Funny thing about cards–that’s one place I splurge. I’m part of a group of 10 women who get together for birthdays and we only exchange cards. Everyone looks for humor as they’re all passed around when opened by the birthday girl. Our dollar store just can’t compete. Same with DH. We rarely exchange gifts. Mostly we exchange two cards, one humorous and one not. I work hard to find just the right cards and the cost doesn’t matter in these cases.
The greeting card industry has, apparently, successfully convinced people that greeting cards are a necessary part of commemorating occasions. They have been less successful at convincing people to spend money on the cards.
We “just say no” to cards. It seems crazy to me to spend $5 on a piece of paper that gets read once for 15 seconds and then thrown out.
I think that’s just “regular” cheap, though, not “uncharacteristically” cheap. B-)
We’ll send out photo cards at Christmas, but if you don’t pick a fancy one and wait for the right coupon you can get the cost down to 50 cents each or so. More “regular” cheap.
I am not frugal. I do want value for my money. But I do have a few areas where I am “cheap”. I buy the highest quality towels. We only use the bath towels. But I keep them forever until they fray…and then we use them for puppy wash days. We need a new duvet cover and pillow shams…my favorite set was $1,000 for the duvet…and that was on sale. I couldn’t do that. And window dressings…I had custom draperies made for the living room. I went safe…and 20 years later I still hate them. And dagnadmic they won’t fall apart!
The price of cards drive me nuts and I really do not enjoy receiving them which drives my family nuts.
My H finally! on our recent 35th made me a card that was fabulous and appreciated.
My splurge on cards is for G’s son and we send those expensive musical/dancing ones.
DIL says he loves them. The one we gave for Valentines’s day was funny and he had to show it to everyone he saw that day.
The fact that I will give a really nice gift but either no card or a card bought years ago
on sale, rarely bought for the actual person in mind…yeah that is a small area that I am
cheap.
I don’t care about cards at all. Occasionally, I happen upon a perfect card for someone, and I will get it. Otherwise,not my thing either to give or get.
Often I just put a label on the gift or write on the wrapper my paper with a sharpie and definitely don’t splurge in cards that I consider mostly disposable and disposed of promptly.
I get what @oldfort was trying to get at.
I am not frugal. I drive a nice German brand car, buy what I want at the grocery store, live in a upscale neighborhood. One of my oddities is that I will spend on the same shopping trip a lot at certain stores and hesitate at others. For example I recently went shopping with my D and bought several pairs of AG jeans and while on sale still were over $100 a pair. I bought a couple of t shirts there as well. I bought a couple of sweaters and t shirts at the Splendid store that were high priced. We next hit up Target and I hestitated over a denim shirt that was $29. I do the same thing at Ross and Marshalls. I have a weird thing that I hesitate to buy anything priced over $20 at Ross.
Best place for cards - Trader Joe’s. .99/piece…available for all occasions. And the stock rotates nicely. At .99/piece it leaves enough for a TJ’s bunch of flowers or a nice box of something sweet. All for the price of NOT having Hmark stamped on the back of the piece of folded paper.