Dear Diary:
Bad Bargains
Reading Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Ellen Ruppel Shell’s autopsy (as if!) of a civilization in which the preferred euphemism for “discount” is “value,” takes me back to my childhood, to the shame of buying underwear at Korvettes. This game of my mother’s involved a double shame. We didn’t, all too obviously, belong at Korvettes. At the same time, we weren’t where we did belong, which would have been, in those days, Best & Co, and, later, B Altman.
Ms Shell’s book takes me back to a football weekend at Notre Dame. My father must certainly have had legitimate business somewhere that involved flight on a company jet (my father was not an idiot), but in those days a slight diversion to a town not directly on the way back home was not frowned upon, provided that one were discreet (my father was discretion itself). (Plus, he provided the crew with tickets to the game.) Mother and Dad were staying at the Morris Inn, where, making do, my mother glanced an ad in the South Bend Tribune and saw that Kresge was selling cases of Planters Dry-Roasted Peanuts at some fantastic low price — one case per customer. Wow! I was asked to round up a few friends for a trip to the store, which lay to the east of campus. My shame was pretty bottomless, but I did it. Having loaded up Dad’s rented sedan, these forgotten friends and I drove straight to the west side of town, where the discounted cases of dry-roasted peanuts were stowed aboard N227T.
Saving money wasn’t the point. Driving forty miles to save a nickel was the point. “Jewing” a merchant “down” was the point. Shame on top of shame! My mother would use this ghastly phrase to summarize her bargaining technique, and I would remember that she was not really my mother. Paying bottom dollar was her idea of dry-roasted fun. More than once — I can say this proudly — I blurted out, “You’re the Jew!”
You might say that I emerged from childhood traumatized by the idea of “cheap.”
Somehow, somewhere I’ve emerged from the same trauma with countless tales of saving money, or spending more money than you’ve actually saved, littered behind me from my family of origin, and below me (geographically speaking) from the Atlanta family branch of Christian frugality. My own mother was a bit schizophrenic on the topic, however; she also could go straight to the most expensive clothing on the rack, and she’d buy it. “Flimsy” was her word for cheap when it came to clothes, and she spat it with real disgust. Nothing pleased her more than imitations that looked real, all the more schizoid because she readily confessed the fake upon any compliment! Weren’t they funny, though?