Once down the dark path you start, forever will it dominate your destiny.

I had bought 6 bags of M&Ms now and realized that not all the bags were $3, some were under $1. And thus the dark chocolate times began.

The next weekend I began buying M&Ms in earnest. There were five sizes of bags, the jumbo 21 oz bags, the large 14 oz bags, the reasonable (and vertical) 5 oz bags and the single serving 3 oz bags. Each store seemed to carry only one or two sizes of bags. Worse, the 3 oz bags were in checkout aisles, and most stores had not yet sold out of their non-Star Wars M&Ms and, as such, had not yet stocked the Star Wars M&M bags.

So the hunt began.

I went to Target where M&Ms seemed cheapest and checked the bags off based on their designs and slogans. Then I went to Wal Mart to get the single serving bags. Then I went to Toys R Us, and a dark feeling overcame me. To my eye the 21 and 14 oz bags looked identical, so had I doubled up on bags, or not bought enough? I had been marking based on design rather than bag number and, as such, was totally lost.

I went online to print the checklist and started marking off the ones we had. The collecting turned out to be trickier than I had thought. I had passed on bags thinking I already owned them and bought bags I did not know I had. However this did help explain why Target would charge $2.33 for a bag while Wal Mart would charge over $3; the Wal Mart bag was bigger.

So back to the stores I went, searching for bags of candy. Each of the four bag sizes had four types of M&Ms, and each type of M&M had either four or six designs for a total of 72 bags. I found the bag sizes at the following stores:

21 oz: Wal Mart and Meijer
14 oz: Target and Toys R Us
5 oz: Toys R Us and Best Buy
3 oz: Wal Mart

To make matters worse there seemed to be chase bags. My wife and I came across a palette of M&Ms at Wal Mart, all 21 oz bags. A total of 30 cases. We looked at every bag in every case and could not find one bag design of each type of M&M. This was getting very troublesome.