Some Chilean wines and, as another Doper mentioned, some Argentinian wines.
Concha y Toro Castillero del Diablo and the Concha y Toro Reserva Especial are both good.
Many of the books available for download from Project Gutenberg (or maybe it’s called The Gutenberg Project. I’ve forgotten. ) Those things are free, and some of them are classics.
Lots of things from Trader Joe’s.
Pho. Ain’t nothing like it taste wise, and it’ll fill you up for most of the day for about $6 per large bowl.
Tap water, as opposed to bottled.
Actually, most dishes at Pho joints are pretty cheap and plenty filling, I find. $5 can get you a nice large plate of saffron rice with a pork chop and a fried egg on top. Great for lunch. Even better is getting a bunch of people together and ordering a massive hot & sour fondue pot. Now that there’s good eats.
Calculators – I bout the very first ever consumer TI calculator for 100 bucks, now comparable ones are virtually free with the purchase of about a million other things.
DVD and CD players.
Taco Bell.
Tap water.
I don’t know about Taco Bell over in your neck of the woods, but over here, Taco Bell is Mexican food designed by people who have only tangentially heard of Mexico.
Or of food, for that matter.
for me its definitely macromedia flash. For a $600 piece of software, Ive made my living from it for around 7 years. I dont have to pay Macromedia any royalties.
I would bet for many of us, in spite of all the cursing we do at it, Microsoft Windows, Word, Internet Explorer, etc. gives a pretty good ROI.
Expensive software is usually crap. It isn’t just low-quality, buggy, and never fixed, it often spies on you in ways you cannot control. Neither Microsoft nor Apple nor anyone else who sells closed-source software is clean in this regard: There are people who have been caught and people who will be caught.
Ubuntu Linux, on the other hand, is on the opposite extreme: It’s high-quality software that can not only be downloaded for free, but will be shipped to you for free on a CD-ROM.
Zippo lighters.
Not only have I heard of it, it’s my favorite rum. I discovered in Barbados and brought a bottle home. I was pleasantly surprised to find I could buy it at the local liquor stores and at prices comparable to all of the usual brands.
On campus dining.
My college has one of the best dining programs in the country (second last time I heard) and some of the food is both incredible and cheap. On meal plan, you can get grilled to order chicken served on garlic mashed potatoes and topped with gravy and crispy onions for just $2.05 (and only $4.10 if you don’t have a meal plan.) Or a huge bread bowl of the best chili I’ve ever tasted for around $1.75 on meal plan. It’s great.
Bad movies.
If you know where and how to look, it’s easy to find MST3K style “so bad, they’re good” movies for dirt cheap. I own over a hundred such movies and love them.
This is a minor hijack, but I gotta tell it. I had never heard of “Two Buck Chuck” until this post. Shortly after I read the post, I left work. In my car, I’ve been listening to an audio book, “The Devil’s Teeth”, by Susan Casey. Within a minute of getting in the car, I heard the phrase “Two Buck Chuck” from the narrator, who was describing supplies for a visit to the Farallon Islands. I would have had no idea what this was from context. Reading SDMB whittles away at my ignorance.
I really, really, really like Bolla red wine. If you are unlucky, you might have to pay $7.99 for a bottle, but I can often get it for $6.19 on sale at Meijer. I call it my “house wine” and buy it in huge quantities, whenever it hits this price.
There are a lot of really great frozen vegetables, too. Spinach, sweet white corn, green peas, and snow peas are now available frozen and they are wonderful. Canned tomatoes, too. What a great invention.
Potato samosas for 75p in some of the London Underground stations- yummy!