Life is like a box of chocolates: it ends quickly when it tumbles into lava. Enjoy the transient experience of sweet pleasure while you can with today's Groupon: for $15, you get $30 worth of innovative chocolate goods from the retail shop at Max Brenner, Chocolate by the Bald Man, located in Rittenhouse Square. This Groupon is only good for the retail shop, not the restaurant.

The originally Israeli chocolatier's aggressive chocolate ethos permeates its whimsically decorated retail shop, from the pleasant tidal wave of cocoa-based smells, visuals, and tastes that engulfs and immerses shoppers upon entering to the propeller blades mixing chocolate in white vats to the network of interlinking pipes along the ceiling labeled "100% chocolate." If you believe that romance and chocolate intermingle even more naturally than romance and haggis, then delve into a bonbons love box ($12.90), which has hearts and other amorous designs patterned onto each square. Max Brenner also offers a variety of truffles ($23.90/18 pieces), milk-chocolate powder ($10.90) for decadent drinks, and Cocos ($11.50), milk-chocolate pralines rolled in roasted coconut. Max Brenner's chocolate even comes in less-easily digested book form: Chocolate: A Love Story ($25.99) is a chocolate cookbook that makes a lovely gift for anniversaries, birthdays, or weddings and can also be used to swear in Oompa-Loompas in most court trials.

To keep pace with its advanced chocolaty wares, Max Brenner has also pioneered new ways to imbibe it with kitchenware such as the Kangaroo Cup ($12.50, spoon and saucer included), which features a pocket for melting dark chocolate into coffee, and the Hug Mug, a cacao-bean-shaped mug designed to warm hands after a long day of massaging stressed-out snowmen. A chocolate-fondue tower ($15.50), on the other hand, is portable enough to turn any shared office cubicle into an awkwardly sensuous encounter. Take your friends’ minds off their thinning hairlines with today's Groupon to Max Brenner, Chocolate by the Bald Man.

Reviews

Max Brenner, Chocolate by the Bald Man has received extensive local and national press, including a feature in O, The Oprah Magazine and a review by the Philadelphia Weekly. More than 250 OpenTable reviewers give it four stars, and Yelpers give it three stars. Max Brenner's also has nearly 50 reviews on Zagat:

• Chocolate. Good, virtuous chocolate. The aroma envelops you like a sweet fog as you enter Max Brenner, Chocolate by the Bald Man. – Adam Erace, Philadelphia Weekly
• If you love chocolate this is the place to be. The wonderful aroma of chocolate hits you as soon as you open the door. The dessert's [sic] are to die for. – An OpenTable reviewer who dined on 04/25/2010
• The chocolate is amazing. There's nothing else to say. – BenL7664, Zagat