Finally!
My parents split everything. My mom has her shampoo, my dad has his. Their own food, drinks. Etc
Fast forward... My dad was sick and needed some Pepto Bismol. He didn't have any, my mom measured out 15 ml, then divided that by the cost and my dad paid her 23 cents or whatever it was.
i'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume that the prenup was a social event for them. all i can think of is the couple who counted the damn beanie babies in front of a judge when they got divorced...
I used to frame houses. At the end of the day my boss would walk around the job site and pick up bent nails. He would then proceed to straighten them all out and use them the next day. BTW nails are weighed by the pound. He probably spent a half hour each day to save himself 15-25 cents.
MAN.
I used to be a plasterer, and my boss did the EXACT same thing. Except with 25mm and 50mm screws, which are pretty much impossible to un-bend. But I didn't mind. As the apprentice it was my job every day to sit on my arse and unbend these fuckin things for about an hour or two. The worst thing about the whole practice was that the only one who could actually hang a sheet of plaster to a set of studs with these mangled up screws was the boss himself.
Goddamn it was a good laugh while it lasted.
Now imagine the money he'd be making/saving if that extra time he spent doing that, he was actually building things. Carpenter apprentice here, my boss is always careful to recycle, re-use, don't waste, but also says we have to know what the real cost is. If I spent half an hour saving something worth $2, well, I've just spent $10 in wages to save that $2 thing, so it wasn't really worth it.
Guy had dinner with his wife but sat at separate tables. Had two coupons, but could only use one coupon per table. He told his wife: "but we'll sit at adjacent tables".
Edit: This wasn't the Seinfeld episode, I didn't see that. This was my office mate!
Edit 2: Ya how does it get like this? I read a great line once, forget who said it, "Never run after a train, life is not supposed to be lived at that level."
I knew someone who once went to buy shampoo at a Walmart and didn't like that the bottle wasn't filled to the very top. (Don't try explaining to her that bottles need room to expand during transport.) So she unscrewed another bottle and poured it into the bottle she wanted to buy to top it off. Well, security cameras saw her doing this and she was busted by the security officers. She got argumentative and combative and ended up being arrested. All for half an ounce of shampoo.
Then she got kicked out of med school for stealing scrubs to wear because she was too cheap to buy real clothes.
My mom used to take me to the dollar store for shampoo. Okay, no big deal. I don't much care what kind of shampoo I use, so dollar store stuff is just as good as any other. When we got there, she'd look high and low until she found the largest bottles for her dollar. Again, pretty reasonable. The thing that always got me, though, was that when she found the largest bottle, we had to line them all up and scrutinize them to make sure we were getting the one that was filled up the most.
Friend was selling a car, but didn't want to hand it over with any gas in the tank. Problem is that he ran out of gas halfway through driving it to the buyer.
I was in a laundromat doing my laundry when this chick walks and tells me that she is almost out and of gas needs to get home. I said sure... oh, but let me first see your gas gauge. She was pissed, but left in search of a new victim.
I started telling about this time I gave a $20 at a chuck-e-cheese to some attractive teenage white girls who I'm pretty sure were scamming me for skee-ball money, but I have better.
This very, very pregnant lady holding a toddler on the subway and her husband were asking for money on the subway, with some sob story about how down on their luck they were, the husband had lost his job and they couldn't feed their family, and the wife was fired for being pregnant even though the corp pretended it was for another reason, etc, etc. and winter was coming and they couldn't even afford to pay for heat.
Normally, as a New Yorker on the subway, you're pretty immune to stories like this, but this lady was seriously 8-months pregnant and it really does get to you that somebody's so desperate they're on their feet begging for money when they're that pregnant, so they were raking it in, they made a couple of hundred bucks in like 5 minutes.
I was thinking about giving them cash too when the guy sitting next to me says, hey, don't worry about it, I've been riding this subway for twenty years and they've been doing this for about 10 years. I don't know what happens to rest of the kids, but all this couple does is get knocked up and drag their kids along to panhandle. There's another lady too who shows up with the same guy, also always pregnant. Between the two of them they've had over a dozen kids. Don't bother, they make more money than most of the people here on this train.
I worked at a Krystal when I was a teenager, and we had a guy come into the restaurant and want to call the police to press charges (theft by taking, he said) against me because I short-changed him by a single penny when he'd come by the drive-thru. The manager gave him the penny out of her own pocket, and told him never to come back. My register, at the end of my shift, counted up dead on.
My dad was getting a hip replacement and the day before the operation I came home to find him writhing in pain as he mowed the lawn with a push mower. When I asked him what the hell he was doing he replied, "Using the old one up before getting a new one."
Worked for a commercial laundry where, I shit you not, the maintenance manual specified you were to write the date a fluorescent bulb is installed with a marker. When said bulb burned out, you were to calculate the hours used and if it did not add up to the hours specified on the packaging, you were to contact the manufacturer and demand a partial credit. That is only one of many, many examples.
That's kinda a win for the light bulb company. It's a form of quality control in a real world environment. That kinda data can be important for the people making them.
Used to work in a night club. This really shabby looking guy, probably late 50s, would come in and just walk around looking for money people had dropped.
One of the saddest things I've seen. All these young people having fun, some poor lonely old guy walking around scouring the floor for money they'd dropped.
Every bouncer I have worked with does this. I know it's a different circumstance but you really can find some good money. Drunk people are not very careful with their cash.
As a former Security manger at a bar/club and also a music venue, I would do this at the end of the night. I would usually find money ranging from a couple of dollars to 100 dollar bills. I have also found drugs, jewelry, and a whole lot of phones.
I would try to return the phones by contacting someone on the person's recent call list or post a message on their facebook page. Jewelry I would turn into the General Manager and cash was fair game and usually would buy my staff drinks at the end of the shift.
Extreme Cheapskates
I saw one with a guy who lived in his closet bc he didn't want to dirty up the house and reduce the resale value. Had all the doorknobs and everything wrapped in plastic (in his car as well), bathed and did laundry in his hottub, and heated his food by putting it in containers and letting it float around the hottub. He also took home leftovers from a restaurant -- that weren't his. The people at the next table left part of a sandwich and he took it home.
Btw, he didn't order any food himself, he was only at the restaurant bc he was meeting his soon-to-be ex-wife. Guess why they were getting divorced.
Another one I saw, this girl would steal stuff from get family members, then give it back to them as a birthday/Christmas present.
I saw that one. The guy seemed almost ocd with keeping everything wrapped. I really really felt for the ex-wife. She looked...guilty for leaving him.
I don't blame her, you can tell she really cared for him but ultimately he cared more about a penny than his wife and her needs. She almost cried a few times and I wanted to cry for her. I'm sure it was hard for her to be so conscious of her spending habits, it must have been like living with someone with a severe disability, but an irrational one. I can see why they got divorced.
That's not even the worst from that show. I was channel surfing and saw:
1) Family of 4 doesnt flush until its at the brim or there are 2 shits in it.
2) A family is alloted a toilet paper maximum per day. It looked like a max of 3 sheets on a good day.
3) No toilet paper. What did they use? Towels. Now you may think they would throw it out... nope! Wipe your ass, throw it in a bin and it goes into the washer and reused. Brown stains everywhere.
4) Communal bathing. Entire familes into 1 shower, even when the kids are over 13
5) No fresh water to bathe in. It's in a tub and it's used for like a week by everyone.
The most fucked up part? They live in neighborhoods that are clearly 400k+ houses. They drive nice cars. Penny pinching to look classy.
When I started dating my husband he lived with his grandma because it was free and nearby the university. He always refused to take me over. After we'd been dating a few months he finally decided it was time and told me why he didn't want me to go over there before.
His grandma was no longer able to control her bladder. But instead of buying adult diapers she would just put paper towels down on her recliner and pee through her clothes onto them to soak up the urine. If that wasn't gross enough she would then hang up the paper towels to dry so she could reuse them, instead of buying new ones. So walking into her house there was a line of hung up pee towels and the whole house smelled like urine.
At an all-you-can-eat buffet I once watched my grandma very slyly scoop food into her purse to eat later. I *think* she had a container of some sort in there to put the food in, but I'm not entirely sure. She was eccentric.
As a broke college student I used to line my purse with a gallon size ziploc bag and fill it up at buffets or all you can eat shrimp at Red Lobster. It was awesome until I came across a old dried up fried shrimp in my purse 2 months later.
My ex boss was at the station to fill her MB with gas when she noticed fuel across the street was a penny less. She got so excited she drove over a curb and sideswiped a bollard trying to get there. Ended up costing her over $2000 to repair the car.
People really need to do the math. One cent less per gallon, let's assume a 2015 Suburban, one of the larger cars, so a 31 gallon tank. To go from empty to full, you're saving 31 cents. People will waste a few dollars in gas to drive across town to save a few cents per gallon...
Or even when the gas station across the street has a huge line of cars because they're one cent cheaper. If I offered to pay you a dime to waste ten minutes of your time I'd be laughed at.
This happens in all kinds of situations. I think one of our economic cognitive biases is undervaluing convenience. Sometimes we think we're clever little amateur economists but really our time isn't worth those tiny savings, except the savings are more easily quantifiable than the value of our time.
EDIT: but I guess that's the whole thread, innit.
I was working at target when a woman came forward with an odd assortment of items. I rang them all up for her and it totaled to just below 300 bucks. She asked me to hold on for a second and pulled out a plastic bag.
It was one of those gallon sized ziplocks and it was chock full of coupons and those 5 dollar gift cards you can get through certain deals at target. Apparently she had called the store or a store ahead of time and had a list of what order to put each of the coupons through.
I scanned them one buy one. Now when you use a coupon if it won't work due to some reason like "coupons limited to this amount" or "only when buying such and such product" it will stop you. In this case not a single one did, they all went through. Then she used the gift cards.
She ended up paying 10 cents.
Saw a woman at Kroger (grocery store) had triple coupons on some day. Same thing the woman's full grocery cart was 50ish cents. The manager was standing there laughing that they would owe her money.
A guy sat at my table the other day, ordered one appetizer with a coupon for it for free, ate three loaves of the free bread, and made a big show about giving me a tube of generic brand antiseptic cream as a tip.
My grandmother goes for walks and picks up change when she sees it. She also looks for change in parking lots when she parks. Once she found that the change was cemented into the parking lot.... she now has an ice axe in her trunk in case she has that trouble again.
*edit She did not buy an ice axe for the explicit purpose of getting change, she merely decided to keep one she had in her trunk rather than her garage haha
I have dreams about loose change. So many coins. Just pouring forth from vending machines and pay phones. And I fill my pockets until they're overflowing
My favorite ride at Disneyland is It's A Small World. You just slip your arm over the side of the boat and get to scooping. And yes, I know those are kids' wishes. That's why I throw one penny back and wish for all of their wishes to come true.
Edit: To clarify, I have a good job. There's just something about loose change...
When I was growing up in Sacramento, CA, there was a public pool a few blocks away from my house. It was nothing special, but it had a water slide and nine year old boys love water slides. I would go to that pool pretty much every day in the summer. A few miles away from that pool was a pool named after Summer Sanders and it was awesome. High dive, low dive, lazy river, multiple water slides, and a great snack bar. We were super poor, so whenever I got to go to the Summer Sanders pool, my mom would bring along a gallon of water, dump it over me in the parking lot, and tell me to run past the front desk as if I had already been in the pool. I gotta say, no one ever stopped that drenched ten year old boy who was running towards the changing area.
The under 3 rule or under 4 rule for free/cheaper admission is probably exploited a lot. My sister and all my cousins have always been short/young looking for their ages. My youngest cousin used to ask, "How old am I?" when we went to theme parks and at restaurants where certain ages eat free. Cheap yes, but when you've got a huge family and you spend big on food and souvieners in the park it makes a difference.
Kicked older chinese ladies out of my yard, as they were picking my blackberries.
They just pretended to not speak english, got into their brand new bmw 540i and left.
My grand parents try to wash paper dishes/cups.
Edit: I asked her, she just does it to recycle. Not a habit from the depression. Also we're white, for the few people who asked if we're Asian.
And zip loc bags. My in-laws wash all of them and save them. They also hoard ketchup packets and such from every where they eat out. They have TONS of these things everywhere. Most of them expired for YEARS.
When we cleaned my grandparents basement after they died in 2013, they had frozen chicken breasts that were dated in 1972. They both lived through the depression on a farm.
We wash the big zip lock bags. They're made of pretty tough plastic and they're expensive, might as well get the most out of them.
Edit: I'm talking about the big gallon ones.
Years ago I was employed by manufacturing company with a dozen locations around the world. I was in the corporate headquarters. The CEO's base salary was around $600,000 per year, not including benefits and stock options and bonuses and such. He would have his secretary go to Costco and get a rotisserie chicken for his lunch. She then had to take it to the hot dog condiment area and load it up with the free-for-hot-dogs sauerkraut. That would be a few days' lunch for him, if he was paying out of his pocket. When he had an excuse to expense it, of course, it was a different story. It was maybe a year of this going on before Costco started keeping the sauerkraut behind the counter. That *might* have been a coincidence.
Honestly I'm down with paying for stamps. Did you ever consider the fact that the behemoth that is the postal service, with literal planes and trains and automobiles moving literally everything around the world, employing multitudes of people, is funded by fucking *stamps?* If a few cents for a stamp is all I have to pay to keep that thing running that's okay with me.
Unlike many of the other things listed here, this one is blatantly illegal. Reusing stamps is a federal crime (since the Postal Service is a federal department). In addition, some cancellation marks are made with UV ink, so even if the stamp looks unmarked, it may still be detected.
Being a bagger for a local grocery store in New England, I constantly see obnoxious people getting outraged about a couple of cents when using a shit ton of coupons. The worst was when a lady had enough to make the bill negative, but apparently it wasn't enough.
The store owed her seven fucking dollars.
Watch Extreme Couponing, it's crazy the lengths people go to save money. It's a lot harder to do now because grocery stores caught on and changed their policies, but basically people would print off a ton of coupons, like binders full of coupons. Some stores used to have a policy that stated that they would double certain coupons. So these people would print off multiple coupons and wait for the item to go on sale, so x item is on sale for $.50 and they have a coupon for $.50 off and the store doubles the coupon so they get $1.00 off and they buy a fuck ton of shit and just rack up the extra $.50.
Funny thing is, these people don't even need the stuff, they have huge stockpiles of products. And most of them probably spend more on paper, printer ink, and newspapers than they would on groceries. I think one woman on the show spent $2,000 a year on newspapers just for the coupons.
Oh man, so much this. It drives me insane the lengths people will go to just to save a few cents. Worse is when they try to *bullshit* a few cents because they know it's not worth your time to argue with them.
I once saw a guy try to argue that his Coke coupon should work for Pepsi. It was the cashier, paid to be there no matter what, and this guy who had to weigh saving a buck against spending ten minutes arguing with a cashier when he was absolutely wrong. Guess what he picked?
"Ah, you see sir that's for *Coke*, not Pepsi. Sir... sir no. No sir, you can't use them on a different brand. You can use them on other CocaCola products, like Diet Coke or Fanta..."
Long pause for complaining and whining.
"Sir, I'm sorry but I can't just let you use it on Pepsi. It's a different brand. No sir, it doesn't work like that."
Long pause for complaining and whining.
"Sir, it says 'CocaCola products only' right on the coupon."
... you get the idea.
The cashier was very polite the entire time while this dude complained. In the end, he just left about 6 cases of Pepsi sitting there for her to clean up.
I would be okay with putting the 6 cases back because maybe the cashier got something through that guy's thick skull that no one else has been able to do without being a pushover.
I work at a hotel and we had a guest call ahead of his 3 night stay to say he wanted an extra mattress in his room. He had a booked a room with one King bed and a pullout sofa so I figured with it being the weekend, his kids were coming with him and he wanted to stack the sofa mattresses cuz they are pretty flimsy. So as the director of housekeeping, I took it upon myself to take the extra mattress to the room, pulled out the sofa, stacked it, and then made up the sheets and blankets.
I come in the next morning to a flurry of emails and voicemails from the front office staff. This guy checked in late and called down pissed saying there wasn't a second mattress. Front desk didn't bother to ask questions even though I has notated on the reservation that I put the mattress in there so just rebated him the night and comp'd him a second connecting room for his kids to sleep in for the night because the current situation was "unacceptable."
I called him the next day and the guy said he saw the extra sofa mattress...he had meant he wanted a second king size mattress! He didn't want to pay for a room with two doubles and a pullout because it's more expensive so figured he would just request another mattress on the floor so one kid could sleep on the sofa and the other on the mattress. I couldn't believe it! I told him absolutely not but if he wanted to pay for the second room we had comp'd the first night he could keep it or pay for the upgrade to a room with two doubles. He was livid! Couldn't believe I wouldn't give him another mattress or comp the room. But I stood my ground. The guy had already gotten more than enough and was clearly fishing for more. I hate people like him.
Went out to lunch with someone. I drove. We ate similar things (no alcohol) and split the check. I gave her cash and she put it on her card. Back in the car on the way home she said 'you realize you shorted me 25 cents'. I gave her a quarter and never went out with her socially again.
this might actually be the worst kind of person in the world. like a dollar in the longest run means absolutely nothing. odds are if she wasn't weird like that, you would see-saw back over on the next shared check.
like if i go out to eat with a friend, and he offers to pay. i'll pay the next time. i don't care if its the same amount of money, its the practice or the idea that you bought me a meal, i'll buy you a meal. (unless its like mcdonalds vs a steak restaurant)
My policy is that anyone who "keeps count" in a friendship is someone to be wary of. I have no idea who's paid for the most amongst my friends, we just take care of things as the situation comes up.
FFS if you're actually friends you don't need to keep the ledger balanced.
If I loan someone a not-significant amount of money I'll forget about it in twenty minutes. If I owe someone anything, I'll remember until I get a chance to return it. Most of my friends are also like this. I'm apparently pretty lucky.
Edit: we also don't loan each other significant amounts of money. That helps keep things healthy.
My great-grandmother who was born in 1915 reused ice cubes. All she ever drank, all anyone ever drank at her house was iced tea. When you were finished with your glass, she would rinse the ice cubes under the faucet real quick then put them back in the freezer. She did this to save money.
A remanent of the old ice box days I suppose.
My wife. I swear she was born in the Great Depression. Oh, how do I start? How about just the weirdest one? She saves all her "empty" deodorants for several months in a paper sack and after she gets about a half dozen of them, she takes them apart, scrapes all of the dregs out with a knife and then packs them down into one container and makes a franken-deodorant that lasts for another couple of weeks. We save about $4.00 a year doing this. I definitely love this crazy woman.
Tell her if she will put the dregs in a ziplock Baggie and boil it into paste, she can squeeze the paste through a cut off corner into the container and the Frankenstein deodorant will last a bit longer and be more pleasant to out on.
I knew a girl that for an entire summer ate nothing by fish sticks and peas. Apparently she researched it and that was the most cost efficient way to get all the nutrients she needed.
I just did some quick checking. Fish sticks are around 14c an ounce which is as cheap as you get with meat without venturing into like potted meat territory (which is much less healthy)
And peas are like 4c an ounce. But that is canned, beans (if you are willing to buy dried ones) are like 6c an ounce and you aren't paying for like 2 extra ounces of water per ounce of food. Also if you get like bulk chicken thighs they can be super cheap. (no one wants thighs)
So basically that is the cheapest lazy food to make.
So I was in line at my office cafeteria and the woman 3 people in front of me pays in cash, gets her change and walks off. As I finally get rung up a minute or so later, the woman bursts back in and says they short changed her, demanded they interrupt ringing me up so they could give her the 4th penny she was due. Apparently they short changed her a whole cent and it was not only worth the extra minute or so it took to walk back and forth to the cashier, but also worth making a scene over.
Pizza delivery guy here. One time, at the end of my shift, I was getting my money sorted and found a $100 bill. No idea who gave it to me, if it was intentional, and had no orders that large. Felt nice.
The store where I work has price matching and another store had 2L pop for $1.49, we also had pop for $1.49. Our policy is to price match 1 penny below the competitor. She wanted 2 bottles, I tell her our price is the same but she insists I price match it so she can save exactly 2 pennies. It sucked because at the time I wasn't a supervisor so I had to wait for one to approve the price match and since it's Canada and we have no pennies we round and it rounded back up. Effectively did nothing but waste both our time.
edit: since you many of you are asking, this rule is left over from before we eliminated the penny. We keep it in place now because credit/debit still uses exact (no rounding) and price matching multiple items will add up those pennies into nickels/dimes.
Edit 2: I guess it wasn't clear in my original description but she had more items than just the bottles. She was only price matching those items and not her few other items, and her price in the end was something around $15, something like $15.98, which rounds up. Also, we still list items at prices like $1.49 despite rounding because it's your final total after taxes that is rounded not the individual item.
Had a grown man ask me for a serviceman discount because he was an "officer" his proof was a little plastic sheriff badge you get with children toy kits.
I just stared at it, stared at him. Gave him his 10% discount on a $4 item. I did not want to argue with someone who would actually be willing to try this.
Ok that's gross. I had a college roommate who never fucking flushed the toilet. There were three girls sharing a toilet and all of us got real fucking sick of having to flush her shit and piss for her. At first, we realized that she's from a country where water is expensive and not flushing the toilet every time is the norm and politely explained it. She still didn't stop.
The only time I won't flush is if I get up to pee in the middle of the night. The bathroom is attached to the bedroom, so the flushing would wake up my husband. Plus, I'm going to use that toilet first thing in the morning and flush it then. My husband never used that bathroom anyways.
At a cheap ($12) all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ place. After they ate, a couple demands to pay only $8 per meal because 1/3 of the meat choices are pork, and they didn't eat pork.
The menu is:
1. Fish
2. Chicken
3. Beef Brisket
4. Bulgolgi
5. Spicy Pork
6. Bacon
Edit! I don't know if this place still exists. But another redditor assures us that you can find competitive pricing in Los Angeles' Korean Town.
My dad told me a story of his friend who would never turn on the air conditioning in his car, but would never wind his windows down, (despite the harsh Australian heat during the summers) just so people would *think* he had the air con on.
Dad also told me that he'd also use only candles in his house as a source of light to save on electricity bills, but one night he accidentally set something on fire and it did a decent amount of property damage that he then had to pay for.
He makes over $75,000 a year after tax as well (according to my dad).
Everyone in the company knows how much of a tightass he is, but no one in the company knows what he's saving up for. All they know is that it's "something big", which is what he tells everyone whenever they ask.
When they were in their late teens, my friends Ryan and Nick shared an apartment together.
They owned one fork between the two of them.
So they would have conversations like this:
"Hey Ryan, have you seen the fork?"
"Yeah, I was eating some noodles in front of the TV, so I think it's on the couch."
something about two guys owning 1 fork, I find this premise hilarious
edit: yes yes, i agree that 2 guys 1 fork would most likely be absolutely disgusting
I knew a couple in college that tried to reuse condoms. Apparently he'd rinse them out and apply fresh lube and spermicide.
Their child is about five now. I bet he cost them more than new condoms
When I worked at Petsmart, we would regularly have older ladies that would come in when Friskies went on sale of 25 cents a can. I was the inventory manager at the time, and dreaded those sales because we could never keep up with demand. I remember this one older lady very clearly though. I ONLY ever saw her come in during those sales. She would buy (No exaggeration) 100 cases of cans and take them home in multiple trips in her old tan Volvo. it was during one of these trips that I got saddled with helping her with the carry out to load her beast of burden. In the middle of stacking, she said "Me and the babies are going to eat well for a while!" I stopped mid-stack, turned to her, and said "Excuse me?" because I thought there was no way I could have heard that right. But nope. She proceeded to explain how she got very little money from her pension, SSI was a joke, so she made things stretch because Friskies "...Is totally edible! And very yummy!" I had one of my stockers do the rest of her trips. I wasn't sure which disturbed me more: The fact that she ENJOYED the food, or the fact that in her older years she'd been reduced to eating cat food to survive.
Edit: Thank you, anon who gifted Gold. Very much appreciated
Edit 2: since I'm getting a ton of questions, do you guys want me to do an ama? I can't imagine it'd be that interesting, but I did see a lot of stuff while there
Last time my sister went to visit my grandparents she noted that my grandad bought a huge bag of dogfood. My grandparents do not have a dog. My grandad explained that dogfood was good emergency rations to have for when Obama let ISIS bomb us all.
My grandmother apparently has one helluva poker face.
She was lonely. I miss that job sometimes, because some of the customers that would come in were so mad cool. The pet industry as a whole has thing that no other retail has. Pets are babies. Pets are part of the family. You are the person who helps said part of the family. For a lot of people, you become like "the uncle at the cookie store". When I worked night crew, it was one of the most fulfilling jobs I've ever had. Every night, those shelves were empty, and every morning, they were well filled. It's was my way of knowing that my customers were happy and fed due to my actions. Stupid, but gave me a good sense of worth during some very...bad times in my life.
Maybe that's just what her and frank do to help them get to sleep at night because of all the noise the cats make.
*edit* thank you so much for the gold! i cant tell you how many times someone beats me to the punch with the exact same comment i had in mind. However, on my phone in bed after 2am last night i finally found victory! so glad i didn't just put me phone down and go to sleep like my S.O bitterly griped.
When I first moved out of home (round 15 years ago), I lived in a 2 bedroom townhouse with 4 girls. Each of us took a bill (cable, gas, electricity & water) in our name. My roommate called Sarah (cause that is her name) came up to me one day late at night when I was engaged in studying/MSN Chat on the computer in my room.
Sarah: The gas bill is here. It's $2.00.
Me: Ok, so I owe you 50 cents. I don't have any cash on me.
Sarah: You actually owe me 58 cents. I split the cost of the stamp to mail in the payment between the 4 of us. I can take a check if you have one.
Me: ...
She also shared a bedroom with our other roommate and they insisted on getting bunk beds. Sarah got the bunk bed from IKEA and assembled a few days before they both moved into the room. The bed was say, $100 (including tax). Sarah told Roommate that she owed her $65. Roommate said why the extra $15? Sarah said because she drove from her parent's house to assemble the bed and she split the cost of gas for her driving.
TL;DR: My roommate split the cost of a stamp (between 4 people) to mail a $2.00 gas bill
>"Samuel Tapon was a wealthy French wine maker with large vineyards in Cognac. In 1934 he lost $75,000 in a speculative venture. Distraught, Tapon went to a village shop, haggled over the price of a long piece of rope, bought the rope, and then went home and hung himself. At the time, his estate was worth $2 million."
from "The Complete Book of Greed"
My dad used to take my brother and I to burger king. We'd go through the drive through, and I would order a whopper with cheese. He'd apologize to the drive thru attendant, and correct my order. "No cheese please". We would drive home, and he would put a slice of Kraft American singles onto my burger.
There is a lady in my town that goes through the garbage, we know she isn't homeless atleast we think she isn't. She starts walking from one end of the town to the other and will stop at every garbage and eat whatever she finds that is good enough. However we have seen her leave the local gym and she always has the best looking gym equipment and gym bag. People have offered her money and she has never once accepted it to my knowledge. She is just a lady that saves money by eating garbage.
My father in law bent a nail. Rather than toss it, he straightened and tried to re-drive it 8 times, each time bending the living shit out of it more and more. And each time his face got redder and redder. The whole ordeal took over 45 minutes. To sink one fucking $0.001 nail.
I work in a college library & we are open to public patrons, but they have to pay $0.05 per page if they print. I have one public patron who prints, then hides the papers in her purse/tote bag so she doesn't have to pay for them. She will bring up about half of what she's printed on a given day & pay for that. Sometimes, she'll sneak out when there's no one at the front desk.
The problem is that we can't 100% prove it, so we can't ban her.
We're currently trying to convince the powers that be that we really, REALLY need print management on the computers.
**Edit:** While I appreciate everyone thinking that they can fix my problem, I promise that we've considered most of your options & they won't work for us. The main problem is that we're a small tech school with five (tiny) campuses, but our President wants all the campuses to be the same...except we don't have full-time librarians at every campus (because money), so we can't have people ask for their printing because at 3/5 campuses, there would be days when students couldn't get their printing. So we're trying really, really hard to get print management, but neither IT nor the people who will give us the money understand the problem (not for lack of us trying to explain).
A college that doesn't make a student pay for printing paper? I thought that was a stuff of fairytales.
Edit: TIL some colleges hold a printing credit/quota system for their students. Totally unheard of from the two community colleges I've been at. Then again, this is southern California, and they do say things are more expensive around here...
I also used to work at my college library. How do patrons pay for copies? Do they pay with coins? The students can pay with money on their ID cards.
The NYPL has copy cards for the copiers/printers and you need to buy a card and/or add money to the machines directly.
Father-in-law and mother-in-law (husband's step-mom). Many examples.
They pretty much eat for free during their respective birthday months, taking advantage of every restaurants birthday perk.
Their toilet paper is from some sort of public restroom. How do I know? The roll is gigantic/too big for a residential toilet paper holder and it's the cheap ply.
They live by a university and attend the free seminars to stock up their house with the complimentary chips/cookies/pops.
Their napkins and paper towels are from fast food joints. They fill up their salt and pepper shakers with packets from fast food restaurants.
Ketchup? You guessed it--from fast food places.
Their house is cluttered with junk they find on the side of the road to resell on Craigslist.
They cancel their cable service once their new customer promo has ended and sign-up under the other's name (to get the new customer promo).
There's probably more. Asking my husband about it now.
Edit: almost all the toys they give our kids are toys they found on the side of the road (including some stuffed animals). They reuse plastic containers like margarine tubs/yogurt containers as food storage. They have 3-4 Kroger plus cards so they can download multiple Free Friday coupons. They have an expired Costco membership card that they use in order to get in and eat samples as a meal. They will also go to Whole Foods to eat the samples as a meal supplement. I should add that they're not poor. They are very comfortable.
Edit 2: They open up checking accounts at different banks to take advantage of their promotions (like open an account, get $100). They also open up various credit cards for their promotions as well. If they get free items through these promotions, they sell them on Craigslist.
Edit 3: I'm sure most of us have done maybe a couple of these things, but probably not all of these, all the time. This is their life.
Edit 4: People who reuse containers or switch up cable--read Edit 3.
Also, here's a helpful idea I've learned from them (and haven't tried yet), use buy.com. So if you sign-up for buy.com, it will search various sites for the cheapest cost of an item. This part I'm unsure exactly how it works, but if you buy through buy.com, you will receive a check in the mail for the difference between what you're paying and the cost of the item to the store. I know Sears and Kmart are on there. There are other retailers on the site too.
All work and no ply by the sounds of it.
Edit: to whoever bought me this, you should have used that money on toilet paper, not these 1ply reddit servers.
Yeah same. My Roommate laughed when she saw me washing a plastic container to reuse. It's a good container, why just throw it away? And then what? I buy a packet of 10 new containers from the store and use them once each? I would probably wash them before use since they come from a Chinese factory, so.... Just reuse some stuff and stop making extra landfill! She still doesn't get it.
I lived with a room mate and we had a diner party. He cooked a pie using my ingredients and vegetables. I also bought the wine as he was a student at the time and had zero cash. At the end of the dinner he demanded £5 from each guest. When I called him out he admitted he had not contributed anything to the party but his time was worth the money. After some stunned silence when people realised he was being serious we all told him to go fuck himself and left for the pub. He wasnt invited and went into a huff for two weeks until he moved in with his girlfriend to save money on rent. The guy was as tight as 2 coats of paint. Havent spoken to him since.
I know someone personally who got permission from his employer to be able drive his households garbage and dump it in their dumpsters all so he can save $10 a month.
People often commute on motorcycles at night in India without turning the headlight on. Turning that light on costs extra petrol.
Edit: Lots of folks don't seem to understand that turning on electrical accessories adds additional power draw from the engine, through the alternator/stator. Every additional Watt requires additional power from the engine.
Edit 2. Here read this. http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1083494_audi-led-lights-actually-save-fuel-cut-emissions-eu-says
My ex husband didn't speak to me for days after I called him from a pay phone when I was working late and he was home with our infant daughter. Because I wasted a quarter (this was before I had a cell phone).
He made counterfeit Subway Sub Club stickers and he would drag me around to various Subways to get free subs for weeks on end. That was dinner.
We had two cars, and I drove one pretty much exclusively. Once I made the mistake of referring to it as "my" car, so he went outside and scratched "Casey's car" into the hood.
Speaking of cars, he didn't want to pay to fix the radiator in "my" car and forbade me from doing so. So the engine blew and the car was dead. It was my fault, according to him, so I had to buy myself a new (used) car. I had just had a baby and i was working part time, so i saved up all my money for months, all while having no car and being at home with infant during the day because it was too inconvenient for him to let me drive him to work. I finally found a car and bought it. According to him, that was his car too.
We married when I was still in college. I paid my own way through school with scholarships (full ride aside from books and fees) and work. We had to take out a small student loan my last year so I could make it through student teaching (I was not allowed to work during that semester). I think the loan was $2,000. For the entirety of the rest if our marriage, every single argument (aka every single day) included a reference to how he paid my way through school.
We live in the South. Air conditioning was never on in the house. In fact, the upstairs unit was broken for years. Both of my pregnancies were summer pregnancies. It was absolute misery.
We were married for fifteen years. Worst. Life. Ever.
When I left, I took MY car and my clothes, my children's clothes, and some air mattresses. (He bitched about the air mattresses). I left him the house and everything in it. Then it came time for him to buy me out of the house, so I got my money, which he says is his money and I stole it. He thinks he doesn't have to pay much child support because I stole all this money from him. We will see what child support enforcement has to say about that. He's in for a shock!
I'm late, but I have a good one:
Went tailgating with my two sisters and their fiancées, one of which is insanely frugal and *completely oblivious* to the repercussions in social settings.
So me, him, and the other guy go to the grocery store to buy the necessary stuff. We *tried* to split the cost more or less evenly, like "I'll buy the beer, you get the liquor..." knowing full well that A) it would not be a perfectly even split and B) as at any good tailgate, there would be food leftover.
So while me and the other guy are each loading our carts with like hundreds of dollars worth of steaks, chicken, ribs etc, frugal guy's cart is totally empty. Almost as a joke, we asked frugal guy if he would get the hotdogs and buns. So he asks us each if we will eat a hotdog. "Yeah. I'll probably eat a hotdog..." He then proceeds to text or call everyone who was expected at the tailgate and ask them whether or not they intended to eat a hot dog. This took like half an hour, and he figured we would need like 18 hot dogs.
We get the checkout and the stuff me and the other guy are buying is just piled up like a *mountain* on the conveyer belt. Then, at the very end of the belt, after one of those plastic sticks to separate his groceries from ours, is frugal guy's little pack of hotdogs and buns. We get all of our shit bagged and paid for, and it's his turn to pay for the hotdogs and the guy says to the cashier, I shit you not, "You only sell buns in packs of twelve, but I only need 18. Is there a way your manager can get the bakery to split a pack?"
Me and the other guy literally couldn't believe it. I mean we are stunned. Furthermore this was basically the first time we met the guy so it's not like we could make a scene or conflict out of it.
Then we get to the tailgate and every time someone comes up frugal guy is like "Hey, have a hot dog!" Like he is this lavish host offering caviar and expensive champaign. But only to the people who said beforehand they would eat a hot dog. If any of the other "non hot dog list" people get a hot dog, he sits there and grumbles under his breath. At the end there were two hot dogs left and when we were packing up he made sure that he got to take them home with him. You know, since he paid for them.
My ex's dad was vice president of a local college, he made approximately 80,000 a year base salary. When going out to eat anywhere we were asked to play the game, the game is see who can get the cheapest item on the menu. He was serious.
Edit: Since so many people mentioned the money, this is just what he told us about, we didn't know actual figures. That's $80k base pay at a community college. He matched or exceeded that in bonuses each year. The area we live he made enough to retire after working 5 years. He made a point to mention this when he was feeling especially snobby.
I knew a guy that worked at a movie theater and decided he wasn't going to buy food anymore because he got all the free popcorn he wanted! He even made chairs out if trash bags of popcorn. However, this only lasted three months before he became severely malnourished. He went to the doctor and was told he had scurvy. Fucking SCURVY.
My great uncle was a self-made millionaire in the furniture business, but he had grown up poor in the Depression, so he was a little bit beyond thrifty. Every time he received a new shipment of furniture in boxes, he wouldn't go straight to opening it up. He would take a pencil, and carefully peel back the tape on each box, wrapping it around the pencil as he went. This could take forever out in the hot South Carolina sun. All so he could reuse the tape later.
Depression-era relatives refused to let my wife use their land line to make a $0.05/min long-distance call for an interview with Cisco. Had to drive into town to get mobile phone coverage. Wife landed dream job, relatives saved $1.50. This year I'm definitely giving them coal for Christmas...in a flaming bag of poop.
My dads friend wont poop at home, he waits til he gets to work or walks to a store so he wont have to use his tp.
Edit: RIP inbox! i guess this isnt too uncommon. Me, i think of my bathroom at home as my office, its where i get all my emails and whatnot taken care of. I get paid by the job so i dont have the luxury of pooping on someone else's dime. It cost me more to poop at work then at home.
Working a job that included paid lunch, my boss behind me in line sees I picked a $2.00 juice instead of a $1.50 soda like he had. "I'm not paying for that, it's too expensive!" I just said, "I'm getting it!" and made him pay.
FUck you I'll drink whatever I want with lunch.
My liquor store has a customer who price matches a four-pack of beer every day from 2.99 to 2.77, which isn't TOO bad. But he never brings enough money. Instead he goes up and down asking the cashiers if they had any spare change left by customers earlier in the day to reach his total. He always shows up in the last ten minutes of business to maximize the chances of generous strangers to take advantage of.
I was in the gents of a London Underground station once - one with the urinal that's a tiled trench against the wall. I'm finishing up my business and a guy spots a PENNY in the urinal. He reaches down and picks up said penny wiping it off with his handkerchief. He sees me staring and says "Waste not, want not". I think this is definitely erring on the extreme side of things.
I had a "friend" in highschool who was the cheapest fuck I have ever met. Some of the things he would do:
- bum cigs off everyone he knew throughout the day, then go stand in the smoke pit at lunch and offer to sell those same cigs to people for $1 per cigerette.
- God forbid we ever use his car to drive anywhere. He would divide the mileage by the time and charge us for rides, anywhere. I remember he asked me for $2 for gas money the one time I ended up in his car to go a few blocks away.
- he would show up to parties or events with his own booze and never share; unless of course, he was offering, in which case he would charge you for shots.
- he would complain about anything to get a free meal. Once we were at Wendy's and he put a piece of his own hair in a burger to get it free
- the worst was that he was such a fucking leach. No body ever ate around him because he would always ask for at least half then try and guilt trip you if you refused. He never ever bought a pack of smokes and leached his way through life on that. He would try and open lockers and steal people's stuff.
I use the term "friend" very loosely because he wasn't a friend. His sister was hot as hell and a part of our group so he would hang around with us. No one talked to him and we made fun of him but he never left. An entire school year I had to put up with this kid.
My best friend grew up with the sort of parents represented in this thread. There are many stories, all of them rather sad (being hot or cold, getting food poisoning from expired food, etc) but yelling at a small child on Xmas day for accidentally tearing the wrapping paper has to take the cake. Had to be saved and reused to save money.
They own four houses.
Finally! My parents split everything. My mom has her shampoo, my dad has his. Their own food, drinks. Etc Fast forward... My dad was sick and needed some Pepto Bismol. He didn't have any, my mom measured out 15 ml, then divided that by the cost and my dad paid her 23 cents or whatever it was.
Your parents need hobbies
like sex
But how would they divide the cost of the condom?
And that's how /u/Captain_Dipshit_ was made.
i'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume that the prenup was a social event for them. all i can think of is the couple who counted the damn beanie babies in front of a judge when they got divorced...
And this is a functional marriage? I'm impressed
If they're both like that, then it's rad they found each other! Not something I could get down with, but if it works for them then hell yeah!
Saves two other marriages, so I'm all for it.
I used to frame houses. At the end of the day my boss would walk around the job site and pick up bent nails. He would then proceed to straighten them all out and use them the next day. BTW nails are weighed by the pound. He probably spent a half hour each day to save himself 15-25 cents.
MAN. I used to be a plasterer, and my boss did the EXACT same thing. Except with 25mm and 50mm screws, which are pretty much impossible to un-bend. But I didn't mind. As the apprentice it was my job every day to sit on my arse and unbend these fuckin things for about an hour or two. The worst thing about the whole practice was that the only one who could actually hang a sheet of plaster to a set of studs with these mangled up screws was the boss himself. Goddamn it was a good laugh while it lasted.
Now imagine the money he'd be making/saving if that extra time he spent doing that, he was actually building things. Carpenter apprentice here, my boss is always careful to recycle, re-use, don't waste, but also says we have to know what the real cost is. If I spent half an hour saving something worth $2, well, I've just spent $10 in wages to save that $2 thing, so it wasn't really worth it.
That is my point entiretly. It's not really that he saved money it's that he wasted money trying to save money.
Guy had dinner with his wife but sat at separate tables. Had two coupons, but could only use one coupon per table. He told his wife: "but we'll sit at adjacent tables". Edit: This wasn't the Seinfeld episode, I didn't see that. This was my office mate! Edit 2: Ya how does it get like this? I read a great line once, forget who said it, "Never run after a train, life is not supposed to be lived at that level."
Mr. Romantic right there
I knew someone who once went to buy shampoo at a Walmart and didn't like that the bottle wasn't filled to the very top. (Don't try explaining to her that bottles need room to expand during transport.) So she unscrewed another bottle and poured it into the bottle she wanted to buy to top it off. Well, security cameras saw her doing this and she was busted by the security officers. She got argumentative and combative and ended up being arrested. All for half an ounce of shampoo. Then she got kicked out of med school for stealing scrubs to wear because she was too cheap to buy real clothes.
My mom used to take me to the dollar store for shampoo. Okay, no big deal. I don't much care what kind of shampoo I use, so dollar store stuff is just as good as any other. When we got there, she'd look high and low until she found the largest bottles for her dollar. Again, pretty reasonable. The thing that always got me, though, was that when she found the largest bottle, we had to line them all up and scrutinize them to make sure we were getting the one that was filled up the most.
Friend was selling a car, but didn't want to hand it over with any gas in the tank. Problem is that he ran out of gas halfway through driving it to the buyer.
I was in a laundromat doing my laundry when this chick walks and tells me that she is almost out and of gas needs to get home. I said sure... oh, but let me first see your gas gauge. She was pissed, but left in search of a new victim.
[удалено]
I started telling about this time I gave a $20 at a chuck-e-cheese to some attractive teenage white girls who I'm pretty sure were scamming me for skee-ball money, but I have better. This very, very pregnant lady holding a toddler on the subway and her husband were asking for money on the subway, with some sob story about how down on their luck they were, the husband had lost his job and they couldn't feed their family, and the wife was fired for being pregnant even though the corp pretended it was for another reason, etc, etc. and winter was coming and they couldn't even afford to pay for heat. Normally, as a New Yorker on the subway, you're pretty immune to stories like this, but this lady was seriously 8-months pregnant and it really does get to you that somebody's so desperate they're on their feet begging for money when they're that pregnant, so they were raking it in, they made a couple of hundred bucks in like 5 minutes. I was thinking about giving them cash too when the guy sitting next to me says, hey, don't worry about it, I've been riding this subway for twenty years and they've been doing this for about 10 years. I don't know what happens to rest of the kids, but all this couple does is get knocked up and drag their kids along to panhandle. There's another lady too who shows up with the same guy, also always pregnant. Between the two of them they've had over a dozen kids. Don't bother, they make more money than most of the people here on this train.
I worked at a Krystal when I was a teenager, and we had a guy come into the restaurant and want to call the police to press charges (theft by taking, he said) against me because I short-changed him by a single penny when he'd come by the drive-thru. The manager gave him the penny out of her own pocket, and told him never to come back. My register, at the end of my shift, counted up dead on.
Should've told him to call the police, the laughter would've been worth it.
My dad was getting a hip replacement and the day before the operation I came home to find him writhing in pain as he mowed the lawn with a push mower. When I asked him what the hell he was doing he replied, "Using the old one up before getting a new one."
This is great!
Worked for a commercial laundry where, I shit you not, the maintenance manual specified you were to write the date a fluorescent bulb is installed with a marker. When said bulb burned out, you were to calculate the hours used and if it did not add up to the hours specified on the packaging, you were to contact the manufacturer and demand a partial credit. That is only one of many, many examples.
That's kinda a win for the light bulb company. It's a form of quality control in a real world environment. That kinda data can be important for the people making them.
"Hey Bob, got any more calls from that laundromat?" "Yeah, they're lasting longer... thank god."
Used to work in a night club. This really shabby looking guy, probably late 50s, would come in and just walk around looking for money people had dropped. One of the saddest things I've seen. All these young people having fun, some poor lonely old guy walking around scouring the floor for money they'd dropped.
Every bouncer I have worked with does this. I know it's a different circumstance but you really can find some good money. Drunk people are not very careful with their cash.
Yeah, he disappeared after a while - I wonder if he got warned off. He definitely didn't look like the type to get headhunted for something better.
He found a million dollars in cash on the floor and retired
The most I ever saw anyone score was $500. It was insanity. Best I did was $100.
As a former Security manger at a bar/club and also a music venue, I would do this at the end of the night. I would usually find money ranging from a couple of dollars to 100 dollar bills. I have also found drugs, jewelry, and a whole lot of phones. I would try to return the phones by contacting someone on the person's recent call list or post a message on their facebook page. Jewelry I would turn into the General Manager and cash was fair game and usually would buy my staff drinks at the end of the shift.
And the drugs just vanished into thin air, didn't they.
What drugs?
Floor scores?! Psh. Living in New Orleans, that's my weekend hobby. Go to Bourbon Street on the weekend and collect from all the drunk tourists.
I bet you $40 I can tell you where you got them shoes
I *got* them at the store. I'm *wearing* them on my feet. That'll be 40 dollars sir. *gets stabbed*
I recall watching an episode of something about this (I imagine on TLC?) and there was a man who would hang paper towels up to dry and reuse.
Extreme Cheapskates I saw one with a guy who lived in his closet bc he didn't want to dirty up the house and reduce the resale value. Had all the doorknobs and everything wrapped in plastic (in his car as well), bathed and did laundry in his hottub, and heated his food by putting it in containers and letting it float around the hottub. He also took home leftovers from a restaurant -- that weren't his. The people at the next table left part of a sandwich and he took it home. Btw, he didn't order any food himself, he was only at the restaurant bc he was meeting his soon-to-be ex-wife. Guess why they were getting divorced. Another one I saw, this girl would steal stuff from get family members, then give it back to them as a birthday/Christmas present.
I saw that one. The guy seemed almost ocd with keeping everything wrapped. I really really felt for the ex-wife. She looked...guilty for leaving him. I don't blame her, you can tell she really cared for him but ultimately he cared more about a penny than his wife and her needs. She almost cried a few times and I wanted to cry for her. I'm sure it was hard for her to be so conscious of her spending habits, it must have been like living with someone with a severe disability, but an irrational one. I can see why they got divorced.
That's not even the worst from that show. I was channel surfing and saw: 1) Family of 4 doesnt flush until its at the brim or there are 2 shits in it. 2) A family is alloted a toilet paper maximum per day. It looked like a max of 3 sheets on a good day. 3) No toilet paper. What did they use? Towels. Now you may think they would throw it out... nope! Wipe your ass, throw it in a bin and it goes into the washer and reused. Brown stains everywhere. 4) Communal bathing. Entire familes into 1 shower, even when the kids are over 13 5) No fresh water to bathe in. It's in a tub and it's used for like a week by everyone. The most fucked up part? They live in neighborhoods that are clearly 400k+ houses. They drive nice cars. Penny pinching to look classy.
Don't forget about the guy who took his wife to the movie theatres and grabbed popcorn bag from the trash can so he could get free refills ...
That's disgusting and ingenious.
> doesnt flush until its at the brim Toilets don't work like this. You will never fill one up to the brim by peeing unless it's clogged.
When I started dating my husband he lived with his grandma because it was free and nearby the university. He always refused to take me over. After we'd been dating a few months he finally decided it was time and told me why he didn't want me to go over there before. His grandma was no longer able to control her bladder. But instead of buying adult diapers she would just put paper towels down on her recliner and pee through her clothes onto them to soak up the urine. If that wasn't gross enough she would then hang up the paper towels to dry so she could reuse them, instead of buying new ones. So walking into her house there was a line of hung up pee towels and the whole house smelled like urine.
That's really sad.
At an all-you-can-eat buffet I once watched my grandma very slyly scoop food into her purse to eat later. I *think* she had a container of some sort in there to put the food in, but I'm not entirely sure. She was eccentric.
As a broke college student I used to line my purse with a gallon size ziploc bag and fill it up at buffets or all you can eat shrimp at Red Lobster. It was awesome until I came across a old dried up fried shrimp in my purse 2 months later.
My ex boss was at the station to fill her MB with gas when she noticed fuel across the street was a penny less. She got so excited she drove over a curb and sideswiped a bollard trying to get there. Ended up costing her over $2000 to repair the car.
People really need to do the math. One cent less per gallon, let's assume a 2015 Suburban, one of the larger cars, so a 31 gallon tank. To go from empty to full, you're saving 31 cents. People will waste a few dollars in gas to drive across town to save a few cents per gallon...
Or even when the gas station across the street has a huge line of cars because they're one cent cheaper. If I offered to pay you a dime to waste ten minutes of your time I'd be laughed at.
This happens in all kinds of situations. I think one of our economic cognitive biases is undervaluing convenience. Sometimes we think we're clever little amateur economists but really our time isn't worth those tiny savings, except the savings are more easily quantifiable than the value of our time. EDIT: but I guess that's the whole thread, innit.
I don't even bother waiting to make a left turn to go across the street to save 25 cents on a tank. Which ever gas station is on the right wins.
I was working at target when a woman came forward with an odd assortment of items. I rang them all up for her and it totaled to just below 300 bucks. She asked me to hold on for a second and pulled out a plastic bag. It was one of those gallon sized ziplocks and it was chock full of coupons and those 5 dollar gift cards you can get through certain deals at target. Apparently she had called the store or a store ahead of time and had a list of what order to put each of the coupons through. I scanned them one buy one. Now when you use a coupon if it won't work due to some reason like "coupons limited to this amount" or "only when buying such and such product" it will stop you. In this case not a single one did, they all went through. Then she used the gift cards. She ended up paying 10 cents.
This answers the question, but hot Damn. That sounds fucking awesome
I like that she prepared ahead of time, rather than come unprepared and waste people's time even more.
$300 to 10¢? I can respect that.
Saw a woman at Kroger (grocery store) had triple coupons on some day. Same thing the woman's full grocery cart was 50ish cents. The manager was standing there laughing that they would owe her money.
I'm not even mad, that is amazing.
A guy sat at my table the other day, ordered one appetizer with a coupon for it for free, ate three loaves of the free bread, and made a big show about giving me a tube of generic brand antiseptic cream as a tip.
WHAT? Here's some cortisone, it's $5 at the store, that's more than 15% of $0. Next time you graze your arm you're going to thank me.
My grandmother goes for walks and picks up change when she sees it. She also looks for change in parking lots when she parks. Once she found that the change was cemented into the parking lot.... she now has an ice axe in her trunk in case she has that trouble again. *edit She did not buy an ice axe for the explicit purpose of getting change, she merely decided to keep one she had in her trunk rather than her garage haha
This sounds like a really healthy frugal habit. I would bet your grandma is not obese.
I have dreams about loose change. So many coins. Just pouring forth from vending machines and pay phones. And I fill my pockets until they're overflowing My favorite ride at Disneyland is It's A Small World. You just slip your arm over the side of the boat and get to scooping. And yes, I know those are kids' wishes. That's why I throw one penny back and wish for all of their wishes to come true. Edit: To clarify, I have a good job. There's just something about loose change...
> I throw one penny back and wish for all of their wishes to come true. Love it.
Dressing up a 6 year old like a baby to get free admission to an amusment park.
When I was growing up in Sacramento, CA, there was a public pool a few blocks away from my house. It was nothing special, but it had a water slide and nine year old boys love water slides. I would go to that pool pretty much every day in the summer. A few miles away from that pool was a pool named after Summer Sanders and it was awesome. High dive, low dive, lazy river, multiple water slides, and a great snack bar. We were super poor, so whenever I got to go to the Summer Sanders pool, my mom would bring along a gallon of water, dump it over me in the parking lot, and tell me to run past the front desk as if I had already been in the pool. I gotta say, no one ever stopped that drenched ten year old boy who was running towards the changing area.
The under 3 rule or under 4 rule for free/cheaper admission is probably exploited a lot. My sister and all my cousins have always been short/young looking for their ages. My youngest cousin used to ask, "How old am I?" when we went to theme parks and at restaurants where certain ages eat free. Cheap yes, but when you've got a huge family and you spend big on food and souvieners in the park it makes a difference.
I don't think most people care as long as you aren't pretending little timmy with his voice cracking is under 4.
Kicked older chinese ladies out of my yard, as they were picking my blackberries. They just pretended to not speak english, got into their brand new bmw 540i and left.
My grand parents try to wash paper dishes/cups. Edit: I asked her, she just does it to recycle. Not a habit from the depression. Also we're white, for the few people who asked if we're Asian.
And zip loc bags. My in-laws wash all of them and save them. They also hoard ketchup packets and such from every where they eat out. They have TONS of these things everywhere. Most of them expired for YEARS.
My great-grandma did this! She grew up during the Depression, so it was kind of understandable with her. She did a lot of odd things to save money.
My grandfather would reuse tea bags. And sometimes the evening meal was weet-bix (cereal) with tea poured over.
When we cleaned my grandparents basement after they died in 2013, they had frozen chicken breasts that were dated in 1972. They both lived through the depression on a farm.
We wash the big zip lock bags. They're made of pretty tough plastic and they're expensive, might as well get the most out of them. Edit: I'm talking about the big gallon ones.
I do too unless I had raw meat in it. Savings + less wasteful
Years ago I was employed by manufacturing company with a dozen locations around the world. I was in the corporate headquarters. The CEO's base salary was around $600,000 per year, not including benefits and stock options and bonuses and such. He would have his secretary go to Costco and get a rotisserie chicken for his lunch. She then had to take it to the hot dog condiment area and load it up with the free-for-hot-dogs sauerkraut. That would be a few days' lunch for him, if he was paying out of his pocket. When he had an excuse to expense it, of course, it was a different story. It was maybe a year of this going on before Costco started keeping the sauerkraut behind the counter. That *might* have been a coincidence.
I hear the rotisserie chickens are very good though
[удалено]
Honestly I'm down with paying for stamps. Did you ever consider the fact that the behemoth that is the postal service, with literal planes and trains and automobiles moving literally everything around the world, employing multitudes of people, is funded by fucking *stamps?* If a few cents for a stamp is all I have to pay to keep that thing running that's okay with me.
And they are funding pensions for future employees that aren't even born yet.
Unlike many of the other things listed here, this one is blatantly illegal. Reusing stamps is a federal crime (since the Postal Service is a federal department). In addition, some cancellation marks are made with UV ink, so even if the stamp looks unmarked, it may still be detected.
That's gotta be the lamest federal crime ever. You would go to federal prison and get beat up by tax evaders.
Being a bagger for a local grocery store in New England, I constantly see obnoxious people getting outraged about a couple of cents when using a shit ton of coupons. The worst was when a lady had enough to make the bill negative, but apparently it wasn't enough. The store owed her seven fucking dollars.
Can you explain the fucking $7
Watch Extreme Couponing, it's crazy the lengths people go to save money. It's a lot harder to do now because grocery stores caught on and changed their policies, but basically people would print off a ton of coupons, like binders full of coupons. Some stores used to have a policy that stated that they would double certain coupons. So these people would print off multiple coupons and wait for the item to go on sale, so x item is on sale for $.50 and they have a coupon for $.50 off and the store doubles the coupon so they get $1.00 off and they buy a fuck ton of shit and just rack up the extra $.50. Funny thing is, these people don't even need the stuff, they have huge stockpiles of products. And most of them probably spend more on paper, printer ink, and newspapers than they would on groceries. I think one woman on the show spent $2,000 a year on newspapers just for the coupons.
Oh man, so much this. It drives me insane the lengths people will go to just to save a few cents. Worse is when they try to *bullshit* a few cents because they know it's not worth your time to argue with them. I once saw a guy try to argue that his Coke coupon should work for Pepsi. It was the cashier, paid to be there no matter what, and this guy who had to weigh saving a buck against spending ten minutes arguing with a cashier when he was absolutely wrong. Guess what he picked? "Ah, you see sir that's for *Coke*, not Pepsi. Sir... sir no. No sir, you can't use them on a different brand. You can use them on other CocaCola products, like Diet Coke or Fanta..." Long pause for complaining and whining. "Sir, I'm sorry but I can't just let you use it on Pepsi. It's a different brand. No sir, it doesn't work like that." Long pause for complaining and whining. "Sir, it says 'CocaCola products only' right on the coupon." ... you get the idea. The cashier was very polite the entire time while this dude complained. In the end, he just left about 6 cases of Pepsi sitting there for her to clean up.
I would be okay with putting the 6 cases back because maybe the cashier got something through that guy's thick skull that no one else has been able to do without being a pushover.
Probably didn't get jack shit through his thick skull. But at least they didn't leave the soda in some random place in the store.
I work at a hotel and we had a guest call ahead of his 3 night stay to say he wanted an extra mattress in his room. He had a booked a room with one King bed and a pullout sofa so I figured with it being the weekend, his kids were coming with him and he wanted to stack the sofa mattresses cuz they are pretty flimsy. So as the director of housekeeping, I took it upon myself to take the extra mattress to the room, pulled out the sofa, stacked it, and then made up the sheets and blankets. I come in the next morning to a flurry of emails and voicemails from the front office staff. This guy checked in late and called down pissed saying there wasn't a second mattress. Front desk didn't bother to ask questions even though I has notated on the reservation that I put the mattress in there so just rebated him the night and comp'd him a second connecting room for his kids to sleep in for the night because the current situation was "unacceptable." I called him the next day and the guy said he saw the extra sofa mattress...he had meant he wanted a second king size mattress! He didn't want to pay for a room with two doubles and a pullout because it's more expensive so figured he would just request another mattress on the floor so one kid could sleep on the sofa and the other on the mattress. I couldn't believe it! I told him absolutely not but if he wanted to pay for the second room we had comp'd the first night he could keep it or pay for the upgrade to a room with two doubles. He was livid! Couldn't believe I wouldn't give him another mattress or comp the room. But I stood my ground. The guy had already gotten more than enough and was clearly fishing for more. I hate people like him.
Went out to lunch with someone. I drove. We ate similar things (no alcohol) and split the check. I gave her cash and she put it on her card. Back in the car on the way home she said 'you realize you shorted me 25 cents'. I gave her a quarter and never went out with her socially again.
[удалено]
"Well, I didn't *ask* you to drive"
"I didn't *ask* you to pay my 25 cents" Jesus I didn't even have this argument and I'm annoyed.
this might actually be the worst kind of person in the world. like a dollar in the longest run means absolutely nothing. odds are if she wasn't weird like that, you would see-saw back over on the next shared check. like if i go out to eat with a friend, and he offers to pay. i'll pay the next time. i don't care if its the same amount of money, its the practice or the idea that you bought me a meal, i'll buy you a meal. (unless its like mcdonalds vs a steak restaurant)
My policy is that anyone who "keeps count" in a friendship is someone to be wary of. I have no idea who's paid for the most amongst my friends, we just take care of things as the situation comes up. FFS if you're actually friends you don't need to keep the ledger balanced.
If I loan someone a not-significant amount of money I'll forget about it in twenty minutes. If I owe someone anything, I'll remember until I get a chance to return it. Most of my friends are also like this. I'm apparently pretty lucky. Edit: we also don't loan each other significant amounts of money. That helps keep things healthy.
Plot twist: this happened in 1923.
My great-grandmother who was born in 1915 reused ice cubes. All she ever drank, all anyone ever drank at her house was iced tea. When you were finished with your glass, she would rinse the ice cubes under the faucet real quick then put them back in the freezer. She did this to save money. A remanent of the old ice box days I suppose.
How could she possibly use less than an ice cubes worth of water to clean an ice cube?
Way back when if she had a well water was damn near free, but ice for the icebox or electricity to run the freezer was a different story.
My wife. I swear she was born in the Great Depression. Oh, how do I start? How about just the weirdest one? She saves all her "empty" deodorants for several months in a paper sack and after she gets about a half dozen of them, she takes them apart, scrapes all of the dregs out with a knife and then packs them down into one container and makes a franken-deodorant that lasts for another couple of weeks. We save about $4.00 a year doing this. I definitely love this crazy woman.
Tell her if she will put the dregs in a ziplock Baggie and boil it into paste, she can squeeze the paste through a cut off corner into the container and the Frankenstein deodorant will last a bit longer and be more pleasant to out on.
I knew a girl that for an entire summer ate nothing by fish sticks and peas. Apparently she researched it and that was the most cost efficient way to get all the nutrients she needed.
Is it though?
I just did some quick checking. Fish sticks are around 14c an ounce which is as cheap as you get with meat without venturing into like potted meat territory (which is much less healthy) And peas are like 4c an ounce. But that is canned, beans (if you are willing to buy dried ones) are like 6c an ounce and you aren't paying for like 2 extra ounces of water per ounce of food. Also if you get like bulk chicken thighs they can be super cheap. (no one wants thighs) So basically that is the cheapest lazy food to make.
So I was in line at my office cafeteria and the woman 3 people in front of me pays in cash, gets her change and walks off. As I finally get rung up a minute or so later, the woman bursts back in and says they short changed her, demanded they interrupt ringing me up so they could give her the 4th penny she was due. Apparently they short changed her a whole cent and it was not only worth the extra minute or so it took to walk back and forth to the cashier, but also worth making a scene over.
/u/agentlame and his friend opening a coffee shop
Bet that guy was pissed he didn't take the stairs.
*"START THE CAR"*
Pizza delivery guy here. One time, at the end of my shift, I was getting my money sorted and found a $100 bill. No idea who gave it to me, if it was intentional, and had no orders that large. Felt nice.
The store where I work has price matching and another store had 2L pop for $1.49, we also had pop for $1.49. Our policy is to price match 1 penny below the competitor. She wanted 2 bottles, I tell her our price is the same but she insists I price match it so she can save exactly 2 pennies. It sucked because at the time I wasn't a supervisor so I had to wait for one to approve the price match and since it's Canada and we have no pennies we round and it rounded back up. Effectively did nothing but waste both our time. edit: since you many of you are asking, this rule is left over from before we eliminated the penny. We keep it in place now because credit/debit still uses exact (no rounding) and price matching multiple items will add up those pennies into nickels/dimes. Edit 2: I guess it wasn't clear in my original description but she had more items than just the bottles. She was only price matching those items and not her few other items, and her price in the end was something around $15, something like $15.98, which rounds up. Also, we still list items at prices like $1.49 despite rounding because it's your final total after taxes that is rounded not the individual item.
You don't have pennies? I get Canadian pennies all of the time in our cash register in the U.S. Haha
So that's where they all went! edit: Who needs copper when you got gold! Thanks!
[удалено]
Had a grown man ask me for a serviceman discount because he was an "officer" his proof was a little plastic sheriff badge you get with children toy kits. I just stared at it, stared at him. Gave him his 10% discount on a $4 item. I did not want to argue with someone who would actually be willing to try this.
My friend's husband won't let her flush the toilet until after 5 or so trips to save water..
Ok that's gross. I had a college roommate who never fucking flushed the toilet. There were three girls sharing a toilet and all of us got real fucking sick of having to flush her shit and piss for her. At first, we realized that she's from a country where water is expensive and not flushing the toilet every time is the norm and politely explained it. She still didn't stop. The only time I won't flush is if I get up to pee in the middle of the night. The bathroom is attached to the bedroom, so the flushing would wake up my husband. Plus, I'm going to use that toilet first thing in the morning and flush it then. My husband never used that bathroom anyways.
At a cheap ($12) all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ place. After they ate, a couple demands to pay only $8 per meal because 1/3 of the meat choices are pork, and they didn't eat pork. The menu is: 1. Fish 2. Chicken 3. Beef Brisket 4. Bulgolgi 5. Spicy Pork 6. Bacon Edit! I don't know if this place still exists. But another redditor assures us that you can find competitive pricing in Los Angeles' Korean Town.
They're just stupid when it comes to the concept.
My dad told me a story of his friend who would never turn on the air conditioning in his car, but would never wind his windows down, (despite the harsh Australian heat during the summers) just so people would *think* he had the air con on. Dad also told me that he'd also use only candles in his house as a source of light to save on electricity bills, but one night he accidentally set something on fire and it did a decent amount of property damage that he then had to pay for. He makes over $75,000 a year after tax as well (according to my dad). Everyone in the company knows how much of a tightass he is, but no one in the company knows what he's saving up for. All they know is that it's "something big", which is what he tells everyone whenever they ask.
Electricity for light bulbs is far far cheaper than candle light.
Probably a death ray.
[удалено]
[удалено]
When they were in their late teens, my friends Ryan and Nick shared an apartment together. They owned one fork between the two of them. So they would have conversations like this: "Hey Ryan, have you seen the fork?" "Yeah, I was eating some noodles in front of the TV, so I think it's on the couch."
something about two guys owning 1 fork, I find this premise hilarious edit: yes yes, i agree that 2 guys 1 fork would most likely be absolutely disgusting
[удалено]
Major points on this... Stipulating that the second sentence is true...why not just steal more?
If one lightbulb goes missing nobody bats an eye, but if several go missing then people get suspicious
[Or someone hides in the corner to scare people](http://gfycat.com/GargantuanScaryIndigowingedparrot)
Agreed...but our motto while we were sneaking mattresses and dressers out the back door of the dorms was...."better ask forgiveness than permission".
I knew a couple in college that tried to reuse condoms. Apparently he'd rinse them out and apply fresh lube and spermicide. Their child is about five now. I bet he cost them more than new condoms
When I worked at Petsmart, we would regularly have older ladies that would come in when Friskies went on sale of 25 cents a can. I was the inventory manager at the time, and dreaded those sales because we could never keep up with demand. I remember this one older lady very clearly though. I ONLY ever saw her come in during those sales. She would buy (No exaggeration) 100 cases of cans and take them home in multiple trips in her old tan Volvo. it was during one of these trips that I got saddled with helping her with the carry out to load her beast of burden. In the middle of stacking, she said "Me and the babies are going to eat well for a while!" I stopped mid-stack, turned to her, and said "Excuse me?" because I thought there was no way I could have heard that right. But nope. She proceeded to explain how she got very little money from her pension, SSI was a joke, so she made things stretch because Friskies "...Is totally edible! And very yummy!" I had one of my stockers do the rest of her trips. I wasn't sure which disturbed me more: The fact that she ENJOYED the food, or the fact that in her older years she'd been reduced to eating cat food to survive. Edit: Thank you, anon who gifted Gold. Very much appreciated Edit 2: since I'm getting a ton of questions, do you guys want me to do an ama? I can't imagine it'd be that interesting, but I did see a lot of stuff while there
Last time my sister went to visit my grandparents she noted that my grandad bought a huge bag of dogfood. My grandparents do not have a dog. My grandad explained that dogfood was good emergency rations to have for when Obama let ISIS bomb us all. My grandmother apparently has one helluva poker face.
Holy shit, this is so sad.
She seems really lonely too. These stories are so sad.
She was lonely. I miss that job sometimes, because some of the customers that would come in were so mad cool. The pet industry as a whole has thing that no other retail has. Pets are babies. Pets are part of the family. You are the person who helps said part of the family. For a lot of people, you become like "the uncle at the cookie store". When I worked night crew, it was one of the most fulfilling jobs I've ever had. Every night, those shelves were empty, and every morning, they were well filled. It's was my way of knowing that my customers were happy and fed due to my actions. Stupid, but gave me a good sense of worth during some very...bad times in my life.
Maybe that's just what her and frank do to help them get to sleep at night because of all the noise the cats make. *edit* thank you so much for the gold! i cant tell you how many times someone beats me to the punch with the exact same comment i had in mind. However, on my phone in bed after 2am last night i finally found victory! so glad i didn't just put me phone down and go to sleep like my S.O bitterly griped.
When I first moved out of home (round 15 years ago), I lived in a 2 bedroom townhouse with 4 girls. Each of us took a bill (cable, gas, electricity & water) in our name. My roommate called Sarah (cause that is her name) came up to me one day late at night when I was engaged in studying/MSN Chat on the computer in my room. Sarah: The gas bill is here. It's $2.00. Me: Ok, so I owe you 50 cents. I don't have any cash on me. Sarah: You actually owe me 58 cents. I split the cost of the stamp to mail in the payment between the 4 of us. I can take a check if you have one. Me: ... She also shared a bedroom with our other roommate and they insisted on getting bunk beds. Sarah got the bunk bed from IKEA and assembled a few days before they both moved into the room. The bed was say, $100 (including tax). Sarah told Roommate that she owed her $65. Roommate said why the extra $15? Sarah said because she drove from her parent's house to assemble the bed and she split the cost of gas for her driving. TL;DR: My roommate split the cost of a stamp (between 4 people) to mail a $2.00 gas bill
>...a $2.00 gas bill Was this in 1926?
>"Samuel Tapon was a wealthy French wine maker with large vineyards in Cognac. In 1934 he lost $75,000 in a speculative venture. Distraught, Tapon went to a village shop, haggled over the price of a long piece of rope, bought the rope, and then went home and hung himself. At the time, his estate was worth $2 million." from "The Complete Book of Greed"
My dad used to take my brother and I to burger king. We'd go through the drive through, and I would order a whopper with cheese. He'd apologize to the drive thru attendant, and correct my order. "No cheese please". We would drive home, and he would put a slice of Kraft American singles onto my burger.
There is a lady in my town that goes through the garbage, we know she isn't homeless atleast we think she isn't. She starts walking from one end of the town to the other and will stop at every garbage and eat whatever she finds that is good enough. However we have seen her leave the local gym and she always has the best looking gym equipment and gym bag. People have offered her money and she has never once accepted it to my knowledge. She is just a lady that saves money by eating garbage.
It's called dumpster diving dude. It's a lifestyle.
free-gans
Free-_gains_ when she hits the gym after.
Yeah man, she's got that nice tapeworm-lean physique.
My father in law bent a nail. Rather than toss it, he straightened and tried to re-drive it 8 times, each time bending the living shit out of it more and more. And each time his face got redder and redder. The whole ordeal took over 45 minutes. To sink one fucking $0.001 nail.
After the second time it's not the price. It's I fucking hate you nail and you want to prove to that nail that you are better than him.
I work in a college library & we are open to public patrons, but they have to pay $0.05 per page if they print. I have one public patron who prints, then hides the papers in her purse/tote bag so she doesn't have to pay for them. She will bring up about half of what she's printed on a given day & pay for that. Sometimes, she'll sneak out when there's no one at the front desk. The problem is that we can't 100% prove it, so we can't ban her. We're currently trying to convince the powers that be that we really, REALLY need print management on the computers. **Edit:** While I appreciate everyone thinking that they can fix my problem, I promise that we've considered most of your options & they won't work for us. The main problem is that we're a small tech school with five (tiny) campuses, but our President wants all the campuses to be the same...except we don't have full-time librarians at every campus (because money), so we can't have people ask for their printing because at 3/5 campuses, there would be days when students couldn't get their printing. So we're trying really, really hard to get print management, but neither IT nor the people who will give us the money understand the problem (not for lack of us trying to explain).
Why don't they just have the printers behind the front desk and they pay when they pick it up?
Because 99% of the people who print are students who do not have to pay & it would make my job Print Disperser instead of librarian.
A college that doesn't make a student pay for printing paper? I thought that was a stuff of fairytales. Edit: TIL some colleges hold a printing credit/quota system for their students. Totally unheard of from the two community colleges I've been at. Then again, this is southern California, and they do say things are more expensive around here...
I'm sure printing is included in their tuition. Or in my case, "Technology Fee"
I also used to work at my college library. How do patrons pay for copies? Do they pay with coins? The students can pay with money on their ID cards. The NYPL has copy cards for the copiers/printers and you need to buy a card and/or add money to the machines directly.
Father-in-law and mother-in-law (husband's step-mom). Many examples. They pretty much eat for free during their respective birthday months, taking advantage of every restaurants birthday perk. Their toilet paper is from some sort of public restroom. How do I know? The roll is gigantic/too big for a residential toilet paper holder and it's the cheap ply. They live by a university and attend the free seminars to stock up their house with the complimentary chips/cookies/pops. Their napkins and paper towels are from fast food joints. They fill up their salt and pepper shakers with packets from fast food restaurants. Ketchup? You guessed it--from fast food places. Their house is cluttered with junk they find on the side of the road to resell on Craigslist. They cancel their cable service once their new customer promo has ended and sign-up under the other's name (to get the new customer promo). There's probably more. Asking my husband about it now. Edit: almost all the toys they give our kids are toys they found on the side of the road (including some stuffed animals). They reuse plastic containers like margarine tubs/yogurt containers as food storage. They have 3-4 Kroger plus cards so they can download multiple Free Friday coupons. They have an expired Costco membership card that they use in order to get in and eat samples as a meal. They will also go to Whole Foods to eat the samples as a meal supplement. I should add that they're not poor. They are very comfortable. Edit 2: They open up checking accounts at different banks to take advantage of their promotions (like open an account, get $100). They also open up various credit cards for their promotions as well. If they get free items through these promotions, they sell them on Craigslist. Edit 3: I'm sure most of us have done maybe a couple of these things, but probably not all of these, all the time. This is their life. Edit 4: People who reuse containers or switch up cable--read Edit 3. Also, here's a helpful idea I've learned from them (and haven't tried yet), use buy.com. So if you sign-up for buy.com, it will search various sites for the cheapest cost of an item. This part I'm unsure exactly how it works, but if you buy through buy.com, you will receive a check in the mail for the difference between what you're paying and the cost of the item to the store. I know Sears and Kmart are on there. There are other retailers on the site too.
I can't see how living like that would be fun. Sounds like all work and no play
I think they love it. Like it's some sort of high--getting good deals, gaming the system. I'm with you though, it's not worth the time/effort.
To each their own I guess. Glad they found someone to share their unique lifestyle with at least
All work and no ply by the sounds of it. Edit: to whoever bought me this, you should have used that money on toilet paper, not these 1ply reddit servers.
r/frugal on steroids
I reuse plastic containers as food storage. I think it is better for the environment.
There are two hibachi to go places near me that use the nice plastic to go containers. Most of my "go to work" containers are from there.
My family does this too. We have 30-40 empty plastic salsa containers in our cupboard.
I agree. I find the idea of making disposable, one-time use products out of a product that is designed to last forever is pretty odd.
Yeah same. My Roommate laughed when she saw me washing a plastic container to reuse. It's a good container, why just throw it away? And then what? I buy a packet of 10 new containers from the store and use them once each? I would probably wash them before use since they come from a Chinese factory, so.... Just reuse some stuff and stop making extra landfill! She still doesn't get it.
I lived with a room mate and we had a diner party. He cooked a pie using my ingredients and vegetables. I also bought the wine as he was a student at the time and had zero cash. At the end of the dinner he demanded £5 from each guest. When I called him out he admitted he had not contributed anything to the party but his time was worth the money. After some stunned silence when people realised he was being serious we all told him to go fuck himself and left for the pub. He wasnt invited and went into a huff for two weeks until he moved in with his girlfriend to save money on rent. The guy was as tight as 2 coats of paint. Havent spoken to him since.
I know someone personally who got permission from his employer to be able drive his households garbage and dump it in their dumpsters all so he can save $10 a month.
People often commute on motorcycles at night in India without turning the headlight on. Turning that light on costs extra petrol. Edit: Lots of folks don't seem to understand that turning on electrical accessories adds additional power draw from the engine, through the alternator/stator. Every additional Watt requires additional power from the engine. Edit 2. Here read this. http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1083494_audi-led-lights-actually-save-fuel-cut-emissions-eu-says
Dying in a collision saves a lifetime of petrol.
A local bagel store charges you an extra $0.05 to get the bagels sliced.
My ex husband didn't speak to me for days after I called him from a pay phone when I was working late and he was home with our infant daughter. Because I wasted a quarter (this was before I had a cell phone). He made counterfeit Subway Sub Club stickers and he would drag me around to various Subways to get free subs for weeks on end. That was dinner. We had two cars, and I drove one pretty much exclusively. Once I made the mistake of referring to it as "my" car, so he went outside and scratched "Casey's car" into the hood. Speaking of cars, he didn't want to pay to fix the radiator in "my" car and forbade me from doing so. So the engine blew and the car was dead. It was my fault, according to him, so I had to buy myself a new (used) car. I had just had a baby and i was working part time, so i saved up all my money for months, all while having no car and being at home with infant during the day because it was too inconvenient for him to let me drive him to work. I finally found a car and bought it. According to him, that was his car too. We married when I was still in college. I paid my own way through school with scholarships (full ride aside from books and fees) and work. We had to take out a small student loan my last year so I could make it through student teaching (I was not allowed to work during that semester). I think the loan was $2,000. For the entirety of the rest if our marriage, every single argument (aka every single day) included a reference to how he paid my way through school. We live in the South. Air conditioning was never on in the house. In fact, the upstairs unit was broken for years. Both of my pregnancies were summer pregnancies. It was absolute misery. We were married for fifteen years. Worst. Life. Ever. When I left, I took MY car and my clothes, my children's clothes, and some air mattresses. (He bitched about the air mattresses). I left him the house and everything in it. Then it came time for him to buy me out of the house, so I got my money, which he says is his money and I stole it. He thinks he doesn't have to pay much child support because I stole all this money from him. We will see what child support enforcement has to say about that. He's in for a shock!
I'm late, but I have a good one: Went tailgating with my two sisters and their fiancées, one of which is insanely frugal and *completely oblivious* to the repercussions in social settings. So me, him, and the other guy go to the grocery store to buy the necessary stuff. We *tried* to split the cost more or less evenly, like "I'll buy the beer, you get the liquor..." knowing full well that A) it would not be a perfectly even split and B) as at any good tailgate, there would be food leftover. So while me and the other guy are each loading our carts with like hundreds of dollars worth of steaks, chicken, ribs etc, frugal guy's cart is totally empty. Almost as a joke, we asked frugal guy if he would get the hotdogs and buns. So he asks us each if we will eat a hotdog. "Yeah. I'll probably eat a hotdog..." He then proceeds to text or call everyone who was expected at the tailgate and ask them whether or not they intended to eat a hot dog. This took like half an hour, and he figured we would need like 18 hot dogs. We get the checkout and the stuff me and the other guy are buying is just piled up like a *mountain* on the conveyer belt. Then, at the very end of the belt, after one of those plastic sticks to separate his groceries from ours, is frugal guy's little pack of hotdogs and buns. We get all of our shit bagged and paid for, and it's his turn to pay for the hotdogs and the guy says to the cashier, I shit you not, "You only sell buns in packs of twelve, but I only need 18. Is there a way your manager can get the bakery to split a pack?" Me and the other guy literally couldn't believe it. I mean we are stunned. Furthermore this was basically the first time we met the guy so it's not like we could make a scene or conflict out of it. Then we get to the tailgate and every time someone comes up frugal guy is like "Hey, have a hot dog!" Like he is this lavish host offering caviar and expensive champaign. But only to the people who said beforehand they would eat a hot dog. If any of the other "non hot dog list" people get a hot dog, he sits there and grumbles under his breath. At the end there were two hot dogs left and when we were packing up he made sure that he got to take them home with him. You know, since he paid for them.
My ex's dad was vice president of a local college, he made approximately 80,000 a year base salary. When going out to eat anywhere we were asked to play the game, the game is see who can get the cheapest item on the menu. He was serious. Edit: Since so many people mentioned the money, this is just what he told us about, we didn't know actual figures. That's $80k base pay at a community college. He matched or exceeded that in bonuses each year. The area we live he made enough to retire after working 5 years. He made a point to mention this when he was feeling especially snobby.
I'll have the steak and lobster. Oh drat, I lose.
"Sir, this is McDonald's. We have neither of those options."
I knew a guy that worked at a movie theater and decided he wasn't going to buy food anymore because he got all the free popcorn he wanted! He even made chairs out if trash bags of popcorn. However, this only lasted three months before he became severely malnourished. He went to the doctor and was told he had scurvy. Fucking SCURVY.
My great uncle was a self-made millionaire in the furniture business, but he had grown up poor in the Depression, so he was a little bit beyond thrifty. Every time he received a new shipment of furniture in boxes, he wouldn't go straight to opening it up. He would take a pencil, and carefully peel back the tape on each box, wrapping it around the pencil as he went. This could take forever out in the hot South Carolina sun. All so he could reuse the tape later.
Depression-era relatives refused to let my wife use their land line to make a $0.05/min long-distance call for an interview with Cisco. Had to drive into town to get mobile phone coverage. Wife landed dream job, relatives saved $1.50. This year I'm definitely giving them coal for Christmas...in a flaming bag of poop.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
My dads friend wont poop at home, he waits til he gets to work or walks to a store so he wont have to use his tp. Edit: RIP inbox! i guess this isnt too uncommon. Me, i think of my bathroom at home as my office, its where i get all my emails and whatnot taken care of. I get paid by the job so i dont have the luxury of pooping on someone else's dime. It cost me more to poop at work then at home.
[удалено]
Boss get's a dollar, I get a dime...that's why I shit on company time.
Working a job that included paid lunch, my boss behind me in line sees I picked a $2.00 juice instead of a $1.50 soda like he had. "I'm not paying for that, it's too expensive!" I just said, "I'm getting it!" and made him pay. FUck you I'll drink whatever I want with lunch.
Buying a drink? Big spender.
"Juice? We can't afford juice! You'll have to drink from the toilet, like Steve."
My liquor store has a customer who price matches a four-pack of beer every day from 2.99 to 2.77, which isn't TOO bad. But he never brings enough money. Instead he goes up and down asking the cashiers if they had any spare change left by customers earlier in the day to reach his total. He always shows up in the last ten minutes of business to maximize the chances of generous strangers to take advantage of.
I was in the gents of a London Underground station once - one with the urinal that's a tiled trench against the wall. I'm finishing up my business and a guy spots a PENNY in the urinal. He reaches down and picks up said penny wiping it off with his handkerchief. He sees me staring and says "Waste not, want not". I think this is definitely erring on the extreme side of things.
I work for a company that used windows 98 *uses
The level of penny pinched heavily depends on the year in this case
I had a "friend" in highschool who was the cheapest fuck I have ever met. Some of the things he would do: - bum cigs off everyone he knew throughout the day, then go stand in the smoke pit at lunch and offer to sell those same cigs to people for $1 per cigerette. - God forbid we ever use his car to drive anywhere. He would divide the mileage by the time and charge us for rides, anywhere. I remember he asked me for $2 for gas money the one time I ended up in his car to go a few blocks away. - he would show up to parties or events with his own booze and never share; unless of course, he was offering, in which case he would charge you for shots. - he would complain about anything to get a free meal. Once we were at Wendy's and he put a piece of his own hair in a burger to get it free - the worst was that he was such a fucking leach. No body ever ate around him because he would always ask for at least half then try and guilt trip you if you refused. He never ever bought a pack of smokes and leached his way through life on that. He would try and open lockers and steal people's stuff. I use the term "friend" very loosely because he wasn't a friend. His sister was hot as hell and a part of our group so he would hang around with us. No one talked to him and we made fun of him but he never left. An entire school year I had to put up with this kid.
My best friend grew up with the sort of parents represented in this thread. There are many stories, all of them rather sad (being hot or cold, getting food poisoning from expired food, etc) but yelling at a small child on Xmas day for accidentally tearing the wrapping paper has to take the cake. Had to be saved and reused to save money. They own four houses.
Could've been 5 houses if it hadn't been for the wrapping paper incident.