Sometimes you set yourself up for failure, and you can only clearly see it in retrospect.
A few weeks ago we decided to day trip by car to make a socially-distanced visit to family who live a few hours' drive from us. We planned to hit the road early, and piggybacked a shopping trip for shoes for one of my (rapidly growing) kids onto the trip. Big mistake.
My normal procedure is to shop at thrift stores, discount stores, and REI used gear sales. The latter are now available online, although at higher prices than I tended to find when the store sold the used gear in a big garage sale affair.
The key to shopping wisely is being unrushed. I take my time, and buy nothing if there are no acceptable options. I tend to purchase shoes 1-2 pairs ahead of when my current ones wear out so there's never an emergency that forces an unexpected spend.
The rationale for departing from this time-tested protocol was that COVID now equated time inside a store with potential exposure. Thus, we would arrive at opening time and commit to finding something that would do the job as quickly as possible.
We masked up and I took the kid with growing feet into a large chain discount shoe store. First, we hit the sale racks, but there was nothing acceptable (I am slowly adjusting to the reality that my kids are old enough to have opinions of their own).
Next, we uncharacteristically hit the retail racks. Although it pained me to pay full price, the scenario was a perfect storm for enabling poor judgment: sure, there were other store options on the road that we could potentially visit, but each additional stop risked both further exposure as well as delaying our arrival during an epoch when visits with family are precious and few. As a result, I bought my kid a pair of shoes more costly than any pair of shoes I've ever bought myself, roughly double the usual price I pay.
We were in and out in under a half hour, but once in the car the implications of my error sank in, expressing remorse as a manic stream of consciousness. Was this action the first step down the road to raising entitled, spoiled kids? Had I capitulated to a child's whims for fashion? Would my children require outpatient economic care for the rest of their lives because of my slip up? Were shoes a gateway spend?
Was I an idiot?
My wife and I spent the next half hour of our drive discussing the value of a dollar earned from work; our concerns about raising the kids in a bubble that we'd deliberately chosen for them, for reasons of safety and education; our concerns that if they reset their expectations (and how could they not, we argued!) to believe they would be entitled to such shoes on future shopping trips they would disappoint us beyond belief.
Finally, in a sympathetic tone, one of the kids gently observed that they had not forsaken our family values, and that our soliloquy seemed to be going in circles. Perhaps it was possible that we were talking for our own reassurance rather than their benefit?
They had a point. They had not done anything we hadn't permitted. We shoved our emotional baggage into the overhead compartment and enjoyed the rest of the drive together.