If You Buy a Soda, The Restaurant Wins

Hal taught me many things about life as I was growing up. Aside from lessons about the evils of sleeping in, or the masculinity-inducing effects of pumping gas, my plucky father also taught me how to make stuff last. Where some parents might have stopped at teaching their kids to price shop and to buy in bulk, Hal went right into the nitty-gritty, physical aspects of stretching out what you have.
Here are some basic rules I learned from my father:

1. Get every last individual drop out of the bottle. Yeah, you know you're really wasteful and you throw away that bottle of ranch dressing when there are still a few droplets clinging to the inside. Not Hal, though. He taught me the delicate art of pouring water into the ranch bottle, shaking it up and pouring the delicious, ranch-flavored water out onto my salad.
2. Wear your clothing until it disintegrates. My father truly taught this principle by example. A pair of green, sweat-stained sweats owned by Harold Hawken will never be thrown away or given to a thrift store. They will be worn until the holes in the crotch extend far below the knee and are threadbare enough as to be rendered transparent. My fathers clothes were never destroyed or thrown away; they faded slowly out of existence.
3. If you buy a soda, the restaurant wins. My father's arch enemies were restaurants. Don't misunderstand, he loved to eat at restaurants, but they were his secret nemeses. When going out to eat, never order a soda. They charge you way more than it costs them to make it! Don't you know that that's all profit?! "One's goal when visiting a restaurant," Hal taught me, "should be to give the restaurant the smallest profit margin possible." (A related rule is that the check must be argued over, or you have not done your part as a patron.)
4. Use expired coupons. Another way to say this is, "Argue loudly and hassle the employee until they accept expired coupons." Also, use them in ways that the fine print says you can't use them (i.e. in conjunction with another sale), and then, when somebody points out that you are doing so, get prickly and throw around invective like, "Oh, that's really honest, down there in the fine print like that," or, "If I can't use them together, then it's not much of a deal, is it?!"

These rules have blessed the Hawken family over the years. I mean, since my childhood, the money we've saved by doing this has saved us, like... 38 bucks! You go to, like, 3 movies with all that money! Hal is a dedicated disciple of thrift, though. That $38 will go toward a couple dozen pairs of sweats from Value Village.