To buy or not to buy ... yeah, go ahead!
“Why do we — YOU — have a tin of Vienna sausages?” My wife, Eileen, has opened the kitchen cupboard and is responding to an unexpected presence in a storage space otherwise fairly predictable in terms of the dry goods typically found there.
She’s not angry. We’ve long been comfortable with the dichotomous aspect of our relationship in which she’s a vegetarian and I’m not. I buy lots of meat products.
In this case, the tone in her voice is a bit accusatory and a bit shaky. These are Vienna sausages, after all, and … well, they’re creepy. It’s as though she found out I had a secret taxidermy shop in the garage and sold stuffed baby rabbits in boxing poses over the Dark Web.
I try to explain. “When I was a kid, I used to enjoy the occasional Vienna sausage. I saw these at a convenience store and wondered how they’d taste compared to what my memories of them are. In my mind, they should taste like long summer days, sandlot baseball, cold bottles of Mountain Dew ...”
“But here they are on the shelf. You haven’t tried them yet.”
“Well, no,” I say. “On the way home, with them on the passenger seat next to me, I thought of Upton Sinclair and ‘The Jungle’ — which I clearly hadn’t read when I was 12 — and decided to ponder the wisdom of the whole experiment.”
I don’t tell her that, next to the Vienna sausages on the convenience store shelf, was a tin of “Libby’s Corned Beef — Product of Uruguay.” I immediately had to Google Uruguay, which is “a South American country known for its verdant interior and beach-lined coast.” Wikipedia says nothing about any tendency by tourists seeking out Uruguay to sample their exemplary corned beef ...
Eileen interrupts my thoughts. “So. Vienna sausages. Another Impulse Buy.” “Yep.”
The truth is, we are both frequently guilty of the compulsion to purchase something on the spur of the moment — and as humans I believe we are in no way alone in this. That’s why stores have shelves full of weird stuff to study while you’re waiting in line at the cashier, trusting that you might grab one or more.
These “impulse buy” products are also clipped to those hanging merchandise strips up and down each grocery store aisles.
You might, for example, be perusing the possibilities of frozen cauliflower crust pizza in the refrigerator case and, in order to open the door, have to maneuver around a