What is the stingiest thing you've ever done / seen someone do?

[Teadrinker11]

Yourself or someone else, what is the most stingy, mean, miserable thing is that you have ever done or seen someone else do?

@Phantom1 don’t give her money, she’ll just keep it.

Just take it in turns to get your coffees. So I’d say ‘I’ll go and get my coffee now whilst you guys save the table’.

Agree this approach with your other non-stingy friend in advance.

Or you could go somewhere where you order your own coffee on an app.

@Mistysnow

Not sure if its the stingiest but it really irritates me... my partner everytime we go out for a meal or even to the chippy he insists we just share whatever i order rather than placing two separate orders... as its cheaper. I am a massive foodie this annoys the life out of me plus im veggie and he doesnt care so i order my thing and he just asks for 2 plates with it

So order for both of you and make sure he doesn’t lump you with the bill!

I don't know if it's already been said but I think there are 2 distinctive themes here.

1. people reusing /recycling. Such as using old clothes as cleaning rags, reusing envelopes as note pads etc.
2. People taking the Mick out of others and using them. Such as never buying a drink, expecting others to pay for your extravagant meals etc. I don't see anything wrong with number 1. It's good for the envuronment. 2 however is awful. These people make others feel uncomfortable and rely on their kind nature to not calls them out on their dreadful behaviour.

Definitely

My point earlier in the thread

A lot of the people are mean spirited and they take advantage of other's generosity

Buying our first house. Exchange times meant we didn't get in until it was dark. Every lightbulb had been removed!! Couldn't see a thing!

@JuergenSchwarzwald

I assume you mean they only took the florets but the big stalks by far the best part... we use to fight over who got it as a kid

I slice off the stalks and eat them raw! The florets are a bit horrible raw though.

We use stalks in cooking. Grate it into pasta sauces and slice up for stir fry’s.

@Phantom1

coodawoodashooda

None of us are skint. She is a moocher and we are too soft with her. She's always telling me that other friends have treated her and bought her something. Next time we meet up, I'm going to stand my ground with her. I meet with her in London when I go to stay for a few days. So, I have both travel and hotel expenses. Yet, she seems to think that I should pay for her or at least subsidise her in some way. There are other things but it would be outing. Thanks.

That sounds really frustrating. I can't be friends with people like that. Mostly because my xh was like that. It's so embarrassing.

@Phantom1

coodawoodashooda

None of us are skint. She is a moocher and we are too soft with her. She's always telling me that other friends have treated her and bought her something. Next time we meet up, I'm going to stand my ground with her. I meet with her in London when I go to stay for a few days. So, I have both travel and hotel expenses. Yet, she seems to think that I should pay for her or at least subsidise her in some way. There are other things but it would be outing. Thanks.

Start greeting the 'other friends bought me something' with a vague answer. 'How nice'...etc.

Then tbh, I would start phasing her out of my life. I can't stand stingy people.

@ilovepixie

When my sister was pregnant I was out for a meal with her and her partner. Her partner ordered his meal with a side order of gravy. He used the gravy and there was still some in the jug, my sis reached for the gravy to get some and he went mad saying it was his gravy and he had paid for it and she couldn't have any! He also used to check the radiators to make sure she didn't have them on while he was at work!

Please say she is not still with him. Feeling the radiators to make sure she didn't have them on, is controlling and abusive behaviour.

That reminded me of a stingy friend who came for lunch with her kids. She said she'd bring pudding. One punnet of strawberries between 7 of us. I mean why bring anything?

coodawoodashooda & CharityDingle

I see her a couple of times a year. In the interim we send emails. We don't do Christmas presents but before Christmas, I always get an email telling me what she would like and they are very expensive items. She never gets them from anyone else either. I always wonder if it's a hint and she thinks that I will buy one of them for her. She does it every year and I've never bought her anything. Maybe it's me or maybe she doesn't give up. Would you think it was a hint or just wishful thinking on her part?

@Phantom1

coodawoodashooda & CharityDingle

I see her a couple of times a year. In the interim we send emails. We don't do Christmas presents but before Christmas, I always get an email telling me what she would like and they are very expensive items. She never gets them from anyone else either. I always wonder if it's a hint and she thinks that I will buy one of them for her. She does it every year and I've never bought her anything. Maybe it's me or maybe she doesn't give up. Would you think it was a hint or just wishful thinking on her part?

That's really needy. Sounds like you do well to ignore her.

Thanks.

@DirtyDancing

Well, I went on a second date with a guy and he ordered lobster and 'forgot his wallet'. I literally sat there in near tears as it meant I couldn't afford my weekly tube card to get the work the following week. I was in my 20s and earning peanuts.

Also I saw a friend steel all the tip money the group had put it. I went ballistic, most was put in by my (now) husband's mates and they had been generous. The friend hasn't even put a tip in!

He had been scrounging off me for years anyway saying he was skint. Turned out he was saving heavily for a house deposit, despite me renting a small room in a house share. We stopped being mates not long after that, as he announced he was off to travel the world. Always felt like I own a door or two in that house or paid for part of his trip lol!

I would have ‘forgotten’ my wallet too (and not accepted any more dates).

Not read the whole thread but the stingiest thing today is starting a post about peoples experiences of stingy people, and not submitting anything to it.

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

Even the concept of 'a children's meal' for under-12s (or whatever limit) isn't very helpful. It assumes that a 3yo will eat the same as an 11yo, which is very unlikely.

As long as it's for good motives and not deliberately trying to take advantage of a small business (like with the hobby group upthread), I don't see anything wrong with ordering an appropriately-sized portion. Also, calling it a 'small meal' would probably sit much easier with self-conscious older girls with tiny appetites than a 'kids' meal'.

And it's not just the quantity but the type of food on offer. An adult with a very small appetite would most probably prefer a smaller normal meal than turkey dinosaurs and potato funny faces!

It reminds me of a story I heard once of a workplace where new safety rules required all of the men (they were only men there) on the factory floor to wear yellow wellies at all times at work. They all gave in their sizes for the order and then, when a big box arrived, it contained lots of pairs of large plain yellow wellies.... and one small pair with little cartoon duckies on the side for the man with size 4 feet

My main point - as per the theme of the thread - is parents who deliberately buy kids' meals for older children whom they know very well will go hungry. I've seen it myself when eating out with friends with teenage boys: their hearts visibly sinking when they see their parents looking at the menu and hear "Oh, Tim & James will be fine with a kid's meal".

Agree this is so stingey. I haven’t bought either of my DC a kids’ meal for several years now (and my youngest is 9).

I spent (many) hundreds of pounds a year being massively ripped off by Toni & Guy. I then had my hair done at the beginning of the pandemic and paid the usual amount (with generous tip) in advance so hairdresser said I could just leave once done. Astonishingly, the salon owner then e-mailed me to say I owed £5 extra for a new PPE charge and to transfer it or pay it when I next came in. I transferred it (shouldn’t have bothered) then promptly changed hairdressers and never went back again.

I think to be fair those people who weren't able to go to the shops didn't realise how low supplies actually were, and how long you had to queue to get in and get round.

True, but I think most people realise that expecting somebody doing you a favour - somebody who already works 11-hour days - to go to four different shops to buy what can be bought in just one of them will take them an unnecessary long time for not a great saving, covid shortages or not.

If you're one of these people who makes it into a hobby to spend all day trawling around multiple shops finding the cheapest price for every item, then good luck to you. It's a conscious personal decision you make that the small financial savings are worth more to you than all of the extra time you spend travelling to, shopping and queuing up to pay in lots of shops (unless you are so very hard up that you genuinely have no option but to do so) - and that's absolutely a valid choice to make FOR YOURSELF.

If somebody else - especially somebody obviously with far less spare time than you - is putting themselves out and doing it on your behalf, you graciously thank them and repay them what they spent on your behalf. In fact, I think most reasonable people being done that favour would cheerfully automatically round it up by a few pounds by way of thanks and to contribute to petrol and parking costs.

To deliberately withhold some of the money actually spent on the items that you requested - from the previously agreed shop - is not even cheeky, it's theft. My simple response, as in all these scenarios, to people who protest that they could have done something cheaper/more quickly/better themselves is 'well, do it yourself, then'.

I used to work in an office with a man who worked as a general office help across a few departments. He dealt with all of the incoming post, distributing it to the right people.

He would go through every item of post, checking the stamps on mail where they'd been used, scrutinising them to see if they could be 're-used' - whether they'd missed the franking machine or had tape over them so that the frank could be carefully cleaned off. He spent most of the day painstakingly doing this, often yielding maybe a dozen or so reusable stamps in a whole working day.

He was actually a very kind, pleasant man and granted, he was generous with his fraudulent gains, would always offer you a stamp if you were sending out personal mail and he saw you reaching into a handbag/purse/wallet for a (legal, honest, brand new) stamp; but the amount he was paid for being there each day was far in excess of any money he 'saved' overall. If people had wanted to, they could have sent most personal post making it look like business mail and written '1st' or '2nd' on it, for it to be franked in the post room and the company pay. Still theft, of course, but that would actually have cost the company far less than paying him £10 an hour to mainly 'liberate' £1.50-worth of stamps and fetch the odd round of coffee.

I remember another B&B that we stayed in, when my DSis and I were children, where the check-out time was 10am. At 9:50am, we had a knock at the room door from the owner. It wouldn't have been (quite so) bad if it had been a polite 'just checking you'll be OK for check-out time', but he was really aggressive and accusatory.

He was shouting "I have girls out here who I'm paying to clean rooms and they aren't able to do that until YOU leave". All in the earshot of the 'girls' (actually women) - standing next to him, looking like there probably was a time when they would have been mortified, but time and experience had long since left them inured to it.

He'd been nice as pie and really charming when we'd first arrived. Even more so once he discovered that our parents ran a small business where they could send trade his way, and had agreed to take a big stack of leaflets (pre-internet days) to promote his place.

As soon as we left, those leaflets went straight in the nearest bin. Not even in a 'serves you right, pal' manner, but our Dad refused to subject their valued customers - many of them also friends - to such an unpleasant experience, whilst risking their own reputation by apparently endorsing it.

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll the B&B owner seemed a bit Bail Fawltyish for sure, but I wouldn't call it miserly as his intention was to have guests out of the room at the time they had agreed to be out pf the room. It's events like that which create huge memories post childhood.

the B&B owner seemed a bit Bail Fawltyish for sure, but I wouldn't call it miserly as his intention was to have guests out of the room at the time they had agreed to be out pf the room.

Oh, I've no issue if somebody gives a polite courtesy 'reminder', but to lay into you (also, don't forget, we were children) and accuse you of being highly unreasonable when you haven't left 10 minutes before (we were actually heading for the door with our bags when he knocked) is not on at all.

I'm sure it's convenient to be able to start cleaning the rooms of guests who have left earlier, but you can't expect that they will have done so and change the terms at the last minute.

Would you be happy if you'd paid for an hour's parking and ended up with a fine when you were leaving after 55 minutes, because somebody arbitrarily decided that an hour actually meant 50 minutes?

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll the B&B owner sounds crazed no doubt, just didn't seem to fall under the general heading of stinginess.

The stamp one reminds me of friends we used to have. They would send all the family annual chrismtas cards through his workplace clearly using office stamps. They would ask to come and stay with us a couple of weekends a year (we live in a popular tourist spot) and would shoe horn in a 2 minute discussion about 'business'. I always wondered wny but once he revealed that he could ask for expenses for the entire trip if he could say we were potential clients. I got really cross one time where we paid for dinner, but he snaffled the receipt and kept it so was clearly claiming that on expenses also.

These things sort of mostly escaped our notice until it all sort of added up and we finally twigged. The final straw for me was when mutual friends had a big anniversary bash where they paid for everything incouding the drinks and I saw this guy hide a bottle of champagne inside each inner pocket of his dinner jacket and give a further two bottles to his older teenage son to do the same, and tney took them home.

now I think of it none of that is stingy, just out and out theft.

the B&B owner sounds crazed no doubt, just didn't seem to fall under the general heading of stinginess.

Oh, I think he was both

It was the fact he banged on about having to pay people to do nothing - for a maximum of 10 minutes (before he could quite legitimately have challenged us), because his estimation of when the rooms would be vacated hadn't worked quite as much to clockwork as he'd hoped.

I'll bet, if he'd been paying the cleaners 'per room cleaned' and not by the hour - and they had been hanging around for 10+ minutes waiting for rooms to be vacated and become available to be cleaned, he wouldn't for a moment have entertained any grumbles that they might have made about unpaid downtime.

now I think of it none of that is stingy, just out and out theft.

A lot of stinginess is low level fraud and/or theft.

It's the criminal opportunism.

As someone upthread remarked: thrifty is one thing, low level fraud is quite another.

There's the something for nothing stinginess, i.e. grabbing a handful of mints from the counter of the take away when it's kinda taken as read you just take one each. Pre covid, obvs.

There's psychological control of money (and themselves) i.e. the guy that walked into the hairdressers. (Average, suburban hairdresser. We're not talking Nicky Clarke/Vidal Sassoon.) Asked how much a haircut would cost. Then walked straight out without saying a word. Which I suspect was his little set piece regardless of the situation.

These people are convinced they are being taken for a fool unless it's them ripping the provider off somehow.

There's thrift and there's theft.....