So I married a serial shopper

Barbara Kay, National Post  Published: Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate on cue by associating the sound of a ringing bell with the arrival of food.

I am the anti-Pavlov's dog. My "bell" is the sound of a back door closing and the mouth-drying words: "Barby, come down and see what I bought!"

Although by no means a cheapskate in general, my husband Ronny occasionally suffers from a syndrome I call Bargain Ultramundane Yearning (BUY). He is also the impulsive type. Add to BUY and impetuosity a large Victorian pile of a house with open-ended storage space, and you get a basement graveyard of spontaneously acquired, once-used "bargains" gathering dust in perpetuity.

The disparity between a BUY-er's fascination with a bargain and his temporarily impaired judgment as to the item's actual utility for his household is perhaps best illustrated by a classic adventure many years ago involving Ronny and a "going out of business" hobby shop. In our somewhat tense post-incident debriefing, surrounded by stacks of plastic build-a-farms, enough acrylic paint to redecorate the Sistine Chapel and hundreds of identical key chains ( "We could sell them at a flea market for triple what I paid!"), Ronny ruefully admitted that he had only meant to buy the store's remaining stock of Dinky cars for our then-small son (labouring under the delusion that if a five-year-old child is happy with the gift of one Dinky car, he will be 47 times as happy with 47 of them). But, he submitted, the cars being so ridiculously cheap, how could any reasonable person refrain from asking the fateful question, "How much for the lot?"

More recently: Even though we were already well-equipped for outdoor cooking at our country house, Ronny became quite mesmerized by a gigantic cauldron-type charcoal barbecue taking up an entire display window in our local hardware store. The advertised price for this Brobdingnagian phenomenon, on to whose grate a small helicopter could land without difficulty, was at first forbiddingly high. But since to any rational consumer the freakish unit was clearly only truly suitable for King and Mrs. Kong, it went unsold. After many weeks of price slashing, the figure plunged to an agonizingly low tipping point no BUY-afflicted observer could tolerate. Now, if the entire Van Doos regiment drops in unexpectedly for burgers on their way to Afghanistan, we're good to go.

Don't even get me started on the massive hotel chafing dishes I can't lift even when empty, the professional parallel bars from a gym sell-off, the series of ice cream makers -- the latest only six weeks ago -- all of which produce sweet, grainy, creamy sludge at three times the cost of the delicious commercial stuff or the miniature street-vendor hot dog-maker with the striped awning and the heated bun prongs.

But after all these years of no hits, all misses, last week, to his own astonishment as much as mine, Ronny redeemed himself. It being Seniors' Day at The Bay with 10% off on selected items, Ronny had, in a characteristic fugue, yet again found himself the dazed owner of a culinary tool that gave every evidence of being as useless as all the others.

The T-Fal Actifry is a counter space-greedy apparatus, bigger than a curling stone, but the same shape and almost as heavy. And across its gulp-inducing price, even discounted, let us, as the French say, "pass the sponge."

For the usual anti-Pavlovian reasons, I was sceptical of the Actifry's claim it would produce two pounds of perfect, externally crisp, internally fluffy French fries using a mere one tablespoon of oil. But it does! You dump in the cut-up potatoes (I find thinner-cut is better), add a tablespoon of oil, press the "on" button and leave it alone. It blasts hot air, a curved shovel attached to the central shaft tumbles the potatoes with the patience and reliability of a pit pony and pretty soon you've got perfect golden fries. Did I say fries? No sir my friend, you've got better than fries; you've got roadside-stand paper bag frites, but without the grease.

Everyone is thrilled with the Actifry except Ronny. I don't mean he doesn't like the frites. He loves them. But like a knight who's found the Holy Grail after so many dashed hopes a-questing, he seems to be experiencing destination deflation. I reassured him that by inspiring this column, he has just entered the historical record on the winning side in the war against obesity. He's still not himself, though. I may have to send him out shopping. For therapeutic reasons only, you understand.

bkay@videotron.ca