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We all love free stuff, but have a little bit of dignity, amiright?
Sadly, if there are corners you can cut to get free stuff, there are people out there who are gonna do it, no question.
These AskReddit users shared stories about people going a little too far to get things for free. I’m SMH…
1. Cuttin’ it close
“My grandfather used to own a small grocery store back in the ’50s. In the store was a payphone where you could make a call for a dime.
As my grandfather told it, there were quite a few people who would file down pennies to the size of a dime so they could save nine cents on a phone call.
My grandmother always used to say: ‘Filing down a penny is hard work. In the time it takes to do it, you could have gone out and earned a dime.'”
2. Not a good time
“I bought tickets to a Lady Gaga concert and brought who I thought was a friend. She wasn’t impressed with the location of the seats and for the entire show, she was trying to convince security at stage level checkpoints that she had cancer and was dying and her last wish was to get up close to Lady Gaga.
It didn’t work. We don’t speak now, and I was angry at the time because she was so wasted I missed the show I paid for to try to keep her out of jail or being thrown out because she was my ride home.
She was supposed to be my designated driver, but with all the antics, I didn’t drink and just drove her home afterward!”
3. Acted like an idiot
“When I was in the Army, I received orders to attend a training course for six months. One day, we had a guest lecturer come in. She was tossing out free stress balls that looked like globes to people who answered a certain number of questions correctly. I’m not sure why, but it got my blood going. I was going to get one of those balls.
What followed was a fairly intense competition between myself and two other soldiers attending the course, with all of us vying to get more correct answers than the others.
And, in the end, I got my squishy globe.
I held the thing in my hands for a couple of seconds before it suddenly dawned on me that I was a 25-year-old man who had acted like a complete idiot for the honor of owning a thirty-cent toy.”
4. That’s a lot of gift cards
“One of my friends has always been stingy. He’s always trying to make money by scamming or reselling stuff at a profit, and he won’t buy something unless it’s cheap. He’s also obsessed with getting free stuff, especially free money.
A few years ago he realized that if you call Amazon and complain that you lost a gift card, sometimes they’ll give you a free $50 gift card. He also realized that when you make an Amazon Prime account you get a free $50 gift card and that you can transfer to another account.
He decided that this would be a great way to spend his summer, so he started making Amazon accounts, transferring the free gift cards to his main account, calling Amazon and fake crying over voice and video chat in order to get another $50 gift card, and then transferring that additional gift card to his main account and canceling the subscription to Amazon Prime. He did this for about a month and now he’s got about $4,000 in Amazon gift cards that he has never used.”
5. Scammer
“I was a movie theater ticket ripper/doorman.
I once had a guy who tried to walk past me without stopping. I called him back, he shook his head no and waved his hand and tried to keep walking. I raised my voice and pointed at the ground in front of me. He was all smiles and came over saying his girlfriend had his ticket and was already in the theater.
I told him to text her to come out and to have a seat while he waited. He said he didn’t have his phone. I told him she would come out when he never showed up.
So he was sulking on this chair next to me. Trying to talk his way out of my sight. The second I had to help someone else he vanished from the chair but the idiot was so dumb that he STOPPED TO BUY POPCORN as I stared at him.
So I went over (he seemed surprised I had functioning legs) and I said he could eat his popcorn on the chair then.
More sulking. I radioed coworkers to give them the heads up. I turned away for a second, then saw him jogging towards the theaters. My manager managed to get him out of the theater (no girlfriend there after all).
He was all smiles saying he would go look for her and we waved bye.
Tickets were $7. He spent about 30 minutes doing this.”
6. Seems like a lot of work
“I worked with a guy who didn’t pay his cable bill, and he spent an entire day on the phone with their customer service trying to confuse them and play each representative against one another until they wrote off his unpaid bill as an error on their part.
I was at his house when he did this, watching movies with his roommate.
The guy was taking notes, carefully monitoring what he said to each rep and what they said to him, and being mindful to twist everything just enough not to get caught lying.
He said the trick was to not do it every month or they’d catch on.
He seriously spent the whole day on it. We pretty much watched the whole extended cut Lord of the Rings trilogy in the meantime. I’m pretty sure that the time and effort could have just gone to paying the bill.
It was over a decade ago. I’m sure the bill was only like $100.”
7. A few hundred bucks
“When I was younger, I found a loophole that would save my friends and me a few hundred dollars.
I grew up 10 minutes away from Six Flags Great America. I was lucky enough for my family to buy season passes.
With that, you also got a cool coupon book. In there, there were tickets for ‘bring a friend along free day.’ On certain days you can bring one friend with a season pass holder.
What I would do is bring five friends.
First I went in with one friend. So now we had two people on the inside. You walked around a little bit to not look too suspicious. Then you went straight to the exit. At the exit, they asked you if you wanted your hand stamped so you could get back in.
Both of us said yes. They stamped our hands with this invisible ink that glows under a blacklight.
From there you hightailed it to your other four friends who had been waiting around the corner. The two with the fresh stamps breathed a bit on your hands to make the ink a little bit wetter.
Then you carefully pressed and roll your stamp onto another person’s hand.
If you did it correctly and quickly, a fresh stamp could be copied onto another person’s hand twice. So two people with fresh stamps could become six people with stamps.
Of course, the copied stamps were mirror images, but no one noticed it any of the times I did this when we walked in.
Even if you didn’t get a complete perfect copy they would let you in because the stampers make mistakes sometimes and sometimes the stamps rubbed off a bit.
It was a great way to save a few hundred dollars.”
8. Flirty
“I work at a low-cost vet clinic and a notorious womanizer came in (my first time meeting him). He got his dog a round of shots and there was a note in his file to no longer allow payment arrangements.
I went to check him out and he was flirting so hard, but I politely shut him down, though he kept trying.
I cut him off by telling him his total ($40) and he flipped his lid, gave me a chuckle, and motioned for me to come near him. He whispered: ‘I know you’re new, sugar, but I’m not supposed to pay for this,’ and winked.
I’m not new, he’s just always come in on my days off. I blankly stared at him and told him we didn’t accept payment arrangements from him anymore, and I’ll be darned if he didn’t keep trying to flirt his way out of that $40!”
9. Not a smart man
“In college, I had to go 40 km from my rented room to my campus.
I had three options: by train – a one-hour ride plus a 20-minute walk: $2.5 one way ride, so $5 daily or $50 for monthly ticket; by bus a two-hour ride: with two changes at $1.10 per bus ride, $6.60 per day or $110 monthly ticket; or using network of interconnected free bus lines spanning whole metropolitan area that ran to and from supermarkets.
That was a four-hour ride, but it was free. That helped with my total budget that was going strong at $20-30/month.
So for half a year, I spent equivalent of full-time job saving $100 per month before it occurred to me to ride by train, and find a half-time job near the campus that paid $300 that covered the cost of transportation as a benefit – and I had to work anyway to eat at all.
I was not a smart man, then.”
10. Snowbirds
“Oh, let me tell you about the Snowbirds. These are geriatric vacationers from Canada/Minnesota/Wisconsin that come to Florida during the winter for their vacation. They are the cheapest humans on the planet.
I have enough stories to write a book; let me share a couple of my favorites:
A server came over to me and mentioned that the lady at table 47 was on her second glass of iced tea, and the appetizers weren’t even ready.
I replied: ‘So what, she’s probably thirsty.’
A few minutes later the server came back and informed me the lady had a gallon Ziploc plastic baggie in her purse and she’s pouring her iced tea in there, saving it to take home later.
One morning, an old couple joined us for breakfast. We had coffee pots on each table, and we sold the cup for $1.50, all the coffee you could drink.
They ordered one cup. The old guy poured himself a cup, drank it, then filled the cup for her.
She drank it, then passed it back to him. This went on for their entire meal.
When Snowbird season hit, we’d remove all the condiments from the table, otherwise, they’d take all the sugar, sweeteners, and anything else they could.
A popular bumper sticker in the area read: ‘If it’s Snowbird season, why can’t we shoot them?'”
Well, how about that? People will do A LOT for free stuff, and maybe that’s a commentary on our world and our time in history? Perhaps?
Well, one thing is for sure, this post was free! And it will always be that way. We love bringing you this content and we want to thank you so much for choosing us to visit. We love our fans!
We’ll see you next time!
