Mary asks me to shop occasionally, such as for small appliances. She does so with trepidation. And well she should.

“Don’t just buy the cheapest thing you can find,” she says, knowing full well where my price point lies. I like making purchases that require the least amount of careful counting when extracting money from my wallet.

And yes, I try to pay cash as often as I can. I want to feel the pain. A plastic card eliminates an important safeguard against overspending, the anxiety of literally feeling money slipping through my fingers. I feel like I am sliding down the slippery slope to debtor’s prison.

Businesses, of course, are not adverse to customer overspending. Intentionally or not, they punish customers for paying in cash.  It is common practice to scan bills in full view of the customer, and those lined up behind, to determine if the money is counterfeit and the customer a potential criminal suspect.

Anyway, once my money leaves my hand, it is no longer mine. I feel like reaching longingly for that last contact before it disappears into the anonymity of the cash register, never again to grace the inside of my wallet. It will never again be identified as “Gary’s money”.

One should always allow themselves time to grieve after spending money.

I catch a last glimpse of my dearly departing friend, Queen Elizabeth II, whose usual brightly smiling face is now sternly sobered by what can only seem an act of betrayal on my part. I suppose she could just be grumpy realizing that she graces a bill of relatively insignificant purchasing power.

I do know that if I have hurt her feelings, I will think twice about doing it again. Was that toaster really worth it?

This time I shopped for a hot air popcorn popper, the kind that sounds like a jet aircraft taking off while spewing popped corn indiscriminately in and around the bowl. In this store, all the choices were cheapest I could find. It seriously complicated my purchase decision.

“Manager’s Special” with a small reduction on a price tag naturally drew my eye, making it cost just slightly less than the others. I reasoned that if all the choices were the cheapest I could find, I might just as well buy the very cheapest one, notwithstanding that anything designated as “special” by the Manager was almost certainly not, or special in not a good way.

“It is small,” I said to Mary, “it will store more easily under the kitchen counter than the others,” thus providing my own appraisal of what made it special, and distracting from the nominal reduction in price. I knew, of course, that Mary would never buy anything as cheap as my explanation.

My consumer habits have bit me on the behind on occasion.

I bought a bottle of Red Hackle scotch many, many years ago. I had never heard of it nor have I since. There was a box of bottles conveniently located near the cashier, “on special” and with an offer of a free car washing sponge with each bottle purchased. These were clues.

After one sip I ran outside and poured the contents of the bottle on the lawn, probably genetically modifying the grass.  The sponge, however, served me long and well through many car washings. They should have sold the sponges with an offer of a free bottle of the scotch.

And what is not to like about Australian wine? I have purchased many a bottle from Canadian vendors. Mary and I, with our good friends Bill and Shirley, visited Australia, the very source of our preferred wine.

Bill and I went to the local wine shop to stock up. We grew up together in the same part of the world and share similar views and spending habits. Not really a good thing to turn the two of us loose with the responsibility to making a purchase, particularly one as important as wine on a holiday.

There it was again, “on special” on a display of a variety of Aussie wines, with a price far below anything encountered in Canada. It must be because we are in Australia, we reasoned, no shipping costs and all. We were delighted at our good fortune and gathered up a number of bottles, scarcely noticing that we had never heard of these wines.

We marched into our resort hotel room, full of pride of our purchase, eager to sip this deliciously cheap Aussie wine with our spouses. Unfortunately, we poured first for them to taste. From their immediate reactions of absolute disgust, the error of our ways, not to mention our lives, flashed before our eyes.

I accept the truth of the saying, “If it is too good to be true, it probably isn’t.” Or more specifically, my own version, “If it is too cheap to be true, it probably isn’t too good.”