Something of a 'Eureka' moment befell me a couple of weeks ago. It was in the Southside Supermarket out at St. David's. From time to time, the store has a job lot of something, which its buyers must have come across and felt represented a good bargain for East End shoppers. The unexpected appearance of such items is part of the charm of shopping out here in the far reaches of civilisation.

On this particular day, the cheap goodies were carpet slippers. By coincidence, the British have just removed carpet slippers as one of the ingredients of the Consumer Price Index. Slippers are apparently desperately uncool. Britain is undergoing a continuing image makeover under the slippery (sorry) Tony Blair. The country remains a dead-end dump, you understand, very like Romania in its darkest days, but it is in the process of becoming a dump with a glossy public relations campaign. If you can't fix the intractable social problems, the theory runs, paper them over by pretending that it's groovy to live in a dump.

I digress. The carpet slippers at White's were Chinese in origin, and their design was very 1950s, retro, traditional ? in a word, horrid. Speaking of dumps, the slippers had probably been dumped on the world market at less than cost, in order to build market share. Such behaviour is illegal, and like most illegal behaviour, goes on all the time.

Each of my feet, by a lucky quirk of nature, is sized seven and a half. You'll be familiar with the adage: small feet, big heart (or you may not be familiar with it, because I just made it up). Most of the slippers in the pile were size ten. No matter how cheap they were (the price was not marked), size ten wouldn't work for me, so I rooted through the bin in search of something nearer my size.

Near the bottom of the pile, I found a pair of size eights. Half sizes, as about half of you will know, are often not available in any footwear. Yet when I looked at the eights, they seemed a little smaller than my feet. I had just slipped off a shoe to try on one of the slippers, when a fellow walked past, on his way to the produce section. He had on a crash helmet, so I'm not sure if he was who I thought he was, or was just a stranger. Either way, he said four words that changed my outlook on slippers, and perhaps other things, too.

He said: "Just buy 'em, bye."

I never just buy anything. I have always thought that such behaviour is a shortcut to economic catastrophe. You see a Ferrari, you just buy it, your wife takes the kids and you go straight to jail. Other than groceries and gasoline, I always think before buying, look before leaping, and generally behave like the prudent fellow I am, at least financially. Yet here was a man proposing that I buy the slippers without even considering the many pros and cons of slipper ownership, fit, style, colour and so forth. Insanity!

Then I started thinking. He was right, of course. Sometimes, you just need to get on with a thing and make it happen. It didn't matter that the slippers weren't priced. How much could they be, stacked in a bin in a supermarket in St. David's? This wasn't Front Street or Fifth Avenue, for God's sake. Plus, at a pinch, I could reject them at the check-out counter. So I just bought 'em, bye.

In general, men shop differently from women. Women enjoy shopping, carefully consider their purchases and often spend a whole day moving from store to store, sometimes returning to the same store. Men tend to run into a place, buy whatever it is they need, and run out in a hurry, perhaps grabbing a candy bar as an impulse purchase at the check-out. As a man, I can't think of anything more soul-destroying than a day shopping, unless it's working in a Chinese slipper factory.

In his four short words, my friend was making a series of points. Sometimes, research is counter-productive. Just buy 'em, indeed. How far wrong could I go? Much as I hate to waste money ? considering how hard I work to get any ? how bad would it be if I spent ten bucks and then had to pass the slippers on to someone with even smaller feet, say a three-year-old?

One local newspaper sometimes asks people if they are spenders or savers. It's a slightly disingenuous question, since we are both, more or less. We are all, also, good and bad. (Even Adolf Hitler, after all, was married; although I read somewhere that he treated Eva Braun with disdain. As a complete aside, did you know that all three of Hitler's girlfriends committed suicide?) We all spend what we consider we can afford, and then save if there's any left over.

"These are nice," said the check-out lady as she slid the slippers across the price device. They were $7.95, I think, hardly a bank-breaking expenditure. It wasn't until I got home and put them in the closet that I discovered that I have four other pairs of unworn slippers, all more attractive than my bargain Chinese pair. The pair I actually wear all the time are about 30 years old, covered in cement dust and exquisitely comfortable. It turns out that I am both a spender and a slipper saver.

So "just put 'em back, bye" would probably have been better advice in this particular case. Still, I now intone the mantra every time I go shopping ? "just buy 'em, bye" ? and maybe I will end up more relaxed as a consequence. I can certainly get out of the grocery store in record time.