Lame Adventure 225: Impulse Purchase

If I were inclined to access my inner weasel, I would blame Hurricane Irene holding me hostage in my apartment for almost the entirety of last weekend combined with the public transit shut down for my subsequent erratic behavior this week.  What did I do that was erratic?  I impulsively purchased a three pack of goat’s milk soap for $5.79 (excluding sales tax).  Every so often I walk into a store and it’s my turn to be bitten by that nasty little money-sucker, the impulse-shopping bug.  I’ll admit it, I don’t think Irene was a factor at all.

I had purposely gone to my grocer’s (Fairway on the Upper West Side) organic food department to purchase a tube of desperately needed toothpaste.  My preferred brand is Tom’s of Maine Whole Care Peppermint Gel.  Fairway sells this toothpaste for $3.99, a very good price for this product with its ever-inflating cost off-setting its ever-shrinking tube size (one of my pet peeves along with the announcement “new packaging” since that almost always means the consumer is paying more for less).  Before I entered the toothpaste aisle my eye caught the site of the friendly-faced goat on the soap’s wrapper.  If a three pack of soap could talk, I could almost hear it calling me by name.

Hi Chump!

This soap mesmerized me as much as porn surely intrigues a prison inmate.  I simply could not stop staring at that goat.  To fellow shoppers I must have looked either hypnotized or stoned, but I was neither (I like to think).

Quickly, I snapped out of my trance, went to the toothpaste aisle, and grabbed a tube, but before I could take my place in the checkout line, I could not control the urge to return to the goat’s milk soap section.  Possibly I was considering how much I enjoy eating goat milk cheese.  Being extremely lactose intolerant, I avoid cheeses made with cow’s milk unless they’re so sharp they taste like barbed wire.

This soap is so special it even impairs judgment.

When I noticed that this soap is available in my favorite fragrance, unscented, for people like me with extra sensitive pelts; that sealed the deal.  I entered the store only intending to buy just a single tube of toothpaste at the cheapest price I can find and exited with both that toothpaste and a three pack of soap made from the milk of a barnyard animal selling to the tune of almost $6.

I just hope this soap will be kinder to me than the juicer I impulsively purchased seven years ago, five years before I was diagnosed with esophagitis, gastritis and a hiatal hernia, prompting my gastroenterologist to advise me to delete all citrus beverages from my diet immediately since they were searing a hole the size of a dinner plate through my guts.

I did that to you?

Eventually, I will pass the juicer onto one of my friends.  Do I have any takers amongst the three most likely candidates – Martini Max, my sidekick, Greg, or you, Albee?  I might even toss in a bar of goat’s milk soap to sweeten the deal if one of you agrees to haul that suicide machine out of my sanctum sanctorum.