In these difficult economic times, rich shoppers with cash to burn have been forced to ditch their Prada or Saks bags after long days of binge buying. But concealing conspicuous consumption is getting old. The solution, as always: the Internet. Where else can consumers buy outrageously priced crap without anyone knowing?
Maybe You Shouldn't Buy That is a handy guide to some of the Web's wackiest and most useless pieces of merchandise — some of which cost more than the latest Prius or, you know, the average American home. Take the magnetic floating bed created by a Dutch architect, valued at a bargain price of $1.5 million. Or maybe you're interested in some gold pills filled with edible gold leaf, designed for users to "digest to increase self-worth." Bravo! There's nothing like flushing $429 down the toilet.
Chris Spags, 24, who works full-time in public relations and performs stand-up comedy part-time, created the site about a month ago. In an e-mail to TIME, Spags wrote that the point of Maybe You Shouldn't Buy That is to "take a look at our excesses as a society rather than just go, 'Hey, silly pictures.'" But this is a recession, and everyone's hoping to capitalize in one way or another. Spags admits that he would like to use the site as a springboard for a possible book deal, but feels that "any revenue I'd make off of the site itself" — it currently generates none — "would cheapen what the site is all about." No pun intended.