Cowden's Confessions: Crafty Crafts

Heather and I visited a couple of craft stores today. We didn't intend to buy anything, just scope out some candles for the church. We left Hobby Lobby okay because we went in knowing that we were just looking. But then we went to Michael's.

Turns out craft stores know how to get money from people like us.

See, there was this wonderful mixture of Fall and Christmas decor all over the place. It even smelled like Fall-Christmas in there. After the initial Fall-mas feeling wore off, Heather discovered the first round of dollar items. They were small games and crafts for kids. She provides childcare for a family at our church now; she watches their three elementary-aged girls after school. They are pretty rowdy when they come home, so the craft store's cheap entertainment section caught her eye. We walked away from there with four items.

Right across the isle from that were the photo frames. We have most of our pictures on our computers, but we've discussed getting a collage frame to display our close friends and family. Guess what? These frames were 50% off! Who can resist, right? So we got one of those. Looks nice.

As any good store supervisor knows, you should arrange all the cheap clearance merchandise in an unavoidable area at the front of the store. It was there that we encountered 50% off Fall decor. At this point, I asked Heather to go get us a shopping cart. This should have been a warning sign. Heather got excited at the idea of making an autumnal centerpiece for our kitchen table (complete with plastic food and leaves). I found a clearance shelf of baskets a few feet away. Now we have our centerpiece.

Just in case a customer could avoid the clearance Fall stuff, some employee had put a bunch of $1 Christmas nicknacks right by the registers. I bought some Christmas notecards to give to folks at church.

Then we began to feel guilty for our impulsiveness, so we wandered slowly backward through the store. Did you know that these scheming merchandisers even put cheap stuff on the opposite sides of the shelves??? We bought a wonderful-smelling fall candle for $4.

After placing the candle in our shopping cart, Wife and I turned to each other and said simultaneously, "Let's get out of here!" So we ran the cart up to the register bobsled style, and as the cashier rang up our purchases, we mumbled things like, "Sales... clearance... good deal... we're suckers..."

Does anyone else have these experiences at craft stores?