The knife I did not need

Atlantic Superstore has been running a promotion. Collect a stamp with every purchase, fill the card, and you can buy one of ten very good chef's knives for almost nothing.

I started collecting. I did not decide to collect. I just started.

Somewhere around the first half card, something old and stupid in the back of my head woke up and took over. Watching the stamps go down was the good part. Not the knives. The stamps. For two or three weeks I was winning at life, one grocery shop at a time, and I filled two whole cards.

Then I went down to the store and chose the two most expensive knives on the board. A hundred and twenty dollars each, mine for eighteen, because I had the full card and the full card felt like a bingo call.

At no point in that month did I ask myself whether I wanted a knife.

I cut the tip of my finger getting the first one out of the packaging.

It is so sharp that I now treat it like radioactive waste. I know where it is at all times. I am quietly afraid my boys will find it. And the honest truth is that I cut lettuce. I make myself a salad. That is the job.

A knife like this is not better at my job. It is better at a job I do not have.

That is diminishing returns, and then past the bottom of the curve into something worse. The first bit of sharp is enormous: a blunt knife tears a tomato and makes a mess. After that each extra bit of sharp buys me less and less, because lettuce does not care. And then the curve turns and goes under the line, because a blade I am frightened of is worse to own than the one I had.

The part I keep turning over is how little of this was about knives.

Nobody sold me a knife. They sold me the stamps. The stamps had a progress bar built into them, and a progress bar in front of a human being is a kind of mild hypnosis. You stop asking what is at the end and start wanting the next one. I did not evaluate the offer. I played the game.

So two questions I am going to make myself ask.

Would I buy this at full price today. If the answer is no, then what I want is the discount, not the thing.

And where on the curve am I standing. There is a first hour on almost anything that pays for itself ten times over. There is a tenth hour that buys almost nothing. And on some things there is a twentieth hour that actively makes it worse, and the only way to know is to ask out loud.

Both knives are still in the kitchen. They will outlive me, and they will probably outlive my children.

I will not be using them. I will be using the old one, on the lettuce.