The Easy Hack For Safely Storing Wine Bottles In Your Costco Cart
When it comes to stocking your home wine cellar, you can't beat the deals at Costco. That's right — the warehouse juggernaut that's got all the extra-large boxes of cereal and barrels of maple syrup is also a great place to get good quality wine for less than $10 a bottle. They've got lots of picks from their own Kirkland Signature line as well as good buys on brands that you can find at other bottle shops for several dollars more. The problem with shopping for wine at Costco, however, is that the glass bottles tend to rattle around in those big shopping carts, and it's not that uncommon for one or two to break. But if you're stocking up your wine racks for a party or the holidays on your next Costco run, there's a pro move for preventing your bottles from breaking, and all you need is space in the child seat of any shopping cart.
If you've got a couple of glass bottles banging around in your cart, it just so happens that the space between the handle and the back of the baby seat is the same length as a 750-mL wine bottle from the bottom to the rounded shoulder. If you pop the neck of the bottle through the tines of the basket, it clicks right into place.
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Use The Cart To Your Advantage
When it comes to shopping for wine at Costco, it's never really a one-bottle situation. Just like all of their other products that are sold in bulk, it's the best place to stock up on a few cases of prosecco and Cabernet for a wedding or the holidays. If you're not ready to commit to a whole case of wine, however, there are plenty of single bottles for mixing and matching. If you're shopping alone, and the wire basket portion of your cart isn't already filled up with a kid, it's the perfect place for your wine bottles. All you have to do is snap them into place like a makeshift wine rack. A recent viral video on TikTok from @dailyoriginalvids shows you how the pros do it:
If you want to earn extra brownie points with your cashier, you can take the extra step of rotating the bottles around so that the barcodes are facing up if you're allowed to keep your cart. That way, the checkout person can scan your wine in a flash, which is a bonus when every second counts in that checkout line. (Cashiers also like it when you have your card ready at the front of your order.)
The Cart Hack May Be A Costco Exclusive
The extra fun part of this hack is that it seems to only work with Costco carts because the spacing of the wire in the cart is wide enough for the neck of a wine bottle. A user on Reddit's r/Costco commented, "Many carts have the wires too closely spaced to fit the stem of the bottle. Costco carts are very thoughtfully designed for what they sell. For example, you can fit exactly one pack of toilet paper and one pack of paper towels on the shelf below the basket, but only if you put the TP at the back, where it just barely fits."
The only drawback to the cart hack for wine bottles is that you can only fit around seven bottles, so if you're planning an extra-large wine-and-cheese-pairing party, you'll need to either shop with someone with a second cart or grab one of the many empty wine boxes that are laying around for shoppers to use. If you're shopping for wine in bulk, you should also consider buying some large-format bottles like a 3-liter bottle of Bordeaux. While the bigger bottles won't fit in the cart's baby seat, they're big and heavy enough to stay put in the main basket of the cart while you browse the rest of the aisles.
Read the original article on Daily Meal.