New Shoes...

[witzend]

So, husband has extremely wide feet. Size 10 EEEE. He's not the easiest person to buy shoes for. When we were in the Pac NW we'd always go to the Nordstrom Rack, because they had a good selection of wide shoes at reasonable prices. Both his work shoes and his tenny's have been pretty worn down, so last weekend we found the Rack here, and did find some work shoes for him. But their selection of tennis shoes was pretty small and we didn't find anything.

So, next day, I got online and found essentially the same sneakers as he has, same size, color, and style, at Sears for $43. Then I dug around a bit and and found a "free Shipping" coupon and a "15% off" coupon, and ended up getting them delivered to the house for $37 and change. They came yesterday. He tried them on, said they looked and felt great, got out of his work duds and put on his old tenny's. Ugh!

So, I asked him about it and got the answer that I knew that I would. "They're too nice to ruin, I'm saving them." OK, this is the man who didn't blink an eye (although I about had apoplexy) when he bought himself 4 polo shirts that cost $150 last weekend at Nordstrom. I think he's wearing them. If I had bought them they'd sit on a hanger until I made him put them on. What is this with the "I don't want to ruin them" thing? They're shoes! The general idea is that you're going to walk on them and get them scuffed up. They were $37 for crying out loud!

Am I the only one who has this problem with her husband? I'd wear new shoes out of the store, for crying out loud!

 

[AnnieO]

Witz - first thing, thank you for making me laugh, I needed that.

Second - my DAD does this!!! OMG, the man drives me and Mom CRAZY! He has this nice stuff that doesn't get worn because he doesn't want to ruin it - and all this really ratty stuff. So about once every 3-4 years I'll go down and make a couple of snarky (but not nasty) comments, and guilt him into putting on those cool "new" tennies and shorts... And he and I will go run an errand... And Mom will throw out the old... LOL!

on the other hand, in some ways it is minutely better than a husband who ruins EVERYTHING HE OWNS within days...

 

[Star*]

Don't ask me - DF's toe is sticking out of his shoe. He's due to go for surgery in about 4 weeks - and do you think I'm going to go with him shopping for new shoes? NAUGHT AH.......I went boot shopping last time and that was the last time.

Got him new boots after looking in 30 some stores. in a 2 day period. Came home, I said "Well we can throw the old old ones out = because he had the old old boots still in the mud room - for working outside.....and he said WHAT? OH ......NO. I want to keep those. FOR WHAT? You got these new ones, now use your old ones for your old old ones and throw the really old old ones away. NOPE had to keep them. Just in case he had a really nasty job - you know didn't want to ruin his work boots. - I waited - a year - then took them outside - filled them with dirt and planted a flower in them and stuck it down by the mail box. (he gets the mail) He was NOT amused.

 

[DammitJanet]

Step...you just described my dad to a T. He would spend money on all of us but for him he would shop the clearance racks. If someone else bought him nice stuff it would still sit in the closet. Now he did have nice work clothes like business suits but I am talking stuff he wore every day stuff around the house. It never failed that he would send us home with a leaf sized garbage bag full of clothes of HIS for Tony and the boys that still had the tags on them that he just didnt want anymore...lol. He always claimed he either didnt like the pattern, grew out of it, or shrank...lmao. My kids loved getting Papa hand me downs.

 

[hearts and roses]

It doesn't matter if I buy an exact replica of something H bought himself and LOVED. He would put it up on the shelf in his closet and claim he's saving it. Can't buy the man dirt. He's difficult.

 

[susiestar]

Well, except for the buying shirts for $150, this could have been my great aunt. NO WAY would she wear the new $37 shoes. she would be wearing a 10yo pair lined with newspaper. The new ones would be in the closet and when you came to visit she would take them out and show you how nice they are.

of course at one point her underwear had a MINIMUM of 4 safety pins holding them together (and in the crotch they HURT when they come open - and they DO - and she would go "ouch! loudly and then wiggle oddly as she walked to a restroom to go fasten the pin back) and over a DOZEN pairs in her dresser that were brand new in packages and she would show them to you at EVERY visit. I had to stop visiting her because she got so mad that I threw a slice of moldy bread away with-o trying to cut off the mold that was on every side of it. ONE slice. with a whole new loaf waiting to be used. i also threw away all the paper towels that were used and drying on the stove on top of the pilot light opening because they caught on fire. So she would ONLy see me if my mother was there to supervise me - I had 3 kids of my own by then!!! I just stopped going because it was unsafe to have anyone there with all the fires from drying thingso n the stove. And the stench from her drying otu her depends to reuse them.

My husband just hasn't a clue what is in his wardrobe because I add/remove things as i wash them. why wash something too old/holey to wear? they sure are not good enough to send to a thrift store!

 

[donna723]

OMG! You have also just described my grandmother, the "pack rat", perfectly! She was famous for doing this! She had six children, nineteen grandchildren, and an infinite number of great-grandchildren so every Christmas, birthday and Mothers Day, she got dozens of gifts. Did she ever use any of them? Absolutely not! All the nice new things found their way into a downstairs bedroom closet so she could "save" them for later! She wore thirty year old house dresses and if she wanted to work in the yard, she would put on a pair of my grandfather's old pants hitched up at the waist and one of his old work shirts. She was still using the same dishes and kitchen things that she had when my dad was a kid! But that closet was overflowing with brand new dresses she had been given, pretty sweaters, slippers, nightgowns, brand new sets of dishes and cookware still in the boxes, tons of new sheets, towels and blankets, plus multiples of every small appliance ever invented. She was "saving" it all for later! And then she'd try to give it away, sometimes to the same one who had given it to her in the first place! If your mixer died, she'd pull four or five brand new ones out of that closet and tell you to take your pick! She wasn't a hoarder, the first and second floors of her old house were always neat and tidy and never cluttered. But OMG! Her basement! It was like a museum! Her basement contained every toy, game, book, record album and article of clothing that my dad and his siblings had ever had as kids, all organized in to neat rows! And considering that my dad was born in 1909, that went back a ways! It wasn't "hoarding", she just thought that some day one of us might need some of that stuff! We were living in a different state when she died so we weren't in on it but I can't even imagine what all they must have found when they cleaned out that house after she died! I sincerely hope they had a knowledgeable antiques dealer come in to look at that stuff and didn't just throw it all out!

 

[keista]

I read, Dad, Great Aunt and Grandmother. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm If they are close in age to my Dad, great Aunt or Grandmother, guess what they have in common? They all live through the Great Depression. A time when ppl learned "the art of frugality" No question some ppl take it to extremes. I just wonder if there were hoarders before then? Or if hoarding is a phenomena that was created by the Depression.

by the way, your house doe not have to be an unlivable mess to qualify you as a hoarder. I know quite a few who have very functional and tidy homes, but the hoard is still a hoard because the items never get used for their intended or planned purpose.

 

[donna723]

Keista, that may have been part of what it was with my grandmother. She was born in 1884, a little Iowa farm girl who met my grandfather when her family traveled to St. Louis to go to the 1904 Worlds Fair! Those people didn't throw anything away - they used and reused and passed things down and made do. Things weren't "disposable" like they are now. Then they raised six children through the Depression and two World Wars. Even when they were very elderly, my grandfather still raised chickens in their back yard (in suburban St. Louis!) and had a HUGE garden! My grandmother canned it all and there were hundreds and hundreds of mason jars full of food lining the shelves in their basement. They very rarely even had to go to the grocery store! So I guess to her it made perfect sense to store away her nice new things for "later" and make do with what she already had and to pass along the extras to her family. Every time we went to their house we would come home with big bags of homegrown tomatoes and fresh corn on the cob!

People today are so different from just a few generations ago, and I'm not so sure that the change has been for the better!

 

[AnnieO]

My Grandma would buy 10 cases of toilet paper... But I'll be honest, she USED this stuff. She did have way too much, but she would use it. I can't recall her having paper towels at all - but aluminum foil got carefully washed and flattened...

I do the laundry, here, too, and I'll wash something that needs to go bye bye and then... Giveaway pile... Or if it's holey socks, I pitch em when I see em, clean or not...

 

[InsaneCdn]

I'm not "allowed" to pitch holey socks... they make the greatest cloths for waxing cars...

 

[AnnieO]

LOL... If I thought husband could find the car wax, maybe...

 

[donna723]

My other grandmother was the same way! You should have seen her living room furniture! She would buy the cheapest things she could find. Then her sister would come and make slip covers for it all. THEN she would buy those nasty plastic covers to go over the whole thing so the slipcovers wouldn't get messed up. Then, because it was cheap, crummy stuff to begin with, the furniture would be falling apart after a few years but the upholstery and slip covers were still in perfect condition. This was in a little house with no air conditioning in hot, humid Florida so we always stuck to the plastic when we sat down on her sofa! I can still hear the sound it made when we tried to get up and struggled to pry our butts off of those hot, sticky plastic furniture covers!

 

[DammitJanet]

I do think the Depression had a lot to do with it. Like I said, my dad would give me the world if he could but he would be very frugal himself.

He grew up in a very poor family up north. His family was a huge Catholic family with 6 boys and 2 girls. His mom didnt work except for taking in laundry and ironing for people. His father was a taxi driver who only came home to get his mother pregnant. My dad never wanted to be like his father. My dad went without a lot of things as a child. He ate many mayo sandwiches for lunches and dinners because that was all they had in the house. When WWII started my father volunteered before they could even draft him. He was 17. He was the youngest one on his ship. Thinking back now I can only imagine what it must have been like to have been a 17 year old boy on a huge ship in the south Pacific with Kamikaze planes coming at you. It must have been terrifying. He never talked about it to anyone except when Jamie joined the Marines and there was a chance he might go overseas.

When my Dad came home from WWII he went to college with the GI Bill and he became an accountant. He was determined that no child of his would ever want for anything. And I didnt. He and my mom saved up half the price of their first home before they ever bought it and paid it off in 3 years. They had our second house built and paid for it outright with the money from the sale of our first house. They never bought a car on time. They always paid cash. They didnt believe in debt. They always had a charge card but it was paid off on the first of the month. Money was invested wisely. The only thing I learned was to not believe in debt...lol. Oh and I got my degree in accounting too.

I miss my dad.

 

[susiestar]

What I always found fascinating about my Great Aunt was that NONE of her sibs were anything like that. They all lived through the Depression and they were all frugal to some degree. But they NEVER did the hoarding kinds of things. Lots of times gifts were given away, even back to the giver the next year. Her house was always in great shape and she was an amazing woman. At age 88 she painted her entire basement. The roller was 'too heavy' so she daughter it wtih a 4 nch brush. Not a huge house, but a good sized one! At age 90 she finallyhired someone 'for the lawn'. She paid the kid next door 50 cents to start the mower. It was hard to pull and she didn't want to spend hundreds on a new mower when hers was 'perfectly fine'. When her placee to keep whatever got too full, she donated it to the church for a sale or family in need. She flat out refused to have a coffeemaker or microwave or air conditioner. My mom made a couple trips to see her where she brought all of those and she did talk her into an air conditioner, but never the others. Coffee was iether instant or made iwth an old percolator that sounded like it was going to erupt at any moment.

It was the paper towels (the lady who was hired to check on her insisted, as did her doctor - she wasn't able to run the old maytag well (her washer was the old old hand crank kind with wringers!) and first cutting each depends PAD into 3 pieces because she 'didn't need all that' and then drying them out that was what bothered us. The rest? Was just her way and no one fussed.

But I bet NONE of your relatives was as frugal as she was. when I was 12 we visited her before we moved to OK. At one point my mom and bro (dad was at home) went to run some errands and I stayed home with my aunt. I asked something about her husband, who was dead. So she took me to 'see' him. We went into the basement, she opened a file drawer and introduced me. His ashes were in a gallon size ziploc bag. She told me she splurged when he died. She bought a new box and used a new ziploc bag instead of one she had washed out (a box lasted her about a year - a SMALL box). This was a BIG splurge and showed how much she cared. She spoke to him as though he was there.

NO ONE in the family believed me for about a decade. Then my bro went to visit her and he got to 'meet' our great uncle. he called me and could NOT stop laughing, lol.