Why I Am Not Allowed To Shop By Myself

October 29th, 2006 Posted in 2006, Essays

The wife and I got paid recently, and—since the Los Angeles government has yet to incarcerate me for tax fraud—we spent the weekend stocking the larder. I admit it: I’m a commerce whore and love spending money. Whenever I have a legitimate excuse to go out and burn through some cash, it is, I assure you, like Christmas morning in my pants. I don’t necessarily care what it is I’m buying—ten pounds of couch wax, flammable candlesticks, a karaoke deep fryer, I honestly don’t give a damn. What’s important is that I have bought something. I have placed money on a table and, as a result, now hold in my hands a big, beautiful, expensive-looking thing (preferably covered in buttons, fully collapsible and featuring a digital display of some kind). It is shiny and glorious, and I don’t honestly care what it does, if it even does anything, because the lights dim when I plug it in. It is mine, and you are never allowed to use it. Keeping that in mind, I hope you can imagine my unbridled, pigtailed-girl-skipping glee when we headed over to our local Costco yesterday. In a momentary flirtation with insanity, Karla let me load up a shopping cart (until it made a satisfying SKREEE noise) with as much barely useful shit that would reasonably fit into our apartment. Christmas morning, I’m telling you. Christmas morning in my pants. Having lugged all this crap home, we’ve since discovered that we might have miscalculated the available storage space in our small New York apartment. Finding room for eight drums of black olives, for instance, has meant having to completely re-organize the kitchen shelves. (We now have room for a plate and two cups.) A tankard of shampoo the size and weight of a guitar case now stands upright in the bathtub. I don’t mind sharing the real estate but live in perpetual fear of it collapsing on me while I’m showering, pinning me naked under its weight while I’m pelted with hot water, my only option being to shampoo my hair until the fire department arrives. Because I usually order cheesesticks when we’re out at the local pub, we’re now the proud owners of two mammoth boxes full of the damn things. They take up fully half of the available space in our freezer, and will likely mean having to incorporate cheesesticks into every meal I’ll cook this month in an effort to free up room. The next time you’re in New York, drop by for some double-decker cheesestick sandwiches with a side of cheesestick-stuffed cheesesticks, as well as a drink I’ve invented called Puréed Brownish-Orange Surprise. (The secret ingredient dies with me.) In short, as inexpensive as Costco is, it deals out harsh and brutal lessons in owning too much of a good thing. There are some items that you simply can’t justify purchasing in bulk, regardless of the savings. It is a lesson Karla’s managed to learn with disarming speed, but for some reason continues to elude my grasp. For this reason, I usually keep my credit cards in a sealed envelope nailed to the kitchen wall, and am not under any circumstances allowed to go shopping by myself. If this seems a bit harsh, keep in mind that a few months ago I left the apartment to do a little preliminary research on buying us a puppy, and came back hours later with a used Xbox and a stack of video games, one of which was a puppy-owning simulator. I’d felt at the time to have intelligently weighed the issue at hand and come up with the most obvious solution (no early morning walks or barking; getting to pretend I’m Batman in no less than two different games). I would later have it explained to me that I had direly miscalculated, and as a result would get to pretend I’m a version of Batman who fights crime while not getting to have any sex. Even when supervised, I am not to be trusted at Costco; Karla is familiar enough with my weakness for impulse buys to watch the shopping cart like a noir detective, ready to interrogate yours truly at the first hint of retail idiocy. “Why do we need this again?” she’ll ask dubiously, holding up one of my awe-inspiring finds like a dead salmon. The triumphant orchestral swell that’s been playing in my head in accompaniment to my bargain-hunting prowess will taper off at this point to a low, fat and embarrassing tuba sound, like a bear farting sadness. I’ll find myself having to make a case for why precisely we need a box of 20 cast iron salad tongs designed for the cooking staff at a large restaurant, or a ten-liter bottle of industrial-strength bleach. (“So I can make these white!” I’ll argue defiantly, holding up a fifteen-pound barrel of price-slashed argyle socks.) A madness overtakes me, gentle readers. A madness. Except, for some reason, when it comes to clothes shopping. I can’t figure this out. Ask me to buy you a plasma-screen television and I’ll spend the afternoon in a blissful halcyon fog, comparing various models for obscure features I don’t understand, or pestering the salesmen with irrelevant questions—“I can’t help but notice the buttons on the remote are round instead of rectangular—will this affect performance?”—to the point where they’ll invent imaginary bargains at non-existent competitors just to get me to leave. (“You didn’t hear this from me, but SuperShitz Video Warehouse on Steinway has the same model with triangular buttons. It’ll be like channel-surfing through God.”) Yet make me go pants shopping and I’ll invariably grab whichever pair looks near my size and is closest to the entrance. I can’t explain why this is; only that I hope it helps clear up why I dress like a Goodwill exploded on me and have a closet full of oversized clown pants. To summarize: I’m really bad when it comes to purchasing goods. What’s depressing is how much worse I am with services: I have no facility whatsoever for haggling. I’ve passed it off as Canadian politeness since moving to America. My American friends accept this explanation at face value, even though, of course, it’s a load of crap. Canadians aren’t genetically bred to politeness—I’m sure most of us can talk the price down on a used car like anything. The truth is that I personally just suck balls at it. I can never remember to negotiate the price beforehand, and invariably end up getting stuck with an enormous bill I’m too embarrassed not to pay. I’ll hop into one of those discount limos at the airport and rattle off a destination, forgetting to ask how much something like that might cost. I’ll tell a butcher I want “two big ol’ thick steaks,” neglecting to add that I’d rather not spend $40 a cut. I’m well aware I might as well be writing cab drivers and butchers out a blank check when I do this, yet I nevertheless feel guilty when presented with whatever ludicrously inflated price they give me. I mean, I did ask for it, and they’ve already cut the meat up for me/driven me to my destination/built me a non-functioning clock radio that also sharpens my toothbrush in the shower and plays new country. I just can’t bring myself to quibble about the price after they’ve already performed the service, and tend to just hand over an upsettingly thick sheaf of bills, making a brain-note to myself that next time I’ll ask what something costs beforehand, knowing I am doomed to repeat the same mistake in an endless loop. My only salvation, really, is that the envelope with all my credit cards in it is nailed to the wall securely. This is realistically the only way that Karla can even leave the house without coming home to an “I bought magic beans with our rent money” scenario. As for me, I’m happy enough to have relinquished the money management in the household. Our Xbox puppy simulator is engaging enough that I barely have the time to go shopping now anyway. Now if you’ll excuse me, Batman needs a walk.