The One Thing Melissa McCarthy Buys In Bulk From the Dollar Store

Funny lady Melissa McCarthy isn’t kidding about her love of bargains. The Life of the Party producer and star chatted with People Magazine and professed what she recently snagged at the dollar store.

“First of all, I love me a 99-cent store,” she says in the magazine’s latest cover story, which is on newsstands this Friday. But when a tabloid story came out recently that said her shopping habit was “tearing [her] family apart,” McCarthy laughed about it.

Turns out, she was just trying to protect her Tupperware. According to the mom of two, her kids—Vivian, 11, and Georgette, 8—are into the trendy activity of making slime, and all of the kitchen containers had been coopted for the gooey craft project.

After trying to put away leftovers and finding all 30 containers already in use, “I went to [the 99 cent store], and I was just straight-arming entire shelves of containers into my cart—anything that had a lid, I bought,” she tells PEOPLE. “I walked out with bags and bags of cheap plastic containers for my girls’ slime.”

James Corden brought it up during McCarthy’s recent appearance on his show, where she says, “I have 45 to 70 containers of slime all over the house. Just open bowls, Ziploc bags sitting there. And it’s like — that’s what’s tearing our family apart.”

The actor tries to explain the allure of slime to Corden, saying that that the main thrill is in the making of the substance. But what’s less exciting is what the girls do with it after it’s made:

“This is what they do with it: During anything we’re watching, they’re just like, [mimes poking slime] ‘snap snap snap snap snap pull’—and Ben [Falcone, her husband] at one point goes, ‘That’s quite enough snap cracking!!'”

That’s the slippery slope of sliming, folks.