Surprise Shopping: Gay Priests

“Surprise Shopping” highlights online shopping and catalog results which don’t match what you expect.

This was the item that first inspired this series of posts, which made the rounds back in January 2010.  Now, why someone went looking for communion wafers and noticed this in the first place, I don’t know.  (Could even have been a hoax, a jiggering of Amazon results to make the funny connection — just buy both a couple times and you could probably force it.)

Of course, now we’re seven months later and the “Also Bought” statistics have changed so this no longer shows up.  (They do currently include an iPhone battery and a power strip, though.  Not as funny, though.  You never know what people will buy at the same time.  My last Amazon purchase was latex gloves and a book on PHP coding.  How would that look?)
 

Surprise Shopping: Poppers on Amazon

“Surprise Shopping” highlights online shopping and catalog results which don’t match what you expect.

They say you can buy anything on Amazon.  Sure enough, you can even buy poppers!

(For the puzzled, “poppers” are a mild inhalant drug used primarily by gay men during sex.  They produce a muscle relaxation effect and usually a high or even mild hallucigenic effect; different brands have different intensities and durations of these effects, usually lasting only a few minutes.  Originally amyl nitrate based and intended for treating heart issues like angina, they were sold in tiny glass vials wrapped in a cloth sock; you “popped” the glass to release the drug.  Poppers are technically illegal and their manufacture is unregulated; if you use them, you probably don’t want to think too hard about it.)

Beyond the fact that you can actually buy these from Amazon, though, is what else shows in the list when you search for them.  Check out the screen capture from the Amazon app on the iPhone.