Perhaps you’ve heard the adage: “Never shop hungry.” If you go to the grocery store with an empty stomach, you’re more likely to find the candy/chips/canned goods section, stick your arm out and run down the aisle, pouring everything on the middle shelf into your cart. When you finally check out and bring the food out to your car, you’re left wondering just how long you can survive eating nothing but lima beans. Recently, I discovered that the opposite is true as well: “Never shop full.”
After a large meal at Olive Garden—lots of pasta, soup and breadsticks—my parents and I went to pick up some food for the next couple days. We walked up and down the aisles… and didn’t want to buy anything. “We don’t need to have dinner, we can just starve tomorrow night.” At the time, it sounded like a reasonable proposal, reasonable enough that we followed through on it. Well, just the “not buying food” part. We didn’t starve the next night—we had plenty of lima beans from the last time we shopped hungry.
