{"id":11460,"date":"2026-07-21T20:41:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T01:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/?p=11460"},"modified":"2026-08-02T20:00:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T01:00:12","slug":"target-treasures-cherubs-share-their-strangest-purchases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/07\/target-treasures-cherubs-share-their-strangest-purchases\/","title":{"rendered":"Target treasures: Cherubs share their strangest purchases"},"content":{"rendered":"

One cherub hotspot stands out above all the rest: Target.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think we go, like, every few days,\u201d said Jean Lee of Los Angeles, whose go-to purchase is Ghirardelli raspberry squares.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Typically, cherubs bought snacks or school supplies, but on occasion, something strange made its way back to Jones Hall.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think the weirdest thing that I bought at Target was with Mads Cass. We bought a 20-pack of Play-Doh,\u201d Lee said. Their inspiration: instructor John Kupetz\u2019s practice of giving out shiny new dimes if a cherub answered a question correctly in class.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI bought a nightstand,\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere was no plastic ones, so she bought one that we had to build,\u201d Roux said. \u201cSo 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In Jones dorm rooms, there\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy roommate and I wanted a mirror to get ready in the morning,\u201d 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. \u201cWe propped it up against a windowsill, which proved to be a really, really bad idea, because it broke on the first week, she said. \u201cApparently, it gives you seven years of bad luck.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Most purchases weren\u2019t breakable.<\/span><\/p>\n

Claire Ales of St. Paul, Minnesota, sprang for a stuffed animal. \u201cI saw this goose at Target in Evanston, and I was like, \u2018Oh my goodness, I love this goose so much.\u2019 So I texted my mom, and my grandma, and I said, \u2018If you see this at Target at home, can you please buy one?\u2019 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,\u201d she said. \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During \u2018Tarjay\u2019 treks, students bought pretzels and Doritos \u2014 but also stockpiled some unusual items. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":11294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,19],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[661],"class_list":["post-11460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-city","category-living-in-evanston"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":661,"user_id":299,"is_guest":0,"slug":"chernoff26","display_name":"Natalie Chernoff","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/ed0f77bda1a2168b2413c63a9230e2363f30812eec5636205849e63460530cfc?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"","user_url":"","last_name":"Chernoff","first_name":"Natalie","job_title":"","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11460"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12943,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11460\/revisions\/12943"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11460"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=11460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}