Tightwad or Tacky: Ten Behaviors that Draw the Line

There's a fine line between being a Tightwad Gazette-style Tightwad, or being an environment-conscious "greenie," and being just plain tacky. And here are ten points through which that line passes:

1. Anybody might honestly fail to catch a mistake the cashier made. Anybody who happened to be math-challenged might even make a mistake in adding up the bill and try to convince the cashier that the cashier's addition is wrong.

If, however, your purchases add up to $25.98, and you hand the clerk $30, and she mis-keys that into the cash register as $40 and hands you back the correct change from your $30, and you demand the change back from that mistaken $40, that's tacky.

2. Sharing things you and your friends own is thrifty and "green." For example, if six families on your block would like to have washing and drying machines, you might agree to share the price of the machines and let each family use them on a different day of the week. Or, one of you might already own these machines and might let neighbors pay per use of them. This kind of arrangement reduces waste by increasing the chance that the machines will at least get all the use they were designed to get before the manufacturer declares them obsolete, and liberates money for things everyone enjoys more than washing clothes.

Trying to share the benefits friends get from belonging to organizations to which you don't belong is tacky. If you're not a fee-paying resident of the condominium, using the condominium's laundry room is tacky. If you're not enrolled in a school where students pay a flat fee for all the cafeteria food they eat, don't pick food off students' plates. For-profit stores that offer employee discounts on merchandise may anticipate that their employees will give everyone discounted merchandise on every gift-giving occasion, but tax-funded stores at colleges and military bases cannot. Don't even ask.