It’s your decision as long as you’re willing to pay the price. This term has been traced to the mid-nineteenth century, when it first appeared in print in the English humor magazine Punch. It also appeared in a late nineteenth-century peep-show rhyme cited in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: “Whichever you please, my little dears: You pays your money and you takes your choice, You pays your money and what you sees Is a cow or a donkey just as you pleases.”