Impulse-buying

Everybody's guilty of doing it, right? There's a reason why supermarkets place candies and magazines near the check-out counters. Yeah, yeah, I'm one of those suckers who always, without fail, grab at least a piece of candy bar while waiting in-line at the check-out counter.

My other impulse-buying besides my obvious weakness for all things sweet and chewy:

- Books (new and used):This is my money-sucking pit, my Achilles's heel. Buying books to me is like what buying shoes is to women: It soothes me when I'm down and they look nice and smart all lined up along the shelves (like shoes), though some of them would probably be collecting dust (again, like shoes.)

- CDs (new and used): Though it has been happening less frequently of late due to the emergence of all these P2P programs, I still buy a lot of CDs (and to a lesser extent, DVDs) on a whim, especially when there's a sale going on. I remember last year in DC when I went to Best Buy with the sole intention to buy a stupid USB cable and I came out with 10 CDs just because all the CDs were on sale ($9.99 or less), and the USB cable, sadly, went unbought. Like today, I went to CD Max to see if they have a used Motorcycle Diaries DVD (they don't), so I grabbed a DVD about street-ball at the legendary Rucker Park, NYC. As I was paying for the DVD at the counter, there was a bright, shiny used Nirvana "When The Lights Out" boxset screaming my name from behind the cashier. I swear that it only took me 0.001 seconds to ask the cashier to ring up that boxset. Granted that the boxset has been on my wish list since it first came out but the purchase today was definitely not premeditated at all.

- Junk food: Never once whenever I go grocery-shopping that I leave the supermarket without at least a bag of Doritos/Frito Lays or Chips Ahoy/Oreos/Keebler/Ritz cookies or a half-gallon tub of Eddy's ice-cream or a six-pack of Klondike bars or a family-size bag of Kit Kat or Reese's peanut butter cups or at the very least, a couple of Snickers bars. It's not like I'm a chronic pot smoker--I'm more on the recreational side--that I have constant cravings for munchies. I'd only buy these junk food only when they're on sale, say, like, this oven-toasted, sour-cream and onion Ritz chips I'm munching right now as I'm typing this very sentence was two-for-$4, which was pretty good deal. The sad truth is junk food is always on sale and it's the poor sap like me who gets suckered all the time.

I don't why I'm writing this post about impulse-buying; I guess I was struck by impulse-blogging. Anyway, impulse-buying is probably the most spontaneous and adventurous thing that most people would ever get to do in their mundane, white-bread lives. They can now go back to their white picket-fenced house in the 'burbs and regale their kids with fantastical tales of their little derring-dos at the neighborhood Pick N Save--"Yes, dear. It only took mommy 0.001 seconds to buy that lemon meringue pie."