I sometimes feel like an anomaly because unlike most people I encounter, who brag about how much they spent on various things, I tend to be more vocal about how much I SAVED on my purchases.

I am a bargain shopper, and I wear that badge with pride. I never, ever, ever pay full price for anything. Well, except for food--when it comes to shopping for groceries, I usually overspend because I cook a lot of different recipes. I often wish I had the discipline, time, and inclination to clip coupons from the tons of mailers I get for food products, but I don't.

Otherwise, unless something I want is on sale, I won't buy it. I haggled back and forth with the Toyota dealer on the internet and scored our SUV, brand-new and including all the options we wanted, for less than we ever thought possible. I only buy clothes or shoes when I have special coupons for the stores I like. I even buy most of my perfume on the cheap from eBay. Sure, sometimes the bottles come to me without caps, but who cares? No one sees it but me, and as long as it smells good, capless perfume bottles don't bother me a bit.

As I mentioned earlier, I often feel like the odd girl out in my quest for bargains. Maybe it's the geographical area in which I live and work. Every time I hear "Main Line" I just roll my eyes and groan (no offense, Mainline Mom--I'm not referring to you, and you're not really from the Main Line anyway). The Main Line is a cluster of suburbs that extends west of Philadelphia along the "main line" of the old Pennsylvania Railroad, which is now Route 30. It's an extremely upscale, old-money, WASPy area. I guess it's comparable to Westchester, NY or the Magnificent Mile in Chicago. And don't forget the King of Prussia mall, only fifteen miles from my house and three miles from my office. It's the second largest mall in the US, I think, and it's chock-full of designer stores. This is a place where people dress to the nines just to go shopping. It's ridiculous. Ugh. I avoid that place like the plague.

Many of the people I interact with on a daily basis are snobs, quite frankly. They always find opportunities to work into conversations how much they spent on their gigantic home theatre systems, their McMansions, their Land Rovers, and their black leather boots. I find all of this totally shallow and in very poor taste. I suspect that most people who do this are overcompensating for character flaws or other perceived shortcomings--the whole I-act-superior-because-I-truly-feel-inferior deal. It's so transparent. I feel the same way about people who constantly name-drop brands. Give me a fucking break.

But after thinking about all of this, I've come to the conclusion that maybe my disdain for people like this makes me a reverse snob. The funny thing is, most of the people described in this post are not from the old-money families of Philadelphia. It's the nouveau-riche types (or the wanna-be nouveau-riche) that are the most conspicuously obnoxious around here.

Thoughts?

Labels: bitching, money, Philadelphia, shopping