The High Cost of Being Thrifty

Use it up, wear it out.
Make it do or do without.
- Old Pennsylvania Dutch mantra

It’s amazing how much money you can spend being thrifty. As the oldest of eight children, growing up in a Pennsylvania Dutch family being “handy” and “thrifty” were virtues right ahead of being honest and modest — though slightly behind being industrious. In most ways I think being brought up to be thrifty is a good thing but the truth is we live in a culture that tends to make you feel there is something faintly obscene in that. Waste makes my skin crawl and passing up a really good bargain seems not dissimilar from cheating on your spouse (which, thank God, I don’t have to worry about.)

I was talking with Jane about this today because we are both a little nuts in this area. Jane says when she gets that screaming need for some retail therapy she makes the rounds of her favorite thrift shops, consignment shops, and second hand stores. We have a great store here called Second Glance. You never know what you will find there but I have come home with amazing treasures and change from a ten dollar bill. Jane has a collection of cashmere sweaters and silk blouses that would please any princess at, all told, less than the cost of one of them.

My friend Trudi told me one of the funniest stories I have ever heard about this. One of her friends is a thrift shop junkie and one of her favorite shops has a buck-a-bag day on Thursdays. For a dollar you can fill up a whole sack. Her friend made her weekly visit on buck-a-bag day and found a beautiful sweater, practically new, and in a color she loved. She put it in the bag but then couldn’t find anything else she wanted and so wound up leaving the store empty-handed because she couldn’t fill the bag. She said when she got home and realized what she had done she decided her thriftiness had gone way too far. I wish I had that problem. I would have done the opposite. I would have found enough to fill the bag if it took me the rest of the day because there would be no way I’d leave without it.

What got me thinking about this is a huge – I mean HUGE — cardboard box that is sitting in the living room at the moment filled with yards and yards and yards of deliciously soft, beautiful 100% cotton knit fabric in wonderful colors that the UPS guy delivered today. The UPS guys all know me. So do a lot of the eBay vendors.

Look, I love fabric. I’ve said it many times before. So if some nice lady in Virginia buys out the entire stock of a children’s clothing manufacturer that is going out of business and sells this beautiful, superb quality fabric for next to nothing — well, it would just be criminal to pass it up. I have enough soft, lovely pure cotton knit to make teeshirts for Rhode Island — for under $30! And they are much better quality than anything you would buy at JJill or the Gap, too.

Last night I went through a couple closets and filled two Hefty bags with clothes. Tomorrow I’ll drop them off at a Salvation Army bin. The clothes in them are made of wonderful fabrics that I got at unbelievable prices and hand-crafted with exquisite detail. Some large-sized ladies out there are going to feel like queens when they hit the thrift shops in their neighborhoods.

I figure buying all this gorgeous fabric, sewing it, wearing it for awhile, and then passing it on is sort of my way of improving the world’s level of luxury. It’s like the story of the man who told his friend that he had a forty year old bottle of fine Irish whiskey hidden in his house and he wanted his friend to promise that, after he was dead, the friend would take the bottle to his gravesite and pour it over the tomb. His friend thought about it for a moment and then said, “Well, of course I will. But would you mind if I passed it through my body first?”

Thanks for reading.