Deal or No Deal?

In this consumer driven world of ours, we tend to buy products. Myself, I buy too many books and DVDs and the like. Moreover, with the internet at our fingertips, we can get pretty much anything we want online. (And when it comes to books, I'd be insane to go anywhere other than the Book Depository, especially with the current exchange rate!)

Also, we can look around, find and compare prices, and pick and choose where get something from. However... then there's the rest of the deal.

Say we find a cheap book or DVD we want (or, more likely, get spammed about from the various sites we've signed up to and haven't bothered to switch the newsletters off from), so we take advantage of the deal to grab that item. But then... if we spend, say, $50, we get free shipping.

(Both Mighty Ape and Fishpond have a deal like this. I'm not 100% certain they are different companies...)

Then we face the consumer-struggle. Do we pay for shipping? Or do we buy more stuff? Even if we decide to buy more stuff, can we find enough from that particular website that we want to get? Let alone, is there really more stuff that we want in the first place? And just how long do we spend browsing trying to find that one or two items that will put us over the limit without going too extravagant.

This just happened with me finding a good cheap DVD that I wanted, then hunting for other things to get the free shipping deal. As I mention above, no point looking at books, but there aren't any more DVDs I want/need (until I found out there's Grudge 3!...which looks like it went straight to DVD.).

Anyway, I filled my trolley up with stuff, so got free shipping... but was it worth it? Will I ever get time to watch the DVDs I just got? Is this just consumer madness/uncontrollable impulse buying?

Do you do things like that?

[END]