Household items

Well, I spent most of the day pinning products onto my new Households pin board.  Again, I apologize to all of those who went in and saw a ton of ridiculous, unappealing products.  Why did I create such an obnoxious board?  Well, after making the decision to order our products online, I found the website giving us the most points and found myself adding everything to my checkout.  Quickly, it became quite evident that we do not need all of those products right now or even in the near future.  We already have some of them or alternatives nor can we afford to buy then all right now.  Realizing that every time I went to the website, I would find myself mindlessly wasting time perusing every item in each category.

I'm a horrible shopper.   Really, I'm a phenomenal browser but when it comes to buying things, I am quite terrible.  This is exactly what I love about Pinterest.  I get the similar sensation to buying things without actually spending any money.  There have been tons of studies that discuss the psychological aspects to shopping.  It's not based on what we need but entirely on either what we think we need or what we want.  Clearly while I was looking at this particular site, I do what I always do when I'm at a store and I see products saying to myself, "oh we need this" or "sure, we don't need this now but it might be nice to have on hand" or "how much more of this do we need"  and finally, "oh, I should get that.  I know I have something like that I don't actually use but this looks like something I'll use instead."   Really, it's absurd.  In the end, I tend to either buy a bunch of things that aren't necessary or walk out without getting the actual necessities.

So, that ridiculous pin board is currently serving as a primarily round where I can go "shopping" and then go shopping again.  Now that I've eliminated the thousands of different items down to about 100, I can go through my cabinets and determine "what do we actually need?"  Like toilet paper, we need toilet paper.  In addition, I've already chosen a brand so I won't be siting there trying to determine which brand of toilet paper is best or the cheapest or the most environmentally friendly.  Also, I can have Dave run through it to make sure I've got the particular brands that he likes (he can be particular about the most bizarre things).  Finally, after the initial order, rather than peruse the whole website I can now go back to the pin board and "shop" from there again as I've already spent many hours narrowing it all down.

Yes, the whole process is insane and counterproductive but this is why I do not prize myself as a "shopper."  I hate shopping and at the same time love browsing.  On the other hand, at least I'm not blowing all of our salary spending hours and money on the shopping that I'm doing.  So as backward as the madness may be, I do have a method.  Wow, I did I just spend an entire post writing about why I created an arbitrary board on Pinterest?  Yes, yes I did.  Le sigh.