alternatives to display 3x3 grid of merchandise

so I was looking through Ben Forta's code for their merchDisplay custom tag from the Web Application Construction Kit CF8  and was surprised so see they perform a select / where clause on every item of merchandise displayed on the page.

Effectively they do this on the page that displays merchandise

<cfquery getMerch cachedwithin 0,1,0,0>

select *

from merchanidse

</cfquery>

<cfloop query getMerch>

   <cf_MerchDisplay merchID=#merchandiseID#>

</cfloop>

------------------------------------------------------------------------

the <cf_MerchDisplay> custom tag has this code in it

<cfquery name="getMerch" datasource="#APPLICATION.dataSource#" cachedWithin="#createTimeSpan(0,1,0,0)#">

SELECT *

FROM 00_merchandise

WHERE merchandise_ID = #ATTRIBUTES.merchID#

</cfquery>

<cfoutput>

     #merchandise_title#

</cfoutput>

My question is, doesn't performing an individual select / where on each item of merchandise impact performance ? Or because it's cached, does it not matter ?

My alternative is to not have the custom tag and to just use the initial select query to <cfoutput>merchandise_title(1), merchandise_title(2), merchandise_title(3) etc... ?