If you've ever tried to pull into the Costco on Lawrence Expressway in Sunnyvale on a weekend, you already know: it's not shopping, it's survival.

This past weekend — the Saturday before Easter — the parking lot descended into its usual pandemonium, with massive crowds flooding in and cars circling like vultures over a rotisserie chicken. One bewildered shopper wondered if there was a gas run or some kind of special event happening inside. Nope. It's just... Costco being Costco.

As one Bay Area resident put it, "That's normal for the Sunnyvale location, probably the worst parking experience in all Bay Area Costcos." And the competition for that title is apparently fierce, with shoppers at locations in Redwood City, Santa Clara, and Coleman Avenue in San Jose all reporting similar zoo-like conditions. One local said the Coleman Avenue location took them 30 minutes just to get into the parking lot.

The kicker? Costco was closed on Easter Sunday, meaning all of this frenzy was concentrated into Saturday — a collective panic-buy of hot dogs, bulk paper towels, and whatever else the Bay Area apparently cannot survive a single holiday without.

Another local didn't mince words about the Sunnyvale location specifically: "It has the absolute WORST drivers in the parking lot and the people are SO greedy and RUDE by literally cutting in front of LITTLE KIDS for samples."

Look, we're all for free markets and consumer choice. Costco is a genuinely great deal, and people voting with their feet (and their oversized shopping carts) is capitalism at its finest. But there's a broader lesson here about infrastructure and planning. When a single retail location routinely creates traffic gridlock that spills onto public roads, it's worth asking whether the city's permitting and traffic planning kept pace with demand — or whether Sunnyvale just shrugged and let it become everyone else's problem.

The Bay Area has a habit of letting popular things get crushed under their own success while planning departments move at the speed of government. Costco isn't going to get less popular. Maybe it's time for solutions that match the scale of the chaos.