Shopping Purgatory

I devised a brilliant shopping strategy. I wish it was for my holiday shopping, but I'm still brainstorming ways to streamline that ordeal. This is what I'm calling my "shopping purgatory." It's my genius idea for saving money by not buying unnecessary items and it goes something like this . . .

I'm sure everyone knows about Amazon wish lists. Or maybe you don't. Let me explain. Amazon not only allows you to place items that they sell into a Wish List for later purchase, but they also offer this handy dandy little button that you can add to your bookmarks menu bar. Here's a snapshot of a corner of my screen. See the little "Add to Wish List" selection in my bar?

So no matter where I am online, I just click on an item to view it in any shop and then I can simply hit that magic button on my top menu bar to add it to my list. It automatically pops up a new little window and fills in the pertinent info to be stored in my Amazon Wish List. It's literally one simple click. The image below is purely for demonstration purposes (really).


Whenever I find myself hemming or hawing over a purchase, or maybe I found something really cool by accident and I want to remember it and where it is, I just add it to my wish list. For me this list has become a gathering of ideas that maybe I want to buy for myself (or for others). But it wasn't until earlier this week when I was shopping for a single book on Amazon, and because I never like to pay shipping, I decided to throw something else in my cart to qualify for free shipping. Surely there was something inexpensive in my Wish List. So I headed on over to the list and that's when it hit me. I had so many items in there that I swear I wanted at some point. I found dancing shoes, CDs, books I'll never read, some tool that Karlo insisted that he needed. All sitting there completely forgotten. I started to delete things out of the list and thought EVERYTHING I ever buy should first have to live on this list for a week or so. If after 10 days I still feel so compelled to buy it than it was meant to be. But, dollars to donuts, most of the silly things I add to the list will likely just be deleted two weeks later. I'm tellin' ya this is brilliant. I probably should have put the Porsche on the Wish List . . .

If you want to get the magic button for your browser, just follow this link.