Shop and stop

The friendly red-and-white color scheme, the cute ads, the democratic “Design for All’’ motto, they all got me. I always fell in love 50 times between the front door and the diaper aisle: With the edgy shirts, the impossibly stylish screwdriver sets, the breezy outdoor plates with matching napkins. All of it was gorgeous for the price.

I did not feel this way about Wal-Mart, because Wal-Mart was the devil. They drove down workers’ wages and benefits, used their huge clout to squeeze suppliers, and gutted old-fashioned downtowns across America.

I was cheap, but I was also socially conscious. I haven’t spent a cent in one of the cut-price behemoth’s stores for over a decade. I was a Target woman.

And then, one miserable Wednesday morning, Ellen Ruppel Shell ruined Target for me. Ruppel Shell, a journalism professor at Boston University, has written a book called “Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.’’

In it, she points out that all discount stores, including Target and (this is truly painful) IKEA, shortchange people up and down the supply chain so that we can pick up good-looking home décor for short money.

And they’ve turned low prices into a kind of cult, an end in themselves. All we care about is the deal, Ruppel Shell argues.

Quality, value for money - such quaint factors barely enter into our shopping decisions these days. Who cares if that adorable screwdriver snaps within the year? Nobody expects anything to last, anyway.

I arranged to meet Ruppel Shell at a Target in Somerville to see how all of this works in practice. I arrived first, and within minutes, I found a deal: a pair of brown toddler shorts reduced from the already ridiculously low price of $4 to just $2.88.

I proffered my score with a mixture of triumph and apprehension. Ruppel Shell pointed out that the fly on the shorts was sewn closed. She turned them inside out to reveal a stitching job a kid might have managed. They were rubbish, not worth any price.

“Look at this bag,’’ she said, picking up an $18 apricot canvas number. “It’s not so different from the ones you buy for $1 at the grocery store,’’ she said.

She pulled picture frames out of boxes and showed how the packaging was the only appealing, not to mention sturdy, part of the product. She drew my attention to the signs in the store: Almost all of them trumpeted low prices, while none mentioned the quality of the products for sale. They barely mentioned the products, period.

In the blender aisle, she pointed out that discount stores are not staffed with skilled sales assistants because that would lead us to overcontemplate our purchases. To prove this, she asked a passing staff member what made the $20 machine different from the $60 one.

“They’re all pretty much the same,’’ he said.

Walking through Target with Ruppel Shell was like uncovering the pathetic little man behind the curtain in Oz. Where once I saw a fantasy world of endless possibilities and unbeatable values, I was now confronted with manipulations and rip-offs.

I had an inkling of all this, of course. Even though Target has not been vilified as Wal-Mart has been, I knew they couldn’t sell things as cheaply as they do without employing some of the same dubious techniques as their down-market competitor.

Before my shopping trip with Ruppel Shell, I chose to ignore this. And after she left me in the store, holding those little brown shorts, I tried to ignore it still: Isn’t $2.88 a handsome deal, even if they fall apart after a few washes? Or should I forgo instant gratification in favor of fewer, better quality clothes?

It took 15 minutes, and all of my will power. I put the shorts back on the shelf.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at Abraham@globe.com.