Love Quote by Augusten Burroughs

Target and Costco aren’t just stores here; they’re passports. Augusten Burroughs frames big-box retail as “that kind of culture,” a deliberately loaded phrase that turns fluorescent aisles and bulk paper towels into a vision of belonging. The line works because it risks sounding ridiculous and then makes you realize it isn’t. He’s not praising capitalism so much as naming the small, ritualized spaces where Americans perform membership: the shared choreography of carts, samples, seasonal endcaps, the quiet reassurance that you know what to do and no one is looking at you too hard.

The key move is the emotional reversal: he “love[s]” what many writers would treat as soulless, because soullessness can be merciful. Big-box stores offer anonymity with structure. If you’ve grown up feeling “like a tourist,” the predictability is its own form of care. Tourists are always scanning for cues, faking fluency. Costco and Target are a kind of social Esperanto: you don’t need pedigree, taste codes, or the right dinner-party vocabulary. You just need a membership card or a red cart.

Burroughs’ subtext is class and alienation, but also something more intimate: the lifelong suspicion that community is happening behind a glass wall. He’s a memoirist whose work circles family chaos and self-invention; “never fit in anywhere” isn’t a mood, it’s biography. In that light, “culture” isn’t museums and literature. It’s the comfort of the ordinary, the radical hope that you can stop performing and simply be a person buying socks in public.