A six-pack of reasons not to buy in bulk

This article on MSN MoneyCentral puts the (usually) tried-and-true advice of buying in bulk on the chopping block, and lists fifteen things that are probably better not bought in bulk.  A few of them surprised me because they were items that I thought were great to buy in bulk.

I'll reorganize the list a little bit and summarize the big reasons why things shouldn't be bought in bulk.

• Don't buy so much of an item that it will go bad before you can use it all. Based on the first item on their list, I'd better start eating my brown rice because some of it is probably either close to losing its nutritional value or just spoiled.  I had no idea. 🙁  Nuts, mayonnaise, vitamins and nutritional supplements, bleach, spices, bread, tilapia, and eggs shouldn't be bought in bulk for the same reason.  Time to give my rice cooker a workout!
• Don't buy so much that you (or your kids) will get sick of it before it's gone. Quick story: A former colleague of mine when she was young had the chance to choose what kinds of food would be grown in a relative's garden.  While some of her siblings chose several kinds of things to grow, she chose one vegetable: eggplant.  Well, there was a bumper crop of eggplant in that garden, and by the time she had had eggplant in pretty much every way you could imagine, she was so sick of it the thought of it now turns her stomach!  We didn't get quite the deal we had hoped with our daughter's watermelon lollipops, as her taste changed long before we had gone through the two gross we bought.  (Overall, though, we came out ahead, but it wasn't quite the bonanza we had hoped.)  Protein powder and kids' cereal fall into this category, too.
• Buying more increases the risk that you'll consume more. I fall prey to this a fair bit:  if it's in front of me, I eat it.  Buying the vendor-size box of candy bars is a recipe for disaster for me.  But it's not just eating more.  It can also be consuming more of something else, like paper towels.  If I had sixty rolls of paper towels, I'd be less likely to use a rag to clean something up.
• Don't buy so much that you are suffocated by your great deals. Finding out-of-the-way places to store 100 rolls or more of toilet paper (in addition to the sixty rolls of paper towels) means that other, possibly more important things don't get the shelf space they need.  Or butchering half a cow is cost effective only if you have enough freezer space to store other things besides the half-cow.
• Don't buy so much of something that it will be outgrown before it's consumed. Diapers are a good example.  So are baby formula, baby clothes, etc.  The good thing about having extra disposable diapers is that they're very unlikely to spoil before they're used, and there will almost always be someone else who would be happy to have what you no longer need.
• And of course, don't buy in bulk when it's cheaper per unit to buy less! Buying eggs several dozen at a time isn't cost effective if you're paying more per dozen than you could in a regular grocery store.  Actually, I watched someone pick up two packages of 1 1/2 dozen eggs, when the prices of three one-dozen packages of the same-size eggs was $2.00 cheaper.

(Thanks to My Dollar Plan for including me in the Carnival of Personal Finance!)