Pumpkins don’t peep, chickens do.

Hipster:

Why do I feel compelled to purchase discount, post-Easter candy when I would never, under normal circumstances, purchase a giant bag of Kit Kats and mini-Snickers for myself? Is there something about leftover holiday candy that somehow makes it taste better than regular candy?

— Kelly

Dear Hipster:

Is it true that Peeps can cure scurvy?

— Dale G.

Dear Hipster:

If, hypothetically speaking, I were to go out and purchase an obscene amount of obsolete, half-priced Easter candy from the local Rite Aid at any point during the week or so after Easter, would that make me more of a shrewd entrepreneur who knows how to buy the dip, or a sad glutton with a soon-to-be-defunct pancreas?

— Brad

Some people will tell you candy market timing is a myth, little more than a trick used by con artists to talk unsuspecting candy investors into liquidating their candy 401(k)s so they can buy into a “system” that doesn’t exist. These people clearly aren’t reading the right Reddits. If they were, they’d know the seasonal candy market goes through bull and bear cycles like any other market, and if you play it right you can be raking in that sweet, sweet candy like the candy wolf of candy Wall Street. But timing is everything. People who get in too early end up paying nearly full price for prime candies (basically anything Reese’s and maybe those caramel turtles), and the chumps who get in too late are stuck with leftover Smarties and gigantic buckets of seasonal Twizzlers. The smart candy shoppers — the ones who have been following the right threads all year and ignoring all the wrong tweets — get in there right at the point where you can get the good stuff at maximum markdown.

The art of post-holiday candy purchasing is, of course, not limited to Easter, unless you only want discount holiday candy in pastel-colored packaging, in which case Valentine’s Day and Halloween aren’t going to do it for you. Another big advantage to post-Easter candy liquidation is the relatively high ratio of Peeps to all other candy during the Easter season. Sure, there are “Peeps” for all seasons, but does anybody believe the lie that pumpkin Peeps and Santa Claus Peeps really count as Peeps when they obviously look nothing like little baby chickens? I, for one, take no solace in even Peeps bunnies, and they’re the most Easter-adjacent of the ersatz Peep varieties.

All of this is to say you should take no shame in gorging yourself on deeply discounted holiday candy. Post-holiday candy discounts give adults all kinds of marvelous excuses to indulge, from thrifty (“Well, it was only $3.99 for a short ton of tootsie rolls”) to ironic (“Normally I don’t go in for candy but I couldn’t resist a package of half-melted chocolate bunnies that look like extras from a 1980s horror flick”) and everything in between.

Furthermore, although Peeps cannot prevent scurvy because they contain zero vitamins, a package of peeps has about 1 gram of protein in it, so if you ate about 1000 peeps it would be roughly analogous to the protein intake you would get from eating one of those ultra-salty roast chickens from Costco. It’s probably a tossup which of those diets would kill you faster.