As a guest, what's the stingiest thing you've ever experienced?

[Marssuri]

Just that!
I'll start

I invited friends for dinner at mine. I made traditional dishes from where I'm from, sausage rougail, chicken cari and dessert.

A few days later they text me telling me to come to theirs for some food at dinner time.

I show up and bring a small jar of chilli peppers. One of the people who invited me goes "is that all you're going to eat?". I was confused and asked what they meant. They replied "It's everyone brings their own food."
I told them I thought they had invited me for dinner and they go "yes, we invited you to come to the house for dinner!".
They saw my face and said "don't worry, we can share some food with you!" before cutting a couple of raw carrots, aubergines, cherry tomatoes with some white sauce and putting them in the middle of the table.
They then served each other the meal they had made for themselves and digged in.

Note from MNHQ - we've had lots of nominations for this thread to be moved over to Mumsnet Classics and, as we're very generous hosts, we've done exactly this.

Another wedding one. Close family member. Loads of people invited and most travelled a long distance to get there, bringing expensive gifts. Those who'd travelled were put up in a hostel type place which belonged to the church and the husband-to-be was meant to have got supplies in for those staying there. In the morning we looked in the kitchen to find he hadn't got anything in, not even tea bags. I was ravenous so went to my parent's house, which was very close by, looking for something to eat but the bride was staying there and she asked me to leave because no one was to see her before the wedding and she wanted her breakfast. I can still hear her shrieking down the stairs. Me and DH had to drive to a local town and do a shop for everyone staying in the annex, which we couldn't really afford and which was never reimbursed. The marriage lasted about a year.

20 yrs ago worked in an office. 3 of the typists contributed to buy tea, milk, butter and bread and shared daily 10am tea and toast run. Realised in short time that others were helping themselves but not replacing the items used or taking a turn to buy things. They were the technical staff and earning over 3 times our typist wages. Luckily our brilliant supervisor mentioned it to the manager and he personally purchased a small tabletop fridge with a lock. We offered anyone to join in with the "tea fund" but only on of the technicians ever did. The rest weren't interested once they couldn't leach off the least paid staff members!

The people offering an excuse as to why some hosts don't open the wine brought along by the guests, yes that was certainly the done thing years ago. However, the key point is the reason that a more suitable wine would already have been carefully chosen. From all the examples on this thread, I don't recall all the tight gits hiding the gifted wine because they already had a wonderful offering to serve - it's more like they kept the good wine for themselves and offered some cheap shit, or nothing at all. That's the difference.

DH eats them the next day cold with a slice of cheddar cheese.

I love them with cold gloopy gravy and loads of salt. Delicious. (Revoltingly gross but delicious).

A PP mentioned being told the pub meal 'would do' as her birthday gift also. That reminded me of my childhood. My birthday is 11 days after Christmas and my maternal grandparents would every Christmas we spent with them say 'It's for your birthday as well'... whatever the gift was. Single book or whatever. It always made me feel really small like they though I was greedy to 'expect' a birthday gift (which i never actually did) but also like I mattered so much less than the other grandchildren who would get separate gifts for their birthdays by virtue of being born at another time. It was usually said with an air of disgust as well - like it was a massive inconvenience to them that I was born at such an time.

A lot of this is very familiar to the behaviour of EXH’s family - if they visited I’d load the fridge with things they liked and they’d get at least two home cooked meals a day and all the booze and we’d get sod all at their house but I’ve just remembered one example of his sister who was the worst of all of them.

I was pregnant so obviously not drinking and she suggested we go to Frankie and Benny’s for dinner. I obviously said I don’t mind driving but I couldn’t fit everyone in the car. No matter, it was approx 20 min round trip so I drop ExH, SIL and her two kids into town and loop back round to pick up BIL.
As we were getting back into town SIL called BIL and I could hear her saying “Make sure you pay for parking.” I was surprised given what I knew about her but thought, ‘oh that’s polite as I’m picking them up and dropping them home.’ I did have a quick look while he was paying - £1.50

Anyway in the restaurant - SIL & BIL get stuck into the beers, order all the food, their kids order from the adult menu and ExH and I order our food but he doesn’t drink as we’re leaving early in the morning and sharing the long drive home. Bill comes and SIL splits it down the middle and says we owe nearly £100.

I’d swallowed a lot from them by this point and wasn’t in the mood so I said.
”Well no, there’s 4 of you and you’ve been drinking and we haven’t so don’t think we do.” And she said, you’ve guessed it, “but we paid for parking!”

I sat there with the bill and worked it out to the penny and told them what it added up to. She still had the audacity to say ‘have you split the parking?’ And I snapped at her not to make me start on the petrol as well and she finally shut up!

We never went for a meal with them again!

Apparently I can be relied upon for 'the inevitable spag bol' from the freezer, I tend to make a vat of it every couple of months!

Yes, true!

And I for one, salute you for it!

You can never do too many roasties.
It's a rule, honest.

If there are somehow leftovers, you eat them cold or send them off with the guests as part of the doggy bag of leftovers in general.

That's on your husband, not you.

Thought of another one.

I don't know if technically this counts as I wasn't invited for dinner specifically, but as a child I regularly spent summer days at my aunts house playing with my cousins whilst my mum worked.
I few times I was left there past dinner time. They would all sit down to a home cooked meal or home cooked curry with all the trimmings and not offer me a single thing. I had to sit there whilst they all ate. The hunger pangs would make me feel sick. I wasn't even offered a slice of toast.
It felt horrible and I've never forgotten it. They did it a few times. Again, not hard up, quite the opposite.
I feel as though I was being punished for something but I didn't know what 🤷🏻‍♀️

I had money but I had noticed them being tight before so was on guard. Hate meaness in people, it's an awful trait.

Some people have no shame.

One friend invited friends including me to a Christmas dinner then sent an invoice to each of us. It was BYOB also.

Another friend invited me and my DH around for dinner, she slapped a hot dog on a bun with some iceberg lettuce, no sides or anything. No drinks offered.

I remember that one!

And didn't the (adult, IIRC) son leave it anyway because he didn't want second-hand food?

I was at my ex-boyfriend's aunt's house on Christmas Day, years ago. They were very wealthy people, and after lunch, some very expensive Christmas crackers were passed round. The prizes inside weren't your average joke spectacles or floppy fish, but very high quality stuff, like a bottle of expensive perfume or similar. I won a little set of screwdrivers. After everyone had oohed and ahhhhd over their nice new Christmas cracker presents, my ex's Mum demanded that we all give her our presents so that she could sell them at a car boot sale. Everyone except me handed them over, willingly, which I still don't understand. I sat on mine and hid it so she couldn't get her greedy hands on it. She hadn't even provided the Christmas crackers in the first place! Still stuns and amuses me to this day.

That reminds me a very great deal of one of my aunts who behaved like this. Always trying to get stuff out of my mother because she was a 'rich southerner'. Very far from the truth when i was growing up. When aunt got out of hospital recently my mother flew up to her and stayed in a hotel while she helped aunt with cleaning and cooking and all that. Once she went out with aunt and her daughter to a cafe and aunt's daughter suggested to her mother that she pay for my mother's cappucino as she had done so much and my aunt apparently snapped; 'She's rich, she can afford it. '

Sadly though my mother continues to try and please, placate and cater to her sister. She will until one of them dies quite frankly.

We were invited for dinner by quite posh work friends.
we took an expensive bottle of wine. They served us 2 slices of bacon and a fried egg. That’s all
Totally bizarre

My uncle and aunt invited me over to visit them. We lived in different countries.

I came from another country to visit them.

I paid hundreds of euros on flights and trains. I sat around airports for hours.

When I got to the UK. He told me he would pick me up from the train station.

The train station was literally ten minutes drive from his house.

When I got into his car, before even saying hello, he asked me for petrol money.

Yes - this is the correct etiquette if you have carefully chosen wine pairings to complement the menu.

However it is odd to hide the gifts and then serve tap water

Oh another one.. my friends wedding. She’s from an Eastern European country but
lives abroad so has many friends from the uk, instead of having the wedding in the main city where everyone had to fly to she decided to have it in a b&b type farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It was close to the small town she grew up in so even when you got as far as the airport, you had to get two trains to get to local town and then from there you had get a taxi to the remote farmhouse. It was tiny, smelly and not set up for such an event. There was no food on arrival and no way to get anywhere else. The day of the wedding the food was all laid out with blue bottles all over it. This was likely due to the pig farm right next door. I still remember the awful stench, it makes me sick. Nothing was labelled and a vegetarian guest ended up eating meat accidentally. The funny thing is even though the food looked disgusting, we all ate it, we had no choice, there were no other food options anywhere. No snacks, no breakfast nothing!

Most people would not bat an eyelid if there was a pay bar at a wedding, so its weird but not much different in monetary terms.

Does anyone have a link to this thread please? I'd love to read it!

A family member once brought a lasagne over ours for a family meal. I made a curry, so that people would have a choice of food.
Everyone (except me) had lasagne and it all got eaten. She was really annoyed that she didn't have any to take home with her. And she didn't want any of my leftover curry...

I would have told the bride to get over herself. WTF!