People Reveal Who Is The Most Ridiculous Cheapskate They Know

It's fun to save money, but some people take a little too much pleasure in making their dollar stretch. It's amazing how far these cheapskates will go just to save a few cents. Is it even worth it in the end?

So Many Cheapskates Make Themselves Known At Work

>>> “I had a customer come up to the bar to pay the table’s bill. Once he saw that his table had racked up about $150 dollars on drinks and food, he casually sat back down at the table. Then he proceeded to put his jacket on, casually said goodbye to everyone and walked off, leaving the bill on the table to be paid by the others.”

>>> “The store where I used to work had a program that rounded up the customer’s total to the next dollar (when they hit the clearly marked ‘Agree’ button) and donated the difference to children’s charities. Some guy hit ‘Agree’ on his $19.99 total and wanted to know why it was $20 instead, after the fact. Flipped out when I said he must have hit the wrong button by accident, and forced me to do a refund – over a single penny. that goes to places like the Ronald McDonald House…”

>>> “My parents were both in the airline industry, so they spent a lot of time in hotels as part of long-haul flights. My ‘goodie bags’ at every party thrown were whatever free stuff they’d nicked from the hotel they’d stayed at over the past year, because 8-year-olds love shower caps, shampoo and mini soap.”

>>> “I worked as a cashier. Our store has gift cards and people get their hands on them many different ways. If the card has already been used, I have no way of telling how much is left on the card. One day, a woman came in with 10+ used cards and made me go through each one trying to squeeze every last cent out of them. I had to go through each card, making incrementally lower and lower charge amounts to get each card to go through. In the end, there was about 20 cents worth of money spread out between those ten cards and it took the better part of 20 minutes to go through them all. The woman seemed particularly proud of her savings.”

>>> “My brother-in-law drove two miles on a dirt road to avoid a 50 cent toll. One year for Easter, they had a bunch of us over for dinner. The sister-in-law brought out a basket of rolls, which looked just like the Red Lobster Cheddar Biscuits. When we remarked on the similarity, she told everyone that she and her husband ate there two nights ago, asked for several extra baskets of the biscuits, and took them home to serve to us two days later on Easter, kind of like resurrecting them in keeping with the Easter theme, I guess. Unfortunately, it failed, as they were stale as can be. Another time, they had eight dinner guests. They served an eight-piece Walmart fried chicken for dinner. That means one piece per person. That also meant two people got a single wing as their dinner.”

Caught In The Act Of Cheapness

>>> “My friend’s husband claimed that he has never and will never purchase a pen. ‘There are enough circulating in the world,’ he says. So he just steals them randomly instead. He is the reason your pen went missing!”

>>> “A friend of mine served homemade pizza in a pizza box he’d gotten two years earlier from ordering a pizza. Two years of pizza grease had made it pretty soggy. I haven’t eaten much else from his house since. I’ve seen they keep most their food in containers of a similar caliber.”

>>> “I know a guy who is middle-aged and still goes over to his old university just to get finger food from the clubs and socialize with kids who are sometimes half his age. He goes to any and every club: Sci-Fi, the Atheist Club, the Christian club, what have you, all just to pick up a sandwich. One time, he went to a Christian club just to (I’m not making this up) get a glass of water. I’d understand doing this if you were homeless, but this idiot has a job.”

>>> “People that eat garbage food. My friend knows a guy who waits outside of the restaurants for them to throw out food, particularly places like Dunkin’ Donuts where they ditch all the donuts/bagels. He has also waited outside major grocery food chains and gotten the deli food that has to be thrown away. He isn’t poor by any means, just cheap and doesn’t want to buy fresh food.”

>>> “When I was a student, someone I knew would get his drink from a bar about 500 meters down the road, smuggle it back in and drink it at the bar we were hanging in because it was 10 cents cheaper at the other place. We were already in a cheap bar…”

>>> “I used to look after a person who used to WASH their cling/Saran Wrap and re0use it, repeat until Saran Wrap is either falling apart or yellow, various other ‘money saving’ things like that.”

“Snowbird Season” Is A Dark Season For This Restaurant

>>> “Oh, let me tell you about the Snowbirds. These are geriatric vacationers from Canada/Minnesota/Wisconsin that come to Florida during the winter for their vacation. They are the cheapest humans on the planet. I have enough stories to write a book; let me share a couple of my favorites: -A server comes over to me and mentions that the lady at table 47 is on her second glass of iced tea, and the appetizers weren’t even ready. I replied, ‘So what, she’s probably thirsty.’ -A few minutes later, the server came back and informed me that the lady has a gallon ziploc plastic baggie in her purse and she’s pouring her iced tea in there, saving it to take home later. -One morning, an old couple joined us for breakfast. We have coffee pots on each table, and we sell the cup for $1.50, all the coffee you can drink. -They ordered one cup. The old guy poured himself a cup, drank it, then filled the cup for her. She’d drink it, then pass it back to him. This went on for their entire meal. -When Snowbird season hit, we’d remove all the condiments from the table, otherwise, they’d take all the sugar, sweeteners, and anything else they could. A popular bumper sticker in the area read, ‘If it’s Snowbird season, why can’t we shoot them?'”

>>> “Some friends of the family who are very well off financially, and only work to have something to do during the day other than stay at home, refuse to pay for their trash. Where they live, you pay per trash bag and buy the city trash bags from the grocery store. You can usually fit 3-4 normal kitchen trash bags in one of the city bags. Instead of buying bags, they take their daily trash, stick it in grocery bags, then put the bags in the freezer overnight (because of smell). Then in the morning when they run their errands, they would just throw the bags in the trash cans outside of Publix or whatever. One day, after a ‘clambake’ at their house where my grandfather purchased all the food and they hosted, they collected all the shells in a bag. In the morning, they drove over to my grandparents’ house (only a five-minute drive or so) and tried to throw the shells away in my grandparents’ trash. That was the point they were never invited to dinner again.”

The Thieving Is Almost Worse Than The Penny Pinching

>>> “My roommate hated driving on her own, so she’d always beg one of us roommates to accompany her. We’d get into her car and the first thing she’d do is get a piece of paper and write down the mileage of her car. A day later, we’d get a Facebook message asking us to pay her calculated portion of the gas because ‘she drove us to places.’ Also, I hate using small change so I had a piggy bank for all that useless coinage. Whenever the piggy bank got full, I’d deposit the cash into those charity money-collection bins, largely because my bank didn’t have any coin deposit machines. One day, I was emptying my wallet when I realized that my piggy bank was completely empty. I knew that it should’ve been full, so I asked my roommates. Lo and behold, the same roommate told me that since I didn’t use the money for myself, she decided to empty it and use it to help pay her portion of the rent. It was only around 20 bucks, but still, what a witch. I wish I could say I got some petty revenge, but I’ve got too short of a fuse for that. So I ended up shouting, telling her that she was a selfish piece of crap and a terrible human being. To be fair, these two were one of many incidents. Jokes on me, though. Two months after I moved out, I got a Facebook message from her asking me to deposit $4.50 of ‘overdue gas money’ into her account. Raged again and then blocked her so hard.”

>>> “My uncle once reached into a urinal for a quarter that he discovered. When I was 12 years old, my uncle brought me to The Bronx Zoo (my first visit). My mother gave me some money to buy a crappy little souvenir and lunch. When we pulled up to the parking booth, my uncle turned to me with his hand out asking for cash to pay the 8 or so dollars for parking. Another time, when I was young, my single mother was in dire straits. She needed someone to watch my Down Syndrome little brother for a day while she was at work. She asked my uncle if he could help and he accepted. So he watched my brother and for lunch, he bought a pizza for my brother and himself. My mother came home and my uncle left, very uneventful. About 6-7 months later, he called my mother and jogged her memory about that time he watched my little brother. It took her a minute to remember, but the moment she did, he mentioned that he bought a pizza for lunch that day and was hoping she could throw him 5 bucks to cover the amount that her son ate. Long story short, my mother flipped out on him and didn’t give him the $5 he so direly coveted.”

The Family That Saves Together…

>>> “My wife’s aunt. When she finishes a box of cereal, she rinses out the wax paper bag and uses it later for a sandwich bag.”

>>> “My grandparents live in Spain and they came to stay with us in the UK for a week not long back. I came home from work and did the obligatory stare in the fridge for a minute thing when I saw eight blocks of mature cheddar cheese. Turns out my grandparents were taking the cheese back to Spain because each block is 20 cents cheaper over here.”

>>> “My great grandfather retired to the cheapest accommodations possible. He walked to the discount store (never took a taxi or bus, even in winter) and bought discount, dented tin cans of beans, tuna and almost expired discounted bread. Died with over a million dollars to his name.”

>>> “One of my coworkers. Most hilarious incident was when he was on Paid Time Off. He came to work in the middle of his week off because he heard there was free food. Speaking of food, he always skulks around after the party and takes any leftovers, even the half-eaten ones. He also likes building models. The site he purchases them off of gives a 10% discount for your first purchase. Pretty much everyone he regularly works with has had him use their email account for the 10% off. He refuses to create a fake Gmail account for this.”

>>> “I’ve seen many working in the service industry. More recently, a woman paid for two coffees, both with a $5 bill, through separate transactions, one right after the other. She thought that the tax added up. But two $2 coffees ends up being over $4 anyway. She didn’t save money and just wasted her time. I thought about her doing that everywhere she went to save some nickels and dimes.”

>>> “I used to work at a gas station and there was one lady that always bragged about finding pennies on the ground. She would come in and scour the store, looking for dropped pennies. She would even find them behind heavy displays and then ask the employees to moved them so she could get a penny. Then, when she finally checked out, she would steal every penny out of the give-a-penny-take-a-penny thing.”

>>> “I saw this one very obese woman bring in a nearly empty ketchup bottle to a local Arby’s I was eating at, only to take almost all of the ketchup packets from the condiments section, sit down without buying anything, and refill her ketchup bottle one packet at a time. She then got up, waddled out to her car, got in, closed the door, unscrewed the cap and TOOK A DRINK FROM THE BOTTLE OF KETCHUP.”

>>> “A guy I worked with drove around with no brake lights for two years because ‘the fuses come in packs of five, and I only need one.'”

>>> “I had a great aunt who had a garden and grew vegetables and stuff. Once, a tornado came through the neighborhood and took out some houses. She got interviewed for the news. Not one word about her neighbors losing everything, but lots about how much money she’ll have to spend buying vegetables because the wind took the vegetables out.”

>>> “A friend of my grandparents had kept track of all of his phone calls for over 50 years in a series of ledgers. Any minute discrepancy on the bill and he will drive into the phone company office to complain about it. And by minute, I mean cents, so the cost to drive in to complain would probably be more than the overcharged error in most cases.”

Grandmothers Know How To Milk A Lifetime Guarantee

>>> “When my Grandmother and Grandfather got married, they did their gift registry with Sears. That was back in the day (late 1940’s) when they had a ‘lifetime guarantee’ on almost everything they sold. My Grandmother has moved house almost 10 times since then, but she has kept every single flattened box and warranty for every appliance she got when she was married. About two years ago, I drove her to Sears to get her iron replaced; she brought all of the boxing, and paperwork from all the way back in the 1940’s to get a new one. They actually did fulfill the guarantee and gave her a new iron! I think it’s hilarious, but she literally hasn’t had to pay for a new appliance in over 60 years because she’s so cheap! She’s a Ukrainian immigrant to Canada, and she always insists ‘Lifetime guarantee means lifetime guarantee.’ I kind of feel bad for Sears because our family is notoriously long-lived (her father lived until 104). I sometimes think that maybe this is the reason why Sears is doing so poorly, a ton of cheap old women cashing in on their lifetime guarantees.”

>>> “Some older guy my dad used to hang out with was a millionaire, owned his house and all that. He would ride his bicycle (no car, too expensive for him) to a supermarket and buy a large bag of their old potatoes for less than a buck. He’d eat those with butter for lunch the next couple of days. My dad would often go hiking with him and at the end of the hike, they’d eat at a restaurant. The guy would order one of the more expensive meals and several drinks. At the end of the meal, he’d say, ‘You pay for both of us this time, next time will be on me.’ Needless to say, he always said that. One time, my dad didn’t take any money with him and told him right at the start, ‘Sorry, no money, but you said you’d pay this time anyway, right?’ Dude hardly ordered anything that time, I don’t think they ever went out to eat together after that. The old guy was even left by his longtime girlfriend because she couldn’t stand his penny-pinching ways anymore. He had even gotten her (who had a regular job while he was already comfortably retired) to give him a weekly allowance during their relationship.”

His Tastes Were Expensive… When He Wasn’t Footing The Bill

>>> “I hosted a guy for a couple of weeks who was moving to the US from out of the country. This guy was an absolutely awful house guest. I’d like to clarify, he wasn’t fleeing a war-torn country without a nickel to his name or anything like that. I had to work as his agent for a few weeks before he arrived. I handled his bank statements and identity documents to get things ready for his arrival; dude had money. Rather, his family had money. His personal bank account had $50,000 in it, with regular deposits from (presumably) his mom.

He didn’t eat anything I cooked (and I’m a good cook who takes pride in his work), and would then fill up on all of my bread, lunch meat, cereal, bagels, you name it. Anything that was at least a little bit higher quality in my pantry, he’d eat it first.

I buy fruit juice for my kids, and it’s not cheap. I water it down so they don’t get too much sugar and to stretch out each bottle. I’d say a half gallon bottle lasts me a week for both kids. He would grab one of my 16oz tumblers and fill that sucker up to the top. You might say, ‘Well, why didn’t you offer anything else for him to drink?’

I asked him well ahead of time what he’d like to drink; he said, ‘I don’t like soda, water will be fine.’ I even told him that the juice was for the kids, he didn’t listen at all.

I knew he liked to drink coffee, and I like to drink coffee, so I bought a couple extra bags of the generic coffee I normally drink (which is actually pretty good) for his stay, and he didn’t touch it. I bought my wife a really nice bag of Blue Mountain coffee as a gift, and all of a sudden, he was making several pots of the nicer coffee a day and drinking most of it before my wife and I could get any.

I bought him some basic toiletries, including some Old Spice soap. He looked at it, raised an eyebrow, scoffed, and said, ‘I’ve never heard of this brand, is it any good?’

I told him, ‘Sure, it gets the job done.’ He didn’t use it, instead opting to use my bar of soap! I had to start hiding all of our toiletries toward the end of his stay.

And the toilet paper… When he was staying with us, our toilet paper consumption went from one roll every few days to one roll per day. It horrifies me to speculate any further as to why.

But I digress, we’re supposed to be talking about how cheap he is. However, I believe a bit of backstory about how he’s a sleazy freeloader is required to fully appreciate the following story:

I helped him move in and furnish his apartment. When I took him shopping for house essentials, he furnished his entire apartment with a futon, a card table, and a single $10 chair from Ikea. He bought a 20 lb bag of rice, a single pot, you get the idea. I gave him a coffee maker as a gift, he didn’t buy any coffee for it. I later asked him if he’d used it, he said, ‘Not so much, coffee is expensive! I’ll go broke buying it!’

I went to visit him a couple of weeks after he moved in. Remember above how I said he was causing us to use a roll of toilet paper per day? When he moved in, he bought a 24 pack of toilet paper. I used his bathroom and noticed that he still had the same pack, and only two rolls had been used for that two week period.”

She Held Up The Entire Drive Thru For One Little Mistake

>>> “I was at Dunkin’ Donuts at the beginnings of my hour-long commute to work a few days ago, and the line was a bit longer than usual because they were training a new cashier. When I was about to place my order, the woman ahead of me placed an order for a few strawberry smoothies, two egg sandwich things, and a few donuts, but the brand new cashier forgot to charge for one of the items. The cashier realized his mistake immediately after he handed her the receipt, and offered to correct it immediately.

However, this freaking lady decided that she deserved all her money back because of the sign that says something like: ‘Your order is free if your receipt is incorrect.’ To be fair, she was technically right, but who the heck would actually apply it in that situation? It wasn’t some egregious mistake made by a cashier trying to make a few extra bucks on the side (which I’m sure what the policy is intended to protect against), it was a genuine mistake that anyone would make on their first day on the job. So she started yelling and yelling about getting her money back, and the workers were being really respectful and courteous (I would have probably lost my mind), when the manager finally came out and corrected the situation. However, by then, 5-10 minutes had passed and the line of commuters was out the freaking door all so this woman could get 12 bucks for a dumb mistake.”

>>> “Saw a guy walk into a Five Guys burger restaurant and eat the free peanuts. He didn’t order anything. All he did was eat a load of peanuts and leave.”

>>> “At our store, a regular customer comes in every single day and asks for a refill of iced coffee, hot coffee, and a small cup of steamed soy. He brings in his old cups and has his membership card in order to get free refills. We always mark his cups (he doesn’t know) so we know which day he brought it in, and call him out on it. My coworkers are sick of it lately, so they just let him have it, but two days ago I looked at him and just said, ‘I’m sorry sir, but these cups are noticeably old and our policy for refills only work if you stay in the store, not bring them back a day later.’ He was ticked, but he paid. It was probably the first time he’s paid full price for his drinks in a week or two.”