Reading the “Crappiest Birthday Gift Ever” thread made me want to start a new thread. It seems like a lot of the crappy gifts people received were because someone was incredibly cheap.
What kind of cheap bastards do you know? What kind of cheap bastard are you?
I’ll start with a couple. Those of you who live in Texas will appreciate this… A friend of mine who lived in Dallas, once went a whole summer without turning on the air conditioner in his house. It regularly hits 105 - 110 in the summer there! Cheap Bastard! We had to meet on neutral territory. I couldn’t stand to be in his house for more than five minutes. (He’s a stereotypical tightwad banker).
My aunt used to wash and save aluminum foil, baggies, and breadsacks. You’d go into her kitchen and see sandwich baggies hanging up to dry. She was also one of those people who would actually re-use wrapping paper and bows. Cheap Bastard!
I was once invited on a ski vacation with a group of people who owned a condo at a really nice ski resort. From all reports, the people were rolling in money. The condo slept something like 12 people, and there were 6 adults and about 8 children there. The opted against the maid service for the entire week - the maids just came in and cleaned after everyone left. It was a pigsty - 8 kids for a week?!? Stinky sweaty adults and kids skiing all day? You could practically smell the place from 50 feet away. I have no idea what they were thinking when they decided maid service was not needed for 8 days.
There is a difference between being thrifty and being cheap. I often reuse the foil, baggies, and such rather than keep on creating more waste products.
I think being cheap depends on the individual. Some people are more into the thought that goes into buying a present than they are the amount spent. And likewise it can go the other way too. I’d rather know someone took a little extra time and spent a little less on a gift for me. You can tell if the gift was well thought out or just picked up because it was expensive.
I’ve a relative that once Christmas was over cut the back page off the cards he’d received and sent the front page out as the current years Christmas cards. Arriving, of course, about 2 weeks after Christmas.
My mom wraps all of our birthday gifts in old newspapers and if we give her a gift in a gift bag, she keeps the bags and reuses them. I can understand re-using a gift bag because those things are $3 (or more) for one bag and they don’t get ripped up like the wrapping paper. But her wrapping gifts in newspaper has always bugged me!
I also know a lady who would not buy anything name brand from the grocery store if she could help it. She had the choice of French’s mustard and Always Save mustard for $.01 difference and she chose the Always Save! I guess she really believed in the “a penny saved is a penny earned” saying!
Also, one of my sisters-in-law bought me a really cheap and ugly make-up bag with a matching ugly coin purse for Christmas one year and she was giving my parents and my brother and his wife expensive sweaters and appliances. It’s like she picked up the first thing she saw with no regard as to whether or not I’d use it.
Dude’s thats nothing.My parents are the cheapest people around.Guess what,when i was little they made me give the birthday presents i got to other people on their birthday instead of buying gifts for them.I had to do this once but put my foot down the second time i tried it.They have loosened up now but guess how much my allowance is?Well i get an allowance of about 50 cents a day and this is all i get for everything.This will sound funnier if you know that i am 20 years old.
I mean i have to save up to be poor.
Bye
Zeeshan
…my first marriage resulted in migraines and hemmeroids…plus a cheap bastard moment!
A cousin of my ex’s is a high profile lawyer- his father is a judge. They are ROLLING in money. We got a regift of a hideous glass platter that was still in the original box from a store that went out of business 20 years ago.
>>>>>>>They have loosened up now but guess how much my allowance is?Well i get an allowance of about 50 cents a day and this is all i get for everything.This will sound funnier if you know that i am 20 years old.
I mean i have to save up to be poor.<<<<<<<
By Zeeshan
Twenty years old and getting an allowance???
Its not that easy,you see i live in Pakistan and am bound to live with my parents till i am out of college.Its how it is here.We don’t have part time jobs and stuff since the atmosphere is different i mean if i am seen mowing someone’s lawn i’ll be the laugh of the town.There’s loads of cheap labor here so the types of jobs you’re talking about are impossible here.Ask any person who’s visited this place and they’ll tell you how it is.
I do have a job now even though i am still living with them.I so webdesigning and web programming and i am getting pretty successful at it,so the allowance is of no consequence anymore,but I do have a right to complain when i have lead a wasted childhood and i have become the most money obsessed guy around due to being deprived of it for so long.
Bye
Zeeshan
Zeeshan, that makes sense, I’m sure that most of us don’t know very much about day to day life in your country.
You know what I really hate? Those people who lavish themselves with stuff, but when it comes time to buy you a gift are all of a sudden pinching pennies. I had these friends who had a pretty cushy lifestyle, you know only the finest for themselves. We didn’t have much money at the time, but when it came time to exchange gifts at Christmas, I really put a lot of thought and time into their presents. The man of the couple worked at a computer shop and they just sent us the promotional copies of software that the store got for free. Not even good software, I remember one of them was some sort of interactive Monkees CD ROM. Neither of us is even a Monkees fan or even remotely close!
I guess it’s not so much the money, you can put a lot of care and effort into something you make with your own hands or find at a garage sale. It’s more the thought of is this is all I’m worth to you? And you know, they turned out to be just fair-weather friends after all.
You are absolutely right,people like that ussually do turn out to be fair weather friends,but how come we always find these people in couples?e.g all the cheap bastards discussed here are couples.I don’t get it.Do cheap bastards always marry each other or is it fate?
Bye
Zeeshan
I reuse foil, and wrapping paper and bows…or, just give 'em to kids…my cousins and I used to fight over the bows at parties.
What annoys me are people who don’t get their priorities straight.
My aunt and uncle have loads of money, a nice house, nice cars, etc etc…yet my cousin is getting Work Study at our college-I wasn’t eligible(sp?) for it, yet my family has less money.
My ex-friend’s parents had a boat, a brand new computer, brand new everything all the time…yet they got reduced lunches at school and her mom refused to pay tuition for her daughter to go to college unless she could get it from financial aid.
Now THAT pisses me off…royally.
One of my neighbors use to work with a girl who’s husband would not allow her to take showers except once a week. They lived in the dark, using candles and mooched rides off of people to get to work.
Said they had piles of dough because of this insane lifestyle choice. But you just know that when the husband dies, the wife is going to leave the lights on all night why she lets the tub overflow.
Many years ago, I was on the bus home from the mall with my mom. There was a group of elderly ladies chatting nearby, and we were eavesdropping.
They were talking about a friend of theirs whose husband had just passed away. While he was alive, he refused to upgrade the tiny television set he and his wife shared to a bigger, or even simply better, model. They had the money, he just didn’t approve.
Apparently, as soon as he was in the ground, his widow went out and bought herself a nice, big, color television
When I was in the Air Force in Korea we had a civilian in our unit. He was a GS-11 (made about 40K a yr) and a retired E-7. He was the biggest dumpster diver you ever saw. He would come back to the shop with all kinds of useless crap.
The good part was, if you couldn’t get something through normal supply channels, Charlie probably had it.
My in-laws used to switch off buying gifts for my husband Justin and his sister. Which sounds like a decent idea in theory but in reality my father in-law is one cheap man. One year that my father in-law bought for my sister in law she got post its, pens, and other fun doo-dads from the bargain table in the grocery store. Unfortunately my husband has the same cheap tendencies as his father. One year he bought me a book of poetry I think it was a Sylvia Plath book from the Friends of the Library used book sale. To top it off the cover was torn and it was water stained. We have been together for 10 years now, five dating and five married and I have finally learned in the last two years or so just to buy my own gifts and not buy too many for him otherwise I get way bitter.
