I am cheap. I am also an inveterate impulse buyer with a hillock of credit-card debt, and I will probably wind up with “the Will Rogers of shoes” carved on my tombstone, given that I have never met a pair of stack heels that I didn’t like, or a pair of platform Mary Janes that I didn’t like, or a pair of clogs with clever little beaded flowers that I didn’t like, or a pair of Steve Madden maribou-trimmed orange earth shoes that I didn’t like, or a pair of shoes that do not go with any outfit I own and in fact would not go with any outfit ever owned by anyone in the history of footwear that I didn’t like . . . and, come to think of it, I haven’t met that many true-crime books that I didn’t like, either, or pints of Sam Adams, or sparkly little impractical backpacks that have enough room for exactly one credit card and a Canadian penny . . . in other words, after last Friday’s trip to Nordstrom’s, during which Pooh and Rona looked away from me for an instant, then looked back to see me seated amid a stack of boxes and tissue paper, with shoe-department employees proceeding to and from my chair with more boxes like ants to their queen while the ladies of the LancÙme counter deployed every jewel-toned lipstick in their arsenal, I wouldn’t seem cheap, but rather like the kind of shopping stereotype venerated by a decade and a half of “Cathy” cartoons.

I guess you could say that I operate on the “you can’t save if you don’t spend” principle. I love finding a bargain; it makes me feel as though I’ve gotten away with something when I buy on sale. Compliments on the clothes or jewelry I wear please me, but compliments on the clothes or jewelry I got at rock-bottom prices fill me to bursting with pride. I enjoy nothing more than lowering my voice to a conspiratorial whisper and murmuring sweet nothings like, “You like it? Yard sale,” and “Mmm hmm, outlet mall,” and “Don’t tell anyone, but – Daffy’s.” I embrace the Contempo Casuals lifestyle. Pinching pennies leaves me more pennies to blow on stacking Lucite rings that I don’t really need and Sanrio auctions on eBay.

But cheaping out can backfire. I’ve lugged home many a Price Club-sized bale of Ramen noodles in my time, and clipped many a coupon, and stocked my kitchen with many a store-brand food item, and I’ve built the occasional shed on my roof to house the metric-ton box of generic sugar cereal that won’t fit through my front door, much less into one of my kitchen cabinets, and I have learned through often painful experience that, sometimes, a girl has to pay full price. Sometimes, a girl has to go with the premium brands.

Shoes constitute a perfect example. Back in the day, I preferred having several dozen crappy pairs of shoes from Rainbow than two or three sturdy pairs from Nine West, but back in the day, I drove everywhere. Now, I rely on my feet – my picky, sweaty, blister-prone, arches-higher-than-Cheech-and-Chong-sporting feet – to get me everywhere, and I can’t have my shoes rubbing my heels or splitting a sole in the middle of First Avenue or returning their buckles to nature. Cheap shoes don’t breathe. Cheap shoes don’t last. Cheap shoes start stinking in no time flat, and the last time I bought a nineteen-dollar pair of shoes, a sub-vinyl pair of slides that rubbed most of the skin off of my arches in ten minutes, then gratified my silent wish that I could just walk around the city barefoot when the upper separated itself from the sole and began flapping uselessly about, I had to hop on one foot into the nearest shoe store while passersby muttered to one another, “Must be a sorority prank,” coincidentally the same store at which I’d bought the crapola shoes in the first place, and try to explain to the gum-snapping betty behind the counter that no, I really only needed one shoe, the better to hobble home and swathe my feet in medicated gauze. No Manolo Blahniks for me – Steve Maddens will do nicely, or a nice cushy pair of Puma Californias – but no more Payless, either. Most people only to have to sit in a cab while one of their patent loafers slowly fills with blood and wonder how the hell they’ll get from the sidewalk to their apartments without tracking Type A all over the lobby once before they learn this lesson. It took me six or seven times – once in a foreign country, and I swear, little old ladies in Firenze still cross themselves when they talk about the American girl with the foot that looked like an enraged salami limping towards the Hotel Ambassadore and wondering aloud how to say “I need a bone saw” in Italian – but I finally got it. No more shoddy shoes.

I buy relatively inexpensive clothing – Gap wash-and-wear stuff, mostly – and for a while I tried to minimize my laundry costs too. I bought a giant box of powdered detergent, wittily named “Laundry-Soap Brand” or some such, loaded it onto a pack burro, and toted it home to my apartment, all smug about the fact that I’d gotten approximately ninety years’ worth of detergent for only a few dollars. The smugness soon turned to annoyance. The powder, so fine that the slightest shift in the box would form an evil sky-blue cloud and set off a sneezing fit, also tended to clump muddily to itself in the washing machine. I’d open the washing machine and find none of the items within cleaner than when I’d put them in, except for one sock, into the toe of which the entire dung-like blob of detergent had migrated. I tried sprinkling the powder over various layers of clothing. I tried putting it in first and turning the water on and adding the clothing last. I tried a flour sifter. I’ve never even bought flour, for god’s sake, but I felt like I’d made a commitment to the giant box, so there I stood, outfitted in an asbestos mask, sifting my goddamn detergent through a flour sifter while my neighbors muttered to one another, “Must be a sorority prank.” None of this to any avail – every time, The Clump. Deep in the New York Public Library’s card catalog, flipping through various listings entitled “clustering properties of goddamn crap-ass soap, which I have begun to suspect is actually dirt that some wiseguy on the Procter & Gamble assembly line spray-painted blue, and when I find that guy, I am going to put my robin’s-egg-colored-mud-besmirched sock in his ass,” I finally came to my senses and ran screaming for the Tide Super-Duper Extra Special Liquid With Space-Age Polymers So Expensive That It Now Has Its Own Futures Market On The New York Stock Exchange and never looked back.

I had a similar experience with the Duane Reade store brand of antacid tablets. I could get twice as many tablets for a quarter of the price, and so many flavors, too! I figured I couldn’t lose, and besides, I eat enough skanky take-out food – and have frequent enough hangovers – that I thought I’d better do the cost-conscious thing. But in this case, the cost-conscious thing precluded the “continued health and happiness of even a single taste bud” thing. I ate chalk as a kid, I think, and if memory serves, chalk tastes a lot better than “May Locks” digestive aids. Chalk works better, too. I soldiered on with them for a while, telling myself that maybe only the pink ones tasted like mildew . . . okay, the green ones do too, but with a minty soupcon (if, by “minty,” we really mean “bilious”) . . . and the orange ones taste like – well, I don’t know if Magic Markers really have a taste, per se . . . and they work okay, once I dislodge the eighty percent that got stuck in my teeth, except that now instead of having heartburn, I feel nauseated . . . but one day, as I entered my fifteenth consecutive minute of chewing one of those little bastards, I had a sudden, sharp, Proustian pang of longing for eight tablespoons of the nasty, gucky, taupe Satanic plasma you might know better as “Kaopectate,” and I knew I’d been bested. The next morning, I went across the street and drove the Rolls Royce of intestinal treatments, Maalox, off the lot new.

A lot of cheap things do just fine. Take canned vegetables, for example. I’ve tried Del Monte, and I’ve tried the Foodtown stuff that costs a third the price, and they taste identical. Cheap cleaning fluids work fine too (and nothing costs less than dumping the bargain brand of bleach into a bucket of hot water). Inexpensive office supplies, garage-sale dishware, the lamp I adopted off the street a couple of years ago – they all work fine and save me money, and I probably pay less than any woman in New York City for haircuts. But sometimes you have to plunk down an extra buck or two, or you get pretty much what you paid for. Hand lotion that looks and acts like Crisco with Red #5 added doesn’t do much for the bottom line in the end, because I inevitably get fed up with it in three days and go back to the Nivea anyway.

One more thing. The generic version of Lucky Charms? It’s cat food with marshmallows. Trust me.

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