Another riff off the conversation that has sprung up here over the past few days. In my post on grocery store discount cards, JD writes:

Next, you don’t get card savings on everything, just the stuff they want you to buy. You should only buy what you want to buy, not what they want to sell.

Later in that comment thread, JK responds:

Nevertheless, I love JD’s advice to never buy what “they” want you to buy. Doing so is indeed a sickness of our human condition. Buy what you need when you need/want it.

And in a related post, slomo adds:

The fact is, I know what I want to eat and when I want to eat it, and no amount of silly marketing is going to change that.

The trend I’m seeing people delineate here is that, in order to be a conscientious consumer and retain some measure of autonomy or individuality or something or other, you should only buy what *you* want to buy, rather than what *they* want you to buy. And I know this isn’t the level on which this conversation began, but the simple fact that any of us even want to buy anything at all is the real trick.

To take JD overly literally, what I want to buy is a way out of this whole jam in the first place. I want to buy happiness, satisfaction, contentment, love, the full experience of being alive, of being human. But since I can’t just go into a store and buy *that*, I do indeed have to settle for buying “what’s on sale.” And what’s on sale are pitiful symbolic replacements, crutches and props which I’ve been trained to accept will enable me to achieve my true desired goals.

In a less esoteric sense though, does it “hurt” a store for us to shop according to what we want instead of shopping for what’s on sale to save money? Hell no! That’s an absurdity. If anything, sale items have lower profit margins than non-sale items. And in either case, if you think you’re hurting a business somehow by giving them money, then you’ve got another thing coming. That’s like boycotting the Coca-Cola company by only buying Diet Coke. Doesn’t get you anywhere but chasing your own tail, which is the ideal position of confusion to have consumers be in. Seriously, if you find yourself walking through a store thinking about what you can buy that will do the least to help the store, then do everybody a favor and walk out of that store and never come back. Sit down and analyze what it is you really want, and get to the root of why you really want it. Why do you feel like you need to play some kind of cat and mouse game with huge faceless companies? Can you ever really win? What does it look like if you just walk away from the game altogether?