so too does the kind of dirtiness of an ad.

CHAKRABARTI: And that gets us also to just, there's a whole new compulsion for consumerism because of the ease of online buying. I actually don't know if that has touched upon your dad.

Is he an online consumer too?

MESTER: Oh, yeah, pretty, almost exclusively online or largely online. He recently has taken to going to Harbor Freight in person because he loves Harbor Freight. It's just discount tools and stuff. And that's been, like, actually a really good activity for him, but mostly online.

And when, he was a pretty early adopter of Amazon. When that sort of, it totally changed his buying. It brought it to a scale it hadn't been at before. Where the physical limitations of a car or a grocery cart, those were gone. And you could just order anything, anytime, at any scale.

So I think, yeah, I think online shopping has really, as it has for most people, it's supercharged the buying.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I have to say I relate to your dad because I love going to Home Depot. I might need one thing from Home Depot, but I do love to spend time just walking around the tools section.

MESTER: The chain section too, you just feel, they're like these like long metal like jewels. I love Home Depot.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I am chronically tight fisted so I won't actually buy stuff, but I love imagining like what project could I do such that I need this like new attachment for my drill. But anyway, I want to offer you this thought, Emily, because it was rolling over in my mind as I was reading American Bulk.

Because you mentioned this word several times, compassion, and consumerism in the United States, I would say is not just a religious experience, but it's almost like a duty. It's like a national duty that we have. Because I remember when I was young, the first time I ever heard my father say the almighty dollar, right?

It's not the powerful dollar or the useful dollar. It's the almighty dollar. So we put this like divine power belief into money and the things that it can do. And I thought to myself, I don't know when this happened, but there's a point in U.S., recent U.S. history. Or let's call it modern U.S. history, the past 75 years, where we stopped calling each other citizens, and we're always referring to each other as consumers, like the American consumer has no confidence in the economy, or the American consumer does, voted this way or that way. So even how we see our worthiness as citizens of this country is through the act of consumption.

And that's why I was very moved when you wrote about your family, with this compassionate lens. Because I feel like we, as we should be critical of the overconsumption in this country, we all should just recognize that this is the system that we're all living in, we've all been thrust into.

And in fact, we're told, sorry for this rant, but we're told that the health of the nation, the health of the U.S. economy requires us to do these very things that sometimes fill us.

MESTER: After 9/11, they told us to shop. I remember that. Bush told us to shop.

CHAKRABARTI: So this idea of doing these things, but feeling a sense of shame about them, that leads me to your grandmother.

Can you talk about her a little bit?

MESTER: Yeah. I grew up just being in love with her. She was just this like jolly, kind of Midwestern. She's a teacher. She's just ideal grandma. And then as I grew up, I just was peeling back the layers of a lot of darkness that she had in her past.

She deals with hoarding. I think she did when my dad was living with her growing up. She did after my dad left, she did when she moved to Illinois to be closer to us in her condo. Everywhere she goes, the sort of stuff accumulates. And it's a different kind than my dad. She's more of the kind you would maybe see on TV.

It's not yeah, it's not, digital cameras and Leathermans. It's like brochures and free stuff. And she's extremely frugal. But yeah, I really, I saw how much shame she had about it, and how much it kept people out. We couldn't even go in her house growing up. And I really wanted to bring compassion to it, because I'm not a hoarder, and I also don't quite shop on the level of my dad, but I completely have what they have.

If I had maybe worse access to mental health resources, or just, a couple more traumatic events in my life, or maybe I became a mom at an age where I didn't really want to, which is what she did. I could see myself becoming that, and just accidentally, things pile up around me, and then all of a sudden, I'm living in this, I really thought I would. So yeah, I really wanted to bring that to the book.

CHAKRABARTI: Talk a little bit more about that because, as you said, you never even went to where she lived when you were growing up. But eventually you did see how she lived. How did she feel when you first discovered what her home was like.

MESTER: I think she was very scared.

So yeah, she left her home in Storm Lake, Iowa. She just up and left it when she retired, packed like a suitcase and just left it. And it sat there for 15 years or something like that. And finally, I wanted to go see what it was, become a myth in my family. And I went with the plan to go in and excavate it and lift things with a gloved hand and inspect them.

And I didn't end up going in, I looked through the windows and I saw, yeah, on TV. It was this cinematic mess, but it was also very her. There were letters from the bank. There were, you know, just little, there was like, an empty can of Coca Cola that she'd been drinking or what food she'd been eating, or clothes she'd been wearing and it felt so personal.

And yeah, I didn't want to go in and I think after all of the, she was very, I think, fearful and tense in leading up to my visit to that house, and I think afterwards, I didn't admonish her for it, and I wasn't like, oh my god, and I think it really calmed her down and made her realize that I don't, I loved her, and I didn't think she was bad, or I understood it.

CHAKRABARTI: It must have been, in a sense, freeing for her.

MESTER: Yeah, I think it was, I called her after, and then all of a sudden all of the trepidation she had felt, she was like wanting to go and visit the house, she was talking about, maybe we could go in and clean it up and it's still sitting there, and I do still have plans at some point to go and deal with it.

But yeah, I think it took a big weight off her shoulders. And eventually a couple years later, she let me into her current, actually now she's an assisted living but she was living in a condo in Illinois and that one nobody had seen for years. And she let me in and it was what I expected, and it felt really important that she let me in and trusted me with it.

CHAKRABARTI: You write near the end of the book about, I'm not going to quote it directly because I want people to read it, but how all these piles of things, the fact is that yes, over thousands or millions of years they will all turn into dust, but they'll also all outlive us. And I guess as we wrap up, Emily, I'm wondering how writing this book and thinking about your family and the country that we live in, did it change your relationship to consumption or did it make, did it change how you view this very core or central American activity?

MESTER: I think it made me a lot more sympathetic to it. And a lot more aware of how common it is. I think I had a small part of me had worried it was just this weird thing that me and my family did, even though I knew on some level it wasn't true. And I worried as I was writing it, I was like, I'm not really presenting a solution to all this.

I'm identifying the problem, and I just leave them with, yeah here's all these piles, they're gonna outlive us, I don't know. But I do think, it's made me realize the importance of just first acknowledging what it is without judgment and then from there, you can address it.

I'm currently, it did make me really address my own consumption, which I'm absolutely an over consumer. And I am attempting a no buy in 2025, but in contrast to previous no buys I've attempted, it has a little more grace, a little more wiggle room, a little bit more of an acknowledgement of how I really am going to act.

And I hope it sticks.

This program aired on July 4, 2025.