Today’s show is a fun one! With it being the day after tax day, we thought we would do a very light-hearted and entertaining show. Don’t worry, though, our next episode is back to the “meat”. Our topic today is based off of an article in this month’s Readers Digest titled “The Cheapest People in America”.
If you want to read the article yourself, click here.
As you listen to the show you will hear stories about individuals that:
- Save an automatic 5% when going out to eat.
- Get free popcorn and drinks when they go to the movies.
- Make “homemade” car air fresheners.
- Plus many, many more
You will also hear about some people who go to the extremes and may even cross that line of what could be considered ethical decision making. Some of these people:
- Drink free coffee all year.
- Never pay for a movie.
- Have all the condiments and napkins they need without ever going to the grocery store.
You will even get to hear how Bo goes grocery shopping and how I mastered the $7 date when I was a young man. We hope you enjoy and maybe even discover a way to save a few bucks.
Peter says
April 23, 2010 at 8:45 amGreat and fun show. I do enjoy the more technical ones, but it’s good to have something lighter once in a while.
The extent that some people will go to save what amounts to a tiny amount of money is amazing. You mention the guy who takes the red pepper flakes from the pizza place. He is expending so much time and effort doing that when an entire jar of them would cost you a couple of dollars and last for years. Same thing with the person who took huge amounts of napkins from the fast food place. A giant bundle of store brand napkins costs a few bucks and would last ages.
As you mention some of the activities really do get close to outright theft. Regardless, taking far more than you need and will use (for example all the napkins), just has the effect of raising prices for everyone, which of course makes the tightwads’ job even harder. So in one sense they are actually hurting themselves in the long run.
True story of a real tightwad. There is a woman in our neighborhood who had a garage sale a few years ago and was trying to sell a huge number of ketchup and other condiment packets she had taken from various Atlantic City casinos. It’s one thing to take extras and actually use them yourself later, but to try to sell them for a profit? It boggles the mind how someone would try to justify that behavior to themselves.