Pinpointing the Line Between Frugal and Cheap
A couple of marketing professors set out to define frugality. It seems that thrift is so alien a concept to the average merchandiser that the authors had to make it sound profound for it to sound real.
“Frugality is a unidimensional consumer lifestyle trait characterized by the degree to which consumers are both restrained in acquiring and in resourcefully using economic goods and services to achieve longer-term goals,” wrote John L. Lastovicka and Lance A. Bettencourt in a recent Journal of Consumer Research.
In other words, as your grandmother might say, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
But your grandmother probably cared more about frugality, and knew better what it was, than anyone you know now. In fact, Lastovicka and Bettencourt found that only 10% to 15% of the population is frugal.
“We’re living in the lap of materialism,” says Lastovicka. “What makes a lot of our current culture go is buying and investing. . . . If you go back in our country’s history, frugality was dominant. And now it isn’t.”
The authors did not differentiate among the genetically frugal, the ecologically frugal and the unwillingly frugal. Nor did they distinguish between being frugal--a tarnished but still unassailable virtue--and being cheap, which is not admired by anyone but Scrooge McDuck.
In this season of excessive nonfrugality, it behooves us to take this subject as seriously as Lastovicka and Bettencourt have, but expand the canvas.
Let’s take a common situation between a frugal and a cheap spouse. The frugal spouse doesn’t fill the gas tank of the family car until it’s empty--a more efficient use of time, she thinks. But then she finds herself with the gas gauge at totally empty, with her sweetie at the wheel. He sees a gas station. “$1.31 a gallon!” he says. “But . . .” she says. Then he ignores $1.29, and $1.28. Finally, just when she’s about to have a nervous breakdown, he spies $1.27 and slides into the bay, satisfied.
This is a cheap person, because he’s willing to risk life and limb for less than 50 cents.
Could It Be Genetic?
Some people think they’re frugal until they meet the real pros. “I am convinced it’s a gene,” says Bette Land of Tenleytown, Md., who buys everything on sale. Her eco-frugal son, Andrew, 24, lives with her to save money so he can see the world.
But Land can be quickly outgunned. “Do you reuse your Ziploc plastic bags by washing them?” she is asked.
“What?” Land says. “I’ve never heard of that.”
“Oh yes. And some people sew them up when they start to rip.”
“Oh, God,” she says. She tries to recoup. “I do reuse shopping bags.”
Perhaps it’s time to refine the definitions.
Frugal is buying a dress on sale.
Eco-frugal is buying a dress made of natural fiber grown without pesticides, on sale, only if peasants in Guatemala aren’t harmed in the process.
Cheap is buying a dress, wearing it once, and returning it to the store for a refund.
Frugal is buying the cheapest paper towels because basically they’re all the same, or not buying them at all.
Eco-frugal is using cloth instead.
Cheap is drying out paper towels and reusing them.
“Frugal people are a little more rational,” said Lastovicka, who bicycles to work, 40 minutes each way, and sees himself as frugal. “Cheapness can reflect a social insensitivity to others.”
The Benefits of Being Frugal
In their studies, Lastovicka and Bettencourt found that frugal people are less likely to be influenced by peer pressure, are careful with their possessions, are not always “coupon prone” and tend to be goal oriented.
They also found that a husband’s evaluation of his wife’s frugality tends to differ from her appraisal of herself and vice versa. (They had to study this?) Other studies by Freudians have found that frugal people tend to have orderly and anal personalities and be somewhat more authoritarian.
Frugal is not eating in restaurants.
Eco-frugal is eating only in restaurants that serve pesticide-free food and recycle leftovers to soup kitchens.
Cheap is eating in a restaurant but tipping only 5%, and stealing the sugar packets when you leave.
“Here you have somebody working as a waiter for less than minimum wage,” says Lastovicka. “Your savings is at someone else’s expense. Cheap suggests that you may be harming your relationships with other people.”
The lexicon of “cheap” is not attractive. “Shoddy or inferior . . . mean or contemptible: a cheap joke . . . of little account or value . . . stingy; miserly,” says the Random House Dictionary. These people are sour, dry, the Mr. Bumbles of the world, denying soup to Oliver Twists.
Frugal connotes an element of saintliness: “Prudently saving or sparing; not wasteful.” Every major religion inveighs against acquisitiveness, greed and materialism. “Lay not up for yourself treasures on earth,” says the Bible. “The person who lives completely free from desires, without longing. . . attains peace,” says the Bhagavad-Gita. Laws against excessive consumption were passed by the Puritans and Quakers of pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
The prevailing view then was that “a man was but the steward of the possessions he accumulated. If he indulged himself in luxurious living, he would have that much less with which to support church and society. If he needlessly consumed his substance, either from carelessness or from sensuality, he failed to honor the God who furnished him with it,” wrote Edmund S. Morgan in the William and Mary Quarterly.
Yet it seems that scriptural injunctions about wealth are obeyed even less than the ones about loving your brother as yourself. Long ago some people started to make money selling tobacco and so forth, and they wanted to spend it, and then other people were envious and got into debt trying to keep up, and pretty soon the template of the American economy had been set.
Spendthrifts Come Back Into Vogue
The Depression boosted frugality considerably, perhaps the only time since Mayflower days that it was the dominant lifestyle. The acquisitive ‘80s sent the frugals underground, but they proudly reemerged in the early ‘90s with such publications as Amy Dacyczyn’s Tightwad Gazette--possibly fueled by all that credit card debt accumulated in the ‘80s and the universal realization that four years of college tuition would soon cost more than Apollo 13.
Dacyczyn’s thesis was that if you saved pennies you could get something you really wanted, like a house. She and others, like the Cheapskate Monthly, circulated tips such as cutting whole milk with the powdered stuff, making your own baby wipes or creating a dryer for those washed Ziploc bags out of an old coat hanger. (One reader calculated that washing a bag took six seconds and saved five cents, for a savings rate of $30 an hour.)
It took the eco-frugals to bring back the moral element, to remind us that “if everyone on Earth consumed like the average American, we’ll need four more planets to hold all the stuff,” reports Betsy Taylor, executive director of the Center for the New American Dream, an organization devoted to “responsible consuming.”
Not only that, 150 million personal computers, made of toxic, nondegradable plastic, will be dumped in landfills by 2005. Storage rental units are one of the fastest-growing businesses today, she says.
Taylor says we’re at the dawn of a 50-year cycle in which people are going to retrench, recycle and reuse. They want simpler lives and less stuff. She is thinking of people like Winifred Roberts of Takoma Park, Md., who 10 years ago traded a high-paying job as a corporate tax attorney for a more relaxed freelance life at one-third the income. Roberts read the Tightwad Gazette cover to cover. “I’d wanted to reuse my foil for years, but I thought it was too weird. Now I feel free to do it. I haven’t bought a plastic bag for five years. . . . I don’t use a clothes dryer.”
She started using her dishwasher for storage after she discovered it used more hot water than two long showers. And she founded a neighborhood “clutter clinic” that meets about four times a year, where people bring stuff they aren’t using anymore. If someone needs it, he can have it.
“I just gave away a beautiful all-suede cape I’d almost never worn,” Roberts says. “It’s been sitting in my closet for 30 years. This young woman looked really nice in it, so I gave it to her. Someone else brought some fresh herbs, and I took those.”
