The one thing I will not miss when I die is shopping. The very thought of walking into a shop to pick up something sets my heart thumping with trepidation. All the more if that shop happens to be located on Luwum Street in Kampala.

When you walk into a Kampala shop, you find one of two attendants: the one who believes you have no right interrupting his mobile phone gossip, or the one who believes that you have just walked into his trap, and there is no way he is letting you off Scot free.

I once went to buy a shirt on Luwum Street. I asked the shopkeeper for a cotton shirt but he gave me polyester instead. When I pointed this out to him, he explained that polyester is actually another word for cotton. I told him I wasn’t that stupid. He changed the story. What he meant to say, he said, was that the Chinese don’t know English; when they say polyester, they mean cotton.

I threw his shirt at him and walked out. The attendant at the next shop gave me cotton alright, only that it was in the form of a woman’s blouse. “I think this one fits your figure better,” he tried to convince me.

In the end, I returned home without a shirt. So if you ever saw me wearing socks or underwear with gaping holes, it is because I never had the courage to go and buy new stuff.

In New York, with unlimited choice of products and the prices clearly displayed, I can finally shop without anybody trying to hustle or cheat me into it. Right? Wrong!

First, you always pay more than what the price tag says. Prices are advertised without the tax element. Worse still, sometimes you reach the counter and the price of a shirt that has a label reading 30 dollars shows up as 50 dollars – before tax – when it is scanned! If you are buying a lot of stuff, you may not notice the discrepancy.

Second, goods and services almost always promise more than they can actually deliver. When you complain, the only advice you get is to upgrade to a better, costlier product. The formula is to hook you, and then extract as much as possible out of you.

A friend who was leaving the country made an arrangement with movers to take care of his shipment. Thirty minutes before the appointed time, they called him up, and told him that he will need to pay some 200 dollars on top of the original price of 500 dollars. They claimed that they had given him the wrong bill. Since he didn’t have the time to cancel the arrangement and look for another company, he had no choice but to pay.

Another friend, from Cameroon, bought a power adapter. He reached home and it didn’t work. Two days later, he went back to return the adapter but the shop he had bought it from was gone! He went to police and he was told that some people set up shop for a day, sell fake stuff, close shop and disappear.

At least in Kampala, no one tries to sell you something unless you go out shopping. Here in New York, they try to sell you something even when you are having a romantic moment in your bedroom. They call you up on the phone – they always manage to get your number – and try to get you to sign up for this or the other.

“No” is not something they take easily for an answer. Your mail is always full of unsolicited offers. You even get cheques written out in your name. You make the mistake of cashing such a cheque, and you are automatically enrolled in some scheme that costs you many times more than the value of the cheque.

The one offer I am really interested in hasn’t arrived: Something to protect me from the world’s sales persons.

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