Why I Hate the Dollar Store!

Why did it happen to me? Why? Why? Why?

I am a traditional person. I don’t give into fads, especially expensive fads at that. But I underestimated the power of the addiction, and overestimated my ability to stay out of the danger zone.

It started innocently enough I was at the dollar store. Now let me digress here and say:
I hate dollar stores with a passion. Just the smell of the dollar store is enough to make me run for the door, or not even go in for that matter. My friends make fun of me for not shopping on the cheap, but I stand firm in my beliefs that if a store has a foul “packaged” smell to it; then you ought not be shopping there. I have never willingly entered a dollar store just to “check it out”.

However I was with a good friend of mine who was in need of beading supplies and she thought that paying retail was like pulling teeth out without the novocaine. We went down the crap isle; I mean the craft isle in search of her beading stuff. To make a long story short the magnificent almighty dollar store failed to carry what she was looking for. (If we had went to Michael’s liked I suggested she would have found it there. One for me, zero for the dollar store.) On our way back down the isle I turned my head ever so slightly to the right and I noticed scrapbooking supplies. I decided to pick up a few things for Holly’s birthday. I was there anyway enduring the smell; why not?

That was the moment the evil scrapbooking gods had me and my wallet in their gasp. Life as I knew it changed for ever; $20 to start, after that a million dollars and counting!

I gave Holly her token birthday gift a week before her birthday, and just as I suspected she absolutely went wild over it. But come on it was dollar store crap…I mean crafts. We had to get the “good stuff.” Immediately we jumped in my VW beetle and sped to our neighbourhood scrapbooking store-no crap there, just 5000sq feet of expensive retail supplies, to which I had no idea how to use. We filled our basket with what we figured the essentials to be: a cutter, some stickers, a few pens and paper, paper, paper. $125.00 later we were out of there. We made a promise to each other that we would not become one of those scrapbook people that buy and buy and buy just for the sake of buying. No we would only buy what we needed. We got home and we laid our treasure out on the living room floor.

This part is David’s fault…

David was sitting with us looking at the receipt and looking pale as he scanned the total. He noticed that the shop gave a 10% discount, and he asked if we had received our discount. We had not. It was an injustice that we had to fix at once. In a matter of two minutes we were back at the overwhelming-heaven-of-a-scrapbooking-supply-store. We broke our oath right then and there and dropped another $25 dollars, because everything was “just so adorable”.

I like to consider myself a smart woman and it did not make sense to me to pay retail prices for scrapbooking supplies, so I revved up my ebay account and started shopping for the goods from the comfort of my easy-chair. (*Notice the following statement is a plug for ebay.) If you love to scrapbook ebay is the way to go. You get name brand products at hell of a savings. Go and check it out.)

My obsession runs deeper than ebay. Now I am going to Michaels and I am walking through the scrapbooking isles. Most of the time I stand there trying to figure out what all the contraptions and dohickies are for.

At the present moment I have refrained from making anymore purchases, but I can’t tell you what tomorrow will hold. One thing I know for sure is: I am blaming my new found addiction on the dollar store! I hate those places.