A couple of week’s ago I read a post on one of the frugal living forums where a woman shared something that she thought was a bit of a frugal win. She used to shop at one of the big supermarkets but this particular week she had less money than usual (she used the words ‘a bit skint’) so she’d decided to pop to her local Aldi to do her shopping.
She went on to proudly post a picture of her shopping trolley to show just how much shopping she’d managed to get in Aldi for about the same amount of money as she would usually have spent in her usual shop.
Now I looked at her photo and thought ‘well done you’, liked the post and scrolled down and that was the last I thought of it until I logged on again the following day to find that the thread was still almost at the top of the page. I had a quick look at the comments and was a little bit horrified to see that the lady was being slated because her trolley had a bottle of wine in there!
How can you be skint when you’ve bought a bottle of wine is a polite way of putting what half the commenters were writing whereas the other half were all up in arms saying how ridiculous it was to judge someone for buying a cheap bottle of wine from Aldi!
Seriously, do people genuinely have nothing better to argue about?
I’m not going to get into the debate about judgemental keyboard warriors who seem to forget that a comment that they quickly type on Facebook to a stranger can really hurt them just as much as if you were stood right there in front of them. But the whole argument did get me thinking about how the phrase ‘being skint’ means different things to different people.
To me, being skint is not having much money left over after paying our bills and putting money aside for our food shopping and other essentials each month. Being skint in our house means that we can’t do as much fun stuff or have treats but it doesn’t mean that we struggle to pay bills or to put food on the table and clothes on our back.
To some people, being skint means counting the days until payday and struggling to feed their family on the money they have left whereas on the flipside, being skint to others may mean not being able to buy that expensive new designer bag as they’ve already bought themselves a few treats that month.
Should we judge others just because they have less or money than us and choose to spend it how they want to spend it?
No!
Image credit: Shutterstock, bookzaa
