"Save Money — Buy a Gift Card!" Sound like a hundred other commercial come-ons you hear every week? This one's a little different. It's the headline of a sidebar in the Ashland Food Coop's current newsletter, and the experiment it announces doesn't seem at first like a very big deal. The more I think about it, the bigger it seems.

Through the end of July, the Coop's offering to its member-owners a card good for $100 in purchases for the upfront price of $95. You have to pay that $95 — and this is what makes the whole deal both possible and important — with either cash or check, which means the Coop doesn't have to send 1.5 percent of your money off to a credit card company.

"There's a lot of reasons we're trying this," AFC General Manager Richard Katz says. "It's a quick convenient way for customers to get through the line, and we wanted to help save them a little money at the same time that they're saving us some credit card fees. It's a feel-good thing, but it's really an awareness-raising thing, too."

Does your awareness need raising? You already know about "merchant fees" flowing to the credit card divisions of the biggest global banks. You may not know that the Coop paid $217,593 in 2008 for the privilege of accepting our credit cards at the checkout stand. Read that figure again. Global corporations pulled almost $220,000 out of Ashland from what we spent last year at our own community food store, buying local produce and products and supporting local employees as much as we can. We do that in part because we want our money to fortify the local economy; that's central to the vision that many of us have for moving through the current mess to a world that will work for our kids and their kids. So you think it might be time to look a little harder at our credit card habits?

Many people already are. I googled "boycott credit cards" and in one-fifth of a second (Google still staggers me every time I use it) page one of 1,020,000 listings popped onto my screen. Scanning through them I found a catalogue of horror stories that are finally drawing the attention they deserve, examples of deceit and cold exploitation that capitalism's most vicious critics couldn't make up. This blog entry was typical: "Until the credit card industry stops inflicting horrendous, oppressive, usurious policies on people, especially the poor, unfortunate and desperate, I will not willingly give them any support, and I will not continue to be a customer from whom they can profit. They will only regain my support if they adopt moral, ethical, compassionate, and honest policies."

Fine. But even if they did all of that, they'd still be draining wealth out of community commerce; that's kind of the point. The essence of the credit card industry is to facilitate a transaction between you and me for a piece of the action. In the course of re-examining all our other economic habits, it's time to ask if that facilitation is worth the cost to other things we care about.

I can only judge that by looking at my own experience, which is more boring than that of the victims I read about online. I use a VISA card for almost every purchase I can, partly for airline miles, partly for the rough ledger of purchases it gives me each month, and mostly because it's a convenient habit. Convenience is nice, but valuing it too highly is a big reason we're now in a hole so deep we can barely see the sky. I've told myself over time that this convenience costs me nothing — no annual fees, interest or finance charges, because I promptly pay the whole balance, and no surplus purchases, because I won't buy with plastic what I won't buy with cash (there's a better than even chance that I'm kidding myself on that last point, because it's a subtle thing).

Maybe other local businesses will help me break the plastic habit by following the Coop's lead and shifting the merchant fee to the individual customer (I'm too cheap to pay it as a stand-alone cost). Or I could buck up and do it on my own, facing the fact that this "convenience" peels $30-$50 out of every monthly bill, sends it straight to Chase Bank, and turns my buy-local cheerleading into thin slogans. If on the other hand I like the sensation of lining my walk up with my talk, and I do, I could figure out a way to endure the gruesome hardship of pulling cash instead of plastic out of my wallet, at least for face-to-face purchases.

Is it a close call?

Jeff Golden is the author of "Forest Blood," "As If We Were Grownups" and the novel "Unafraid," with excerpts available at www.unafraidthebook.com.