When frugality goes wrong (at an office supply store)

In my post about saving money on back-to-school supplies, I mentioned that I try to hit some of the super-duper cheap sales that office supply stores have…you can get notebooks for $0.10, binders for a penny, folders for a nickel, and so on.

Well, I made my way to one of those sales recently, and a guy in the checkout lane next to me had gathered up ALL of the penny deals for that week and was getting ready to pay for them.

But there was a little problem…the penny deals required an additional $5 purchase, and he either hadn’t noticed that or had ignored it.

The cashier was doing an admirable job of trying to explain the rules to the customer, and the customer just got more and more upset. He said sarcastic, annoying things to the cashier (and to the manager, who had come out to help), and eventually, after they refused to change the rules for him, he left his stuff there and walked angrily out of the store.

I’m all for saving money and for taking advantage of the deals that stores offer, but there are a few things that bug me about this scenario.

• It’s not right to try to save money by breaking a store’s rules.

• $5 isn’t an enormous price to pay for the privilege of getting a whole pile of items for a penny each.

• Being rude to employees is not the appropriate response, even if the employee is wrong.

I guess I think that if your commitment to saving money causes you to be rude and have a freak-out over $5, frugality is probably a little bit too important to you.

This post isn’t really about that guy, though.

I want to talk about us.

Since all of us here are pretty devoted to frugality, we could be prone to this same sort of thing on some level. Saving money is a worthy goal, but when it becomes a virtue that trumps all other virtues, we get ourselves into trouble.

-We might become tempted to slip expired coupons to the cashier and send in multiple rebate forms.

-We might not be generous enough to help people in need.

-We might make our families miserable by keeping the thermostat super low in the winter or super high in the summer.

-We might yell at a kid who breaks something or ruins a piece of clothing (because replacing things costs money!)

How this plays out will be different in everyone’s lives…only you know what happens when you elevate frugality to excessive heights. But if you’re a frugality devotee, odds are good that like me, you need to do a little self-check every now and then just to make sure you’re keeping frugality in its rightful place.

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Have you ever caught yourself letting frugality trump other virtues?

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Today’s 365 post: I just never get bored of this.