The fourth reason not to buy

A man in Tanta stands in an appliance showroom in front of a water filter for the kitchen tap. He likes it. He has come back to look at it twice.

First it is too big for the space under the sink. The salesman shows him the slimmer model. Then the cartridges will be hard to find. The salesman points to the box of spares behind the counter. Then he is not sure who would fit it. We fit it, the salesman says, the same day. Then it is the price.

By now the salesman thinks he is losing an argument. He is not in one. Each answer was correct, and each one was followed by a new reason, because the reasons were never the thing.

What the man is saying, underneath, is that he is nervous. Nervous about spending on something nobody at home asked for, about his brother asking what was wrong with the tap water their father drank for forty years, about drilling into a counter he cannot replace. Nobody says that in a showroom. It feels small to admit, and it invites the salesman to talk him past it, which is exactly what he is afraid of. So he offers a size, a part, a fitter, a price. Price is the most useful, because it ends the conversation and nobody loses face.

More information will not move him. A leaflet full of test results answers a question he was never really asking.

Two things do move people like this. One is the people around them: the week his neighbour fits one and his sister asks where to get the same, the fear shrinks without a single fact changing. The other is when standing still becomes the scarier choice, when the water tastes wrong one summer and doing nothing starts to feel like the risk.

Until one of those happens, every objection that gets answered only makes room for the next one.