Everyone loves to save a buck but in the years following the Great Recession, Americans have taken their thriftiness to new heights.
Inspired by a recent Reddit thread that asked people to share things they hate but also rely on, we decided to explore a few of the most common things people put themselves through in order to save money — and why we hate them so much.
Here's what we came up with:
1. Coupons
The Great Recession may have been the best thing ever to happen to couponers, ushering in a new era of extreme couponing that still lingers today. First came the wave of daily deals sites, such as Groupon and Living Social, pumping digital coupons to our email and smartphones with such relentlessness that we wonder if it's even worth the potential savings to put up with them. Then it became cool for celebrities to joke about their coupon-clipping habits, and even wealthy households saw a surge in coupon use. And thanks to TLC’s Extreme Couponing series, it’s no longer good enough to wait for a juicy promo to find its way to your inbox. Couponing is a full-on contact sport, with the truly obsessed going so far as to dumpster dive for discarded sales ads, plan shopping trips weeks in advance and scour the Web for promo codes into the wee hours of the morning. The payoff can be huge, but for us mere mortals who can’t remember the last time we held a newspaper, much less clipped coupons out of one, it can be an enormous pain in the rear.
2. Getting roommates
Shared households made up nearly one out of every five homes in the U.S. three years after the onset of the recession, according to the latest Census data. For many people, splitting the rent with a roommate or two was (and still is) the simplest way to cut household expenses. We just wish it didn’t suck so much. Maybe it’s cute and fun for young people and underemployed college grads to shack up together for a few years, but if you’re over the age of 30, gainfully employed and find yourself bickering with your umpteenth Craigslist roomie over whose turn it is to do the dishes, chances are cohabitating lost its appeal long ago.
3. Mega-retailers
In a perfect world, we’d all stock up on artisanal bread and organic toilet paper at Whole Paycheck Foods and spend our evenings hand-picking our dinner from our lush backyard garden. But the reality is that eating well costs a lot of time and money (organic produce costs 10% to 30% more than regular), two things Americans are often in short supply of. And though we hesitate to admit it, we have come to rely on the very same big box retailers we villainize for bankrupting Mom and Pop shops and underpaying their employees. Sure, we hate their cheap fluorescent lights, their waxy, pesticide-ridden produce aisle and the fact that they’ve turned holiday shopping into a contact sport. The problem is, we don’t hate them quite as much as we hate the alternative — going broke.