The Art of the Impulse Purchase

A friend of mine is offering eleven drink boxes of coconut water to anyone who might like them.  (If you live in the Kansas City area, look her up.)  “Most ridiculous impulse buy I’ve made to date,” she proclaims.

It’s a pretty great one, I think.  Just say the words coconut water out loud (or imagine doing it, if you’re reading this on the bus or something).  It sounds luxurious, cool, relaxing, refreshing.  Lovely.

Unless you don’t like coconut.  Then it probably just sounds gross.

That’s the thing about impulse buys.  They can be wonderful, or . . . something you try to get rid of on the Internet.

J’s post got me thinking about my own impulse purchases and trying to decide: what is my most ridiculous impulse buy?

Sometimes, my impulse purchases are actually wholesome (you may remember my impulse Brussels sprouts a few months ago).

Sometimes, they involve in-store coupons (Bel Vita breakfast biscuits, which turned out to be kind of a hit in the Cumings house, although Zoe now demands “real cookies” instead of what I’ve billed as “breakfast cookies” most of the time).

And sometimes, they are handmade pottery.

It’s true.  When I lived in Milwaukee, there was a wonderful little pottery store.  I loved browsing and chatting with the owner, and I would sometimes buy gifts there.

One day, I saw it.  A simple, beautiful cream serving bowl.  I had to have it, so I bought it.

My roommate Katie was horrified.  Not by the bowl–it is really very pretty–but by the price: sixty dollars.

In the years right after LVC, sixty dollars was a substantial amount of money.  (Honestly, it’s not peanuts this year, either.)  But at a time when we had only recently realized we could spend more than a dollar on pasta sauce, spending sixty dollars on a lovely but slightly wobbly serving bowl was just bananas.

Nine years later, I still have the bowl.  I almost never use it–it’s been superseded by also lovely but also sturdier wedding presents–but I just can’t seem to part with it.  (Pro Tip: There’s a fine line between being sentimental and being a pack rat.  Probably.)

We are having a garage sale next weekend, so there’s a chance my Impulse Bowl might find its way out of the basement as someone else’s impulse buy.

And if that does happen, it will cost a lot less than sixty dollars.

What’s your most ridiculous, or most wonderful, or most embarrassing impulse buy?