One cherub hotspot stands out above all the rest: Target.
“I think we go, like, every few days,” said Jean Lee of Los Angeles, whose go-to purchase is Ghirardelli raspberry squares.
Typically, cherubs bought snacks or school supplies, but on occasion, something strange made its way back to Jones Hall.
“I think the weirdest thing that I bought at Target was with Mads Cass. We bought a 20-pack of Play-Doh,” Lee said. Their inspiration: instructor John Kupetz’s practice of giving out shiny new dimes if a cherub answered a question correctly in class.
“We wanted to hand out shiny new Play-Dohs, because they were glittery,” Lee said. “We just handed them out if someone was nice to us.”
“I bought a nightstand,” said Emerson Roux of Brooklyn, New York. When her mom surveyed the Jones Hall dorm room, she was convinced that a nightstand was essential. She dragged her cherub daughter to Target to buy one.
“There was no plastic ones, so she bought one that we had to build,” Roux said. “So I built a nightstand for myself. For four weeks. Which is a little excessive, but it wound up being really helpful, and I have a lot of storage space because of it.”
In Jones dorm rooms, there’s no mirror, mirror on the wall. While lectures hardly require being Instagram ready, some cherubs do sometimes want to apply mascara and eyeliner without smudging.
“My roommate and I wanted a mirror to get ready in the morning,” said Skye Dean of Los Gatos, California. But Jones only has mirrors in bathrooms. Dean and her roommate, Eva Saraf of Statham, Georgia, made the trek to Target to splurge on a $20 one. “We propped it up against a windowsill, which proved to be a really, really bad idea, because it broke on the first week, she said. “Apparently, it gives you seven years of bad luck.”
Most purchases weren’t breakable.
Claire Ales of St. Paul, Minnesota, sprang for a stuffed animal. “I saw this goose at Target in Evanston, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I love this goose so much.’ So I texted my mom, and my grandma, and I said, ‘If you see this at Target at home, can you please buy one?’ They looked, and the goose wasn’t at any of the Targets around where I live. After I found that out, the next time I was in Target in Evanston, I just bought the goose,” she said. “There I was, carrying my Target bag with normal things in it, like Goldfish and muffins, but then I just had this ginormous goose sticking out of the bag.”
