How I triage a purchase

To Buy, or not to Buy, that is the Question!

I’m standing there with a bar of dark chocolate in my hand. That’s where this starts. Not with a definition. Not with a theory of the good consumer. With a thing, a price tag, and the question of whether it comes home with me.

I do this with everything. Food. Hardware. Something for the boat I did not walk in intending to buy. The most influence I have — the line this site already runs on — is what I buy, or refuse to buy. The rest is how I get there.

First: what I think I want, or need.

Food is typically a need. I eat. You eat. That’s a body, not a lifestyle. But food can be just a want, too, and I know the difference more often than I like to admit. Dark chocolate is the example I keep coming back to. I like it. I reach for it. I could make an argument that dark chocolate is good for my health, and good health is a need. I could. I have, standing right there with the wrapper in my fingers. That argument is mine. It is not a study. It’s me, 71, on a sailboat in Hampton Roads, telling myself a story that might even be true. It still doesn’t turn a want into a need just because I said “health” out loud. Sometimes I put it back. Sometimes I don’t. The first gate is the asking.

Then: where I’m going to try to get it.

Local preferred over online. I would always prefer a co-op, or a farmer’s market, over the grocery store. There is no good co-op around here that can compete. So for groceries I use Harris Teeter. They stock organic labels, and Thursdays they give seniors five percent off. That’s the store I can actually use. It is not an advertisement.

If it has to be online, I choose Walmart over Amazon. Better still is to use those sites as a catalog — compare, read, see that the thing exists — and then go buy it from the producer’s own website. I found boxed water on Amazon. I was looking for an alternative to single-use plastic bottles. I went to their site and bought it there. Amazon showed me the product. They didn’t get the sale.

Same gate: the gas cylinders for the soda maker. I was buying them from SodaStream. I switched to Simpli Soda because they are American, not Israeli. Simpli fills in Wisconsin. SodaStream is the Israeli brand, now sitting under PepsiCo. I still want the bubbles. I changed who I pay for the gas.

If the food is something I’m considering — if it got past want or need, or if I’m buying it as a want and I know it — then the nature of the ingredients and the packaging come into play.

High-fructose corn syrup. HFCS. Automatic rejection. I don’t bargain with it. I don’t need a speech about corn in the aisle. If it’s in there, it doesn’t come home. The bar goes back on the hook. That’s just no.

What I want to see after that is pronounceable ingredients I am familiar with. If I can’t say the word, and I don’t know what it’s doing in my food, I’m not in a hurry to swallow it. Organic over conventional. Glass over plastic. Organic is better than the spray-and-ship version when I can get it. Glass I can reuse, or at least it isn’t another piece of petroleum I’ll still be looking at in a decade. Plastic on food is a mark against. Not always a deal-breaker — of course it isn’t, look at the store — but it counts.

I said “of course.” That’s because I live in the same country you do. The shelves are what they are.

Local versus transported. This one is for food and for all products, and it is not the same question as local versus online. How far did the thing itself travel to get into my hand. A tomato from nearby is a different purchase than a tomato that rode for two days. Same for a tool, a jar, a length of line. “Buy local” is the easy phrase. Doing it, when almost everything on the shelf was made someplace cheap and far, is the actual work. I still ask. I live aboard a sailboat at a dock. I don’t have a garage of backups. What I bring aboard, I live with. Distance is not an abstraction when the thing has already crossed an ocean to reach a Virginia grocery, and I’m about to carry it another hundred yards down a pier.

For other products — not food — another gate: mined or grown.

I prefer agricultural products over mineral products. Grown, not dug. Most mineral products are petroleum-based. Plastics. The others are metals. I prefer metal over plastic for most things. A metal cup. A metal tool. Something that can take a beating, or at least doesn’t flake into the water. Plastic is convenient and I’m not going to pretend I own none of it. I prefer not to add more when something grown, or metal, will do the job.

Then: where was it manufactured. That sits next to how far it traveled. If it wasn’t grown around here, who made it, and how far did the making travel. That’s the question I ask in the store. Fair Trade, when it shows up on a label, lives in that neighborhood. Same question, really: where was this made, and does any of that stay close enough to see.

Last honest gate: quality over price.

I want the better thing. The chocolate that tastes like chocolate. The tool that doesn’t fail the second time I use it. Quality over price. Though that’s not always clear, or practical.

Not always clear: the package doesn’t tell you, or it tells you something that isn’t so. Two bars, two prices, and I cannot honestly say from the shelf which one is the better product. Advertising is very good at that confusion. I just know I am often guessing.

Not always practical: the better thing costs more, or it’s heavier, or it doesn’t exist in a form that fits a boat, or I need the cheap one today because that’s what I can afford. Quality over price is the direction I face. It is not a vow I keep every time. Sometimes this gate fails in real life, and I buy the lesser thing, or I buy nothing, or I walk out irritated at myself. That’s the honest end of the sequence.

So that’s the triage. Want or need. Then where I try to get it — local preferred, a co-op or farmer’s market when I can, Harris Teeter when I can’t, and if it’s online, Walmart over Amazon, better the producer’s own site. If it’s food I’m still considering, ingredients and packaging — HFCS is a hard no, then words I know, organic, glass. How far the thing traveled. Grown versus mined, metal over plastic, where it was made. Quality over price, when I can see it and when I can live with it.

I’m not walking around with a chart. I’m standing there with the thing in my hand, running the same questions I have run for years. Dark chocolate is the want that still tries to call itself a need. The store is just the room I have to decide in. A lot of days the answer is I don’t need this, and it stays on the shelf. That’s a purchase too. The future gets bought either way.

If your triage is different, I want to hear it. A gate I missed. A store that actually works where you live. The comments are open. I read them.