People on Reddit were asked: “What is the biggest waste of money that you’ve ever witnessed being spent?” These are some of the best answers.
1. I watched somebody bet on all the numbers in roulette. One of the dumbest things I’ve ever witnessed.
[deleted]
2. Woman came into the 7-11 I work at, bought $1700 worth of $20 scratch cards, scratched them all off, won about $100 back, complained how “these things are rigged,” and left.
TLee21
3. I watched my buddy blow about $500 dollars at a strip club one night. The saddest part was, he thought the dancer was really into him.
vagued
4. My ex-girlfriend had an obsession with phone psychics. Not all at once, but over the course of a single year she spent over $15k getting ‘life advice’ from multiple psychic lines.
No one in her circle of family or friends could convince her to stop. I haven’t spoken with her in a few years but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s still wasting her money on them.
blue_awning
5. My former boss was putting in a backyard patio. She and her husband went to Home Depot in their Jaguar to buy some bricks for the patio. While there, they realized they didn’t want to bring the bricks home in their Jag. They walked across the street to to a Toyota dealer and bought an FJ Cruiser so they could bring their bricks home. They had no intention or need to buy a car. Oh, yeah, they put the entire vehicle purchase on a credit card…and they kept the vehicle.
LivinDying3-4Time
6. As an IT guy, it boggles my mind how many hundreds of thousands of dollars companies will shell out for software that clearly overlaps with something they already own but aren’t utilizing, only to turn around shelve the software for years without even using it to its full potential.
InstagramLincoln
7. I work for a cell phone provider in North America and have seen some pretty outrageous purchases but by far the worst was a pregnant woman (6 months pregnant) come in and buy two 64GB iPhone 5S’s with 2 cell phone plans that were more than $100 per month. At first I thought it was for her husband or something but then she tells me “I am not an iPhone person but my psychic tells me that these two bundles of joy in me are, so please keep the boxes sealed. We want them to open them when they are born.”
She was buying iPhone’s for her unborn children and wanted to give the phones to them as presents for being born.
[deleted]
8. $20 million on a SAP implementation that had to be scrapped.
Ytzombe
9. My brother got a $4,000 tax return. He has two kids and lives with our parents. Instead of spending the money on like 7 months rent, he spent over $3000 in parts on his Plymouth Neon. Body kit, turbo charger, intercooler, and rims on a 20 year old piece of crap car. He just recently totalled it because he drives like a jerk. Oh and he will be 31 years old next month.
Vstar3
10. I witnessed someone spend their one and only inheritance of $250K in less than a year. Invested none of it. Knew he would too.
[deleted]
11. In Scandinavia (mostly Sweden) we have something called “vasking”. It’s when you pay the bartender to pour a bottle of champagne in the sink just to show how wealthy you are.
It’s widely considered to be a [jerk] move, but I saw this one douchebag do it with a $2000 bottle to impress some [women] with great success.
I wanted to fedora whip him.
ashybarry
12. My dad oversees various remodelling and construction. His company was doing a remodel of a woman’s bathroom, and he was in charge of figuring out what materials she wanted to use. She immediately said, “What is the most expensive type of tile? I want that.” He said she didn’t even care what color it was or what it looked like. It cost her 10 grand.
_deener_
13. My city is spending $140,000 to rename the local airport after a president who isn’t from here (and probably never visited here) because a couple of local radio DJs started a petition. I’m just glad they worked out all the important problems first.
trololuey
14. I watched some drunk wander up to a craps table in Vegas, plop down $7500 in markers on a “hard 8” bet at the craps table, lose on the next roll, and walk away looking like he had no idea he’d just lost.
aiming-low
15. I used to work in a high end electronics store. You guys think monster cable is a rip? I’ve sold people thousands of dollars worth of cables. The worst example I can think of is a guy that wanted high end speaker cable for his rear channel speakers in a surround sound system. I think they wound up at $1000 for each speaker. Total we’re talking about over $5k in cables.
ONE_GUY_ONE_JAR
16. Those wrist bands which were supposed to give you better balance. I was out with about 5 friends and 3 of them bought it.
Petyr__Baelish
17. I saw someone once buy a first class ticket on Air France from Paris to London. The Guy spent something like $2,000 to fly 200 Miles, not to mention the fact that the Eurostar trains were directly below him, and would get him to downtown London in half the time as the plane.
simciv
18. My sister was visiting with her boyfriend and kids a couple years ago and I went shopping with them. We were in a mall for less than an hour and I watched her blow $2000 in three stores (about $1500 on clothing for herself and $500 on clothing for her two kids). She completely emptied out their joint account, leaving no money for their remaining few days, without even batting an eye. She and I ended up having a falling out over it because her boyfriend had been asking for this $50 personalized hat since they flew in and by the end of that hour, there was no money left to get it for him (and he made the majority of their money).
Also, more recently, she spent over $1000 renting out an entire “club” on a Friday night for her best friend’s birthday, with food, and something like 8 people showed up… Being as frugal as I am, it’s been difficult for me to listen to her stories of all the things she’s bought for her and her friends when she can’t even pay her bills and is constantly calling our parents for money.
julifra
19. A 4k TV for their PS4. Come on, 1080 is barely possible on those and regular television is going to take at least another 5 years to get on that train.
KeroEnertia
20. An ex of mine bought a campervan on eBay for 2000. He parked it on the street and within a week it had been towed. He never bothered to get it back again.
atheista
21/36 The cancellation of two gas fired power plants to save votes in an election. This was at the cost of 1.1 billion dollars to all taxpayers in Ontario.
A380101
22. At a very high end tequila bar in Vegas, they had a bottle that sold for $4K a pop, one shot was about $200. Some 50+ year old douche bag roles up next to us, a whore under each arm. He sees us kinda smirking at him so he orders “your most expensive tequila!” Bartender shows him the bottle verifies everything is copacetic, pours three glasses a finger in each. Douche bag proceeds to make the bartender MIX THE TEQUILA IN A MARGARITA!
Bartender and I exchanged pained glances. And so it goes, all the men with the money don’t know how to use it.
penlies
23. Was part of a company meeting for low level managers at a famous golf resort. The thing easily cost $250k. Can’t imagine what they paid for the big boys.
LearningLifeAsIGo
24. I went down to the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas a few years back, which itself was a waste to money. Someone bought a pair of regular rubber flip-flops for $65 at the gift shop.
Former_KGB
25. I used to play cards with a Russian guy who spent $7,000 on his gold-plated Nokia. He was a weird and somewhat scary dude. His caller ID came up as “Tina Turner”. No idea why.
StickleyMan
26. Saw a guy put $2000 on a specific number on roulette. NOT black or red, on a specific number. If it had hit, he would have been $70k richer, but of course it didn’t. He didn’t seem too pissed about it though, so I guess he was loaded. He just walked away like it was no big deal.
[deleted]
27. Women’s clothes. Yesterday I heard two girls talking about their jeans. One bragged that her jeans ONLY cost them $120. That’s how much I’d spend for a years worth of clothes.
vincentdiabolus1
28. A kid in my English class has a $3000 backpack. Don’t ask me why.
AssholeBarf
29. An acquaintance of mine received $350k for a work-related accident that [messed] up his body pretty good. He lives in a broken down trailer that smells like sewage, his wife drives a pos car and the kids have an old PC but mostly just spend time on the xbox. AFAIK he’s blown most of it on casinos, beer and drugs.
LostSoulsAlliance
30. I saw a fella purchase a $120,000 bottle of champagne when I was in Hong Kong. Enough said really.
shrc91
31. My roommate purchased a lifetime subscription to Star Trek Online for $200 before the game was even released.
ShadyJane
32. My best friend paid $15k for a single douse of cancer ray treatment on his dog. Dog was already too far gone, had a massive growth tearing his shoulder apart.
I was like [what]? But of course was more compassionate in person.
Dog still went and they were out the $15k. Poor dog.
Drowned_Samurai
33. I’m a roofing contractor and the company I work for has a customer who had us put on a $50,000+ temporary asphalt shingle roof on his house while he and his wife decided on the what color slate they wanted for the permanent roof. All in all they spent over $200,000 on their roof in a few months because they couldn’t decide on a color.
ZombieCharltonHeston
34. My girlfriend spent $260 USD on a blow dryer, because it had a Ferrari designed engine….to be fair, that [thing has] some power.
fernanimal
35. A former company I worked at spent $70,000 to hire a guy to come up with a “mission statement.” He “worked” for six months, and wrote a single sentence the size of a paragraph that was incomprehensible.
“Our brand presence serves the ever reaching goals of values with customer presence and obsequious delineation from where the core beliefs are born unto the service we provide for the external sequestration of greatness among those who apply business excellence…”
Something like that, only about 4 times as long and with a lot of fancy punctuation. I always pictured the guy in a striped shirt, a mask, a black beret, and a huge bag over his shoulder labeled “LOOT.” What a crook.
The whole debacle so outraged the stock holders that half the board of directors who approved the decision were fired.
punkwalrus
36. I used to work at a place that did FedEx. One day, a woman comes in with a Costco size case of Kraft Dinner. She wanted to ship it overnight to France because her grandchildren wanted KD but they didn’t have any in France.
So I look up the cost for her… and inform her it comes to ~$2800. She just shrugged and said sure.
I informed her it would probably be cheaper to catch a red eye to France and cook it for them herself, and she shrugged again and said “But I have plans for supper tomorrow.”
tea_and_cats
37. Dollar draft night. Tons of IPAs and good beer as well as your Buds and Coors for a dollar. Watched this kid order $3 PBR cans all night long.
bo0ze
38. Not on the same scale as some of these but…
My father one went to costco to buy AA batteries. He spent $500 and forgot the batteries. We don’t let him go to costco alone anymore.
Charyou-Tree
39. 200,000 on a pigeon, I know everyone has their hobbies but pigeon racing is beyond me.
peasandbones
40. Standardized tests. Plus monthly standardized benchmark tests, and workbooks to prepare for the standardized tests, none of it doing anything to actually help kids learn to read. MILLIONS of dollars’ worth of nothing.
Apples-with-Ella
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