I love cooking at home.

I used to hate cooking at home, though. I was awful at it. I burnt things. I messed up scrambled eggs beyond all recognition.

But over time, I got better at it. I started figuring out lots of little things that made the entire process smoother and made my results much better without necessarily improving my skills.

Now, I vastly prefer what I make in my own kitchen over what I can get at most restaurants. What I make at home is tastier, usually healthier, and quite a bit cheaper, too.

Along the way, I’ve picked up lots of little techniques for making home cooking much easier and faster. Here are ten that really changed things for me.

Hone your knives. One of the biggest frustrations I had with home food preparation is that whenever I had to chop anything, it took forever and I often smashed them into oblivion. I thought it was cheap knives, but after getting a much nicer one, I had much the same problem after the first use or so. The entire problem was a simple one – the edge of the knife wasn’t honed. Honing a knife’s edge is incredibly simple. Just take a sharpening steel and lay your knife on it, with the hilt of the blade near the hilt of the sharpening steel. Then, with the blade forming a small angle with the steel, drag the blade slowly but firmly back down the steel to the tip. At the end, the tip of the blade should be near the tip of the steel. Then, switch hands and repeat with the other side of the blade, and alternate back and forth a few times. Your previously-dull knife will now slice through vegetables like a hot butterknife through butter.

Don’t fear the crock pot. Crock pots have this strange reputation for turning out bland food. In truth, though, crock pots are just as good as what you put in them – all they really do is cook things at a low heat over a long period of time. The trick is to make sure your ingredients are good and that you’ve added plenty of herbs and spices right off the bat. Crock pots are absolutely perfect for making stews and soups and chilis that benefit from long, slow cooking – just put the ingredients in the crock pot in the morning, turn it on low, and let it sit all day. In the evening, you’ll have a tremendous meal waiting for you. We’ve also found a lot of success slow-cooking pot roasts with lots of vegetables in a crock pot.

You can almost never over-season a dish. The only exception to this seems to be hot peppers, which can drive some people away. Aside from that, you have to go to almost grotesque lengths to over-season most dishes. So, if you’re unsure, toss in some more spices. It’ll usually make the dish more tasty than simply following the recipe absolutely.

Use fresh ingredients. Fresh ingredients are often the key to making a recipe really pop. While frozen vegetables (for example) are passable, nothing beats the pop of fresh vegetables in your mouth. While canned vegetables can work in a pinch, they just don’t compare. Canned meats are convenient … that’s about all I’ll give them. In most cases, there’s more nutrition in fresh ingredients as well.

Store staples in the freezer. Whenever you prepare something that might be used as a staple in another meal, make plenty of it and store the extras in the freezer. Chicken breasts, loose ground beef, loose sausage, and diced onions all work well in this way.

Always make stock out of leftover bones and leftover vegetables. The meal is done. You have leftover chicken bones, or maybe you have some leftover vegetables of various kinds. Perhaps you have a leftover hambone or the bone from the middle of a roast. Quite often, these things get thrown out. Save those leftovers. Just take them to a crock pot, add enough water to the crock pot to cover whatever you add (and maybe half an inch more), then turn it on low and let it slowly cook all night. In the morning, strain the liquid (just to get the big pieces out) and save the liquid in a jar in the fridge. Then, the next time you need to make something using those flavors, just bust out that jar. That stuff is fantastic flavor.

De-glaze at every opportunity. Another great source for flavor is the “glaze” on the bottom of a frying pan after you cook something – that stuff is pure flavor! Just put some water into the hot pan, watch it sizzle, and notice how much of the glaze on the bottom of the pan comes off into the water. That liquid can now be used in a lot of ways, from adding flavor and moisture to rice and side vegetables or allowing the meat to simmer in it.

Stick with comfort foods at first. It’s easy to get caught up in the sexy idea of preparing some novel dish in the kitchen, but if you don’t have the skills yet, it will likely end in frustration and an underwhelming result. Instead, at first, stick with dishes that you know you like that you’re intimately familar with. For me, that means tuna casserole, hamburgers, and broccoli with rice.

Try cooking something familiar without a recipe. Another great way to really amp up your skills in the kitchen is to attempt making a familiar recipe from memory without using a recipe. This requires you to begin thinking on the fly a little bit as you cook and often forces you into doing things a little different. Sure, sometimes you’ll fail, but you’ll learn a lot from abandoning the recipe.

Get others involved. For me, no kitchen experience is better than cooking in the kitchen with people whose company I enjoy. Being in the kitchen while my wife chops vegetables, my daughter stirs a mixture, my son snaps green beans, or my best friend butters some garlic bread makes the entire experience far more enjoyable no matter how the meal turns out. Get people into your kitchen and cook together – it becomes an amazing social experience.

A big part of successful frugality is the routine with which you live your day-to-day life. Here are twenty four little things that you can incorporate into your daily routines that just trim a little money away from your spending – and puts it into something more important to you.

1. Brush your teeth. An unclean mouth is a perfect place for unwanted bacteria and germs to take root. Good oral hygiene reduces the chance for bacteria to grow in your mouth. This reduces doctor visits, medicine costs, and productivity lost to illness – not to mention the time spent feeling awful.

2. Take leftovers to work for your lunch. If you have something left over in the fridge from a previous meal, pack it up and take it with you to work. If you choose to eat it there, it’s a double savings – you save in that you didn’t waste the food you made at home and you also save by not buying the overpriced food options at work (eating out or the food vendor).

3. Take a piece of fruit or toast with you as you leave. A simple high-energy breakfast raises your energy for the rest of the day, making you more productive. It also helps with alertness, helping to ensure that you make better decisions throughout the day.

4. Adjust your thermostat before you leave. In the summer, raise the temperature several degrees; in the winter, drop it several degrees. Don’t waste money controlling the environment of your home while no one is there.

5. Prepare a grocery list before you leave. Look in your refrigerator and cupboards to identify the things you actually need, then make a list from them. Look in the freezer, too, and make a rough meal plan while you’re at it so that you’re sure to be buying only the things you actually need and will use.

6. Turn off all possible electronic and electric devices before you leave. Devices left on that aren’t doing anything sap electricity which you pay for. Devices even as simple as toasters devour energy throughout the day. Turn off your television, your cable box, any gaming consoles, kitchen appliances, radios, and also don’t forget to turn off your lights. This can be made much easier by putting your home entertainment equipment on a switch, so you can simply flip it before you leave.

7. Take a new route to work (and do the same on your way home). Every six months or so, it’s worth trying an alternate route to and from work. Why? For one, there might be a better route for you to take due to new roads or simply a lack of earlier observation on your part. For another, traffic flow changes constantly based on road construction and new roads, often affecting roads not under construction, meaning a previously-discarded route that’s close may in fact be a much better route now.

8. Park far away from your office. Why? Two reasons. For one, at many workplaces, parking far away from the building is less expensive, because closer spots are often in restricted lots (this was the case in my previous workplace). For another, parking far away from the building requires you to walk much further to get in there, giving you a bit of exercise.

9. Wash your hands a few times a day. This works for similar reasons as brushing your teeth – it reduces your chance of getting sick, which saves on doctor’s bills, medicine, and lost productivity. Get your hands wet, get soap on them, and rub them together for the length of time it takes to sing “Happy Birthday” twice.

10. Use your work downtime to spell out in writing your personal goals. It’s far more valuable than just surfing the web or sitting idle. Make lists of your short term and long term goals, then flesh out how you’ll achieve each one. Come up with specific things you can do and write them down.

11. Eat lunch at your desk. Eating lunch at your desk is far less expensive than eating out, plus it gives you time to work on your goals (as mentioned above). Of course, this is even easier if you brought your lunch, as suggested earlier.

12. Drink water instead of soda or coffee. Water is virtually free and quenches your thirst more effectively than coffee or soda, both of which have adverse health effects (caffeine addiction, weight gain).

13. Invite a friend over. Make a plan for doing something social at your home. Inviting a friend over is far cheaper than going out with a friend and, even though you might have to spring for some costs such as food, it’s likely that such an invitation will be reciprocated later, giving you a free evening of entertainment.

14. Touch base with some people you haven’t heard from in a while. How does this save money? The more established relationships you have, the more likely it is that you can tap your social network for advice (and sometimes more), plus friends often drop each other useful things all the time. Friends are useful to have all around.

15. Meditate or pray. Meditation and/or prayer calms you, improving your health and making it easier for you to make better choices afterwards. Take some time near the end of your work day or the start of your post-work day to meditate for a bit or offer up a prayer in quiet solitude.

16. Try a generic product. When you’re trying to decide at the store which product you should pick up, consider giving the generic alternative a try. It’s almost always far less expensive and it’s often identical to the name brand – many times, they are the same item in different packaging.

17. Hit the library. Libraries offer an abundance of entertainment options for free: books, magazines, DVDs, CDs, games, and countless other items are there to easily be checked out.

18. Air up your car’s tires. Filling your car’s tires up to the maximum recommended pressure once a month or so has an enormous positive impact on your car’s gas mileage. With some recent testing on my wife’s car, we found that it improved her mileage by four miles per gallon.

19. Wash your windshield when you stop for gas. A messy windshield reduces vision (which increases the likelihood for accidents) and can have a subtle negative aerodynamic effect on your car. Since it’s free and you’re just standing there pumping gas, wash it up!

20. Have something in the freezer for dinner. Instead of going out to eat or stopping by the grocery store to pick something out, take a look at what’s in your freezer. Likely, there’s something in there you’ve forgotten all about that will make a wonderful, cheap dinner.

21. Read a book for your evening entertainment. A book (particularly one checked out from the library) is an incredibly inexpensive way to entertain yourself. Turn off the television and the cable box (saving energy) and crack open a book instead.

22. Go for a thirty minute walk. Not only can it be a free form of entertainment, it’s also a great way to improve your physical fitness a bit, reducing your health care costs.

23. Do some of your morning routine the night before. Pack up your leftovers. Turn off as many of your devices as possible. Put the things you’ll need to take in the car. Why? Doing this now helps to ensure that you’ll do things more efficiently in the morning – and you’re more likely to remember everything, too.

24. Turn down the thermostat before you go to bed. Just drop the temperature five degrees or so. You won’t notice it until the morning, at which point you can raise it right back up when you’re still toasty warm from a long night’s sleep. This can easily save you a few dollars.

And a final bonus one… go to bed early. A well-rested mind is a more alert mind, more able to avoid marketing tricks and also more capable of helping you to get ahead in the workplace.

November is here. Winter is sneaking up on us, and with winter comes winter heating bills for most of the United States. I live in northern Iowa, where temperatures can get quite cold in the heart of the winter months and, since I work from home, I have to utilize lots of different tricks to ensure that we’re not burning too much energy just to keep the house warm.

Last winter, I catalogued several of the best tactics to share with you at the dawn of the next winter. Here they are.

Check your insulation.
Take a quick peek in your attic. What do you see? Do you see any bare spots not covered in insulation? Attempt to identify what type of insulation you have and make sure it’s up to the level of insulation you need for your area using this helpful insulation guide along with this tool for understanding insulation R-values. Proper insulation is key to keeping your house warm.

Make sure your home is air sealed.
Air leaks and drafts allow warm air to quickly escape your house, resulting in tremendous heating and cooling bills. The solution to this problem is to check your home for air leaks and properly air seal any leaks you discover. This useful guide from the Department of Energy will walk you through the entire process.

Close the vents in unused rooms (and seal them off, if possible).
If your home is well insulated and you have a room or two that’s not actively being used, turn off the air vent in that room and seal the room as best you can. The temperature in that room will drop significantly when you do this as you’ll no longer be heating it – and no longer paying the bill for heating it, either.

Invest in thick socks.
I work from home in Iowa, and I’ve learned that there’s no better way to stay warm in the winter at home than to wear thick socks. Thick socks keep my feet warm even if I keep the temperature in the house low, and feet are one of the primary thermal indicators for the body as well as being a relatively poorly circulated extremity. Keep the feet warm and the rest of you will be fine.

Test the lower levels of your thermostat.
Along with wearing warm socks, I often tend to turn the heating down during the day (raising it when my family is at home, which is basically just a manual version of the effect one would get from installing a programmable thermostat). I work on the upper level of my home where it’s warmest, so reducing the house temperature during the day rarely has any negative impact on my work – but it certainly saves on energy costs.

Use a hot water bottle. We also tend to dip our thermostat down a bit at night when we’re snuggled in our beds. Unfortunately, after a long winter day, a bed might not necessarily be cosy right at first. Thus, I often use a trick that my father used when he was a boy – a hot water bottle. We use a reusable microwaveable hot water bottle filled with a gel-like substance. A quick heating in the microwave just before bed means that the bed quickly gets cosy warm – a perfect resistance against the cold nights.

Open the blinds on the sunny side of the house – close them on the other side.
In the winter, I do this on the top two floors of our home (where most of the windows are). In the morning, I open all of the blinds and curtains on the east-facing side of the house and make sure everything is closed on the west side (usually done the night before). Then, when I eat lunch, I switch the two. Then, just before dinner, I close everything on the west side of the house. This goes a long way towards maximizing the benefits of direct sunlight and minimizing the heat lost to windows not facing the sun.

Stick together – share a blanket.
If you walked into our family room, you’d see that we already have several blankets out for the winter months. We love to cuddle up as a family under a blanket or two on the couch, sharing our natural body warmth with each other. It keeps us all close together and toasty warm.

Use the oven.
Who wants to go out to eat in the deepest part of winter anyway? Stay home and cook something in the oven. Not only will the food preparation save you money, you’ll also find that the oven is far more energy efficient in the winter. How so? It works with the warming of your house rather than against the summer cooling of your house.

Drink warm fluids.
For me, winter is filled with cup after cup of hot tea and hot chocolate. Drinking a warm fluid makes me feel much warmer (and likely does slightly raise my body temperature). For me, the effect lasts for about forty minutes, a time in which I can get away with a temperature a few degrees lower. During the day, I’ll often prepare myself a giant mug of hot tea and slowly sip it over the course of a few hours. The small energy expense of heating up the water is more than replaced by the energy savings of being able to lower the house temperature a bit more.

This is the final entry in a weeklong series of articles on the ethics of frugality. How far can you take things without crossing an ethical line or diving into seriously socially unacceptable waters? I’ll be recounting some of my own stories – and some stories from readers – along the way.

“Mindy” writes in:

My husband and I received a panini press as a wedding gift from his aunt. After opening it and looking at it, it appeared as though the press had actually been used already. There seemed to be a thin film of grease on the plates of the press and the packing was pretty messed up. My husband argued that his aunt probably did it because she thought we would actually like it and she already had one on hand. I thought it was really rude and kind of gross. Please don’t tell me you think this is an acceptable way to save money.

The first question raised here is whether a re-gift is appropriate at all. If someone gives you a gift, is it appropriate to keep it and then gift it to someone else? If it is, is it appropriate to use the item before re-gifting it? In other words, is it appropriate to gift someone a used item?

Let’s break it down into the three separate arguments.

Regifts are tactless. Someone gave you a gift because they thought you would appreciate it. If you simply use it as a way to get out of having to buy a gift for someone else, you’re taking the care and thought someone put into the item for you originally and tossing it out the door. If you absolutely must refuse a gift, do it quietly and tactfully by returning it and not making an issue out of it. After all, if you found it useless, why would someone else find it to be a great gift?

Regifts are fine if they’re never used. Sometimes we wind up with duplicate or redundant items or gifts that simply don’t match some aspect of our lives. That doesn’t necessarily mean the item isn’t useful or isn’t a good gift – it just doesn’t match your situation. In that case, regifting is a great way to take that item and breathe new life into it by passing it on to someone who will find value in it.

Used regifts are fine. Sometimes, you have an item in your home that’s superceded by something else. For example, perhaps you get a knife set and find that you mostly just use the chef’s knife (this often happens), then someone buys you a very expensive chef’s knife. That knife set now sits there unused, but it’s a perfectly good knife set, perfect for a friend or family member. So why not wrap it up and give it to them as a gift?

My take? I’m with the middle road on this one. I have no problem with regifts as long as the regift is an item that you received that you genuinely have no use for but can genuinely see that someone else might have a use for. In this case, it does honor the original gift, as someone thought of you and purchased an item that you would actually use – and you do use something already that fills that niche in your life – so you’re passing the gift along to someone who also might genuinely use it. The thought and care and goodwill of the item is intact.

What about used items? If you have an item in your home that you no longer use and think someone else might use it, just give it to that person without the pretense of a gift-giving occasion. If you don’t have anyone to give it to, sell it in a yard sale situation or give it away to a goodwill store.

If you do choose to re-gift used items, you should be aware that the recipient will likely feel as Mindy does – that the gift was simply something you had lying around the house that you could box up to get out of any responsibility for having to think of or buy a gift. In other words, they may feel some serious disrespect.

One thing I think we can all agree on: it’s pretty foul to regift something that you’ve used and not bothered to properly clean. It’s practically the equivalent of dropping some leftover food into a box, wrapping it up, and presenting it as a great gift. If you fall on the side of re-gifting used things, at the very least, you really should clean them well.

Throughout this week, I’m posting a series of articles on the ethics of frugality. How far can you take things without crossing an ethical line or diving into seriously socially unacceptable waters? I’ll be recounting some of my own stories – and some stories from readers – along the way.

“Jim” writes in:

A married couple I’m friends with invited me over to dinner recently. When I arrived, they were rushing around trying to throw a meal together. The main course turned out to be leftover chicken breasts. Yes, leftover. They had been grilled a day or two before and they had merely tossed on some additional spices and warmed them in the oven. I was kind of disgusted by this. I understand that this was an inexpensive route for them to go for dinner, but I was a dinner guest at their home!

When you have guests over, how far does frugality go before it crosses a tactful line? As always, there are two sides to the story…

The price is right. Someone is providing a free meal to you. It’s rude to look a gift horse in the mouth. The meal was obviously cooked and was edible, so a good guest wouldn’t question the source of it (assuming there are no allergy issues or the like). The hosts obviously have some issues going on in their lives – perhaps financial or otherwise – and the best thing you can do as a friend is support them. In fact, instead of being outraged, you might take this meal as a sign that your friends need some help.

The hosts aren’t treating their guests well. If your hosts wanted to merely see you for a while, they did not have to invite you over for a meal. Inviting a guest over for a meal means that you’ll attempt to put something appetizing and reasonably fresh on the table, not your leftovers. If you intend to merely foist leftovers on a friend, make it clear – it can be fine if it’s a close friend and there’s some advance warning (”Hey, Jim, we have a ton of leftovers from our Thanksgiving dinner. Want to come over and help us clean them up?”). Without that, though, it’s fairly rude to toss your uneaten scraps in front of a guest in your home.

My perspective is that it depends on the friendship. I would have no problem serving my closest friends some well-prepared leftovers, nor would they feel self-conscious serving me the same. Anything beyond my closest friends, however, would never get such treatment in my home.

What’s the difference? I have such a long, established relationship with my closest friends that there’s no longer any need to impress in order to further build a friendship. These people have been my friends for the majority of my life at this point (or nearly that long). They know who I am and they know I care deeply about them. They also know that they’re an intimate part of my life, intimate enough that I would feel comfortable serving them some leftovers in a pinch.

If a friendship weren’t nearly as established, I would never serve leftovers as a dish to my guests. However, I would use leftovers as an ingredient in a dish that I would serve to anyone. If I make a big pot of chicken chili, for example, quite often the chicken itself is a leftover and the liquid in the soup is chicken stock, prepared from the bones of a roasted chicken.

One of my mantras is “stop caring what other people think.” That mantra ends at my doorstep when I invite people inside. When they’re here, I do care what they think because I value them enough individually to invite them into my home and share part of my life with them. Respect your guests – and they’ll respect you in return.

Over the upcoming week, I’ll be posting a series of articles on the ethics of frugality. How far can you take things without crossing an ethical line or diving into seriously socially unacceptable waters? I’ll be recounting some of my own stories – and some stories from readers – along the way.

“Megan” writes in:

A friend of mine had a sweater from Land’s End that she’d had for about fifteen years. It was getting pretty old and beat up simply because of normal wear and tear. A few weeks ago when she unpacked her winter clothes, she found that one sleeve had finally worn off the sweater. she called up Land’s End and complained, invoking their lifetime guarantee. They sent her a replacement one – not exactly the same, but pretty similar. She was quite proud of this “free” sweater. I was less than impressed. What do you think about this?

As always with these types of things, there are two sides to every story (at least two sides). Here are two ways of looking at it.

Lifetime guarantee means lifetime guarantee. As long as I’m the original owner of that particular item, then I should be entitled to get it replaced if it wears out. It says right there that if, for any reason, you’re unhappy with the sweater (and you’re the original owner of it), you have the right to return it and request a replacement item. This is your right, no matter the circumstances.

Fifteen years of wear on a sweater is a little over the top. If you manage to get fifteen years of wear on a sweater, then the product has been exceptionally good. Instead of trying to get another “free” item of similar quality, just buy another sweater. It’s pretty obvious that the reason for the “lifetime guarantee” is not to give you freebies if you wear a sweater to death, but to protect against a weak seam discovered after several wearings over a few years or something like that. By trying to squeeze a free sweater through this loophole, you’re basically taking advantage of a good company that puts effort into producing quality products – the kind of company we need more of, not the kind we should push out of business.

My take on this is somewhere in the middle. If I had an item that had worn out from regular use, I would not use a lifetime guarantee to try to get a free replacement. However, if I had a sweater that suddenly failed after a few years due to a weak seam or something along those lines, I’d unquestionably call in that lifetime guarantee.

To me, a very well-made item that simply lives out a long, natural lifetime is a very good product, while lifetime guarantees are there to protect you against faulty products. I have quite a lot of respect for companies that produce material with a high enough level of quality that they can provide a lifetime guarantee on it – that means that, under normal wear and tear, it’ll have a long lifetime.

If something goes wrong in the middle, I expect that lifetime guarantee to hold up. But if my long-loved sweater winds up being worn down enough that it becomes the padding on my dog’s bed, I don’t feel that I should be awarded a free replacement. The product did exactly what was advertised and did it very well – I’m deeply satisfied with it.

I guess that my impression of the situation in the question comes down to the sweater itself. If it had only been worn five or ten times in that fifteen year period and the sweater degraded enough that the sleeve fell off due to such little wear and tear, the lifetime guarantee should be invoked. However, if that sweater had been worn several times a year and was obviously nearing the end of a natural lifetime, it’s not frugal to demand a replacement – it’s cheap.

What do you think? Would you demand a replacement item if your item had a lifetime guarantee and you used it frequently to the end of a long natural life?

Over the upcoming week, I’ll be posting a series of articles on the ethics of frugality. How far can you take things without crossing an ethical line or diving into seriously socially unacceptable waters? I’ll be recounting some of my own stories – and some stories from readers – along the way.

A long while back, in a post entitled “When Is Frugality Stealing?“, I wrote about how I would sometimes jot down notes out of books when I was in a bookstore. This was completely allowed – and even encouraged – by the store’s owner (perhaps in part because I was a regular customer there) and would often result in me deciding to buy the book once I found that the information was accurate and useful.

This leads to a bigger question about frugality: when is it okay to sample content without buying?

Take, for example, music. Some people find it completely appropriate to download and keep mp3s, offering up the reasoning that the content is overpriced for what you get or that they might buy the music someday if they listen to it enough. Personally, unless these are given as free downloads by the people that recorded it, I find this stealing. There are many, many ways to sample music without just taking what you want – thirty second previews, Pandora radio, and so on. Access to such recordings isn’t really an issue, either, unless you get into highly obscure recordings.

This is a topic that’s endlessly debated online. There’s a significant group that argues that information was meant to be free and that anything that can be reduced to simple information should thus be free. Thus, content creators should find other ways to earn an income and treat their content as an “advertisement” of sorts for their other endeavors. For example, they might argue that I should give my books away for free and then charge a price for my live appearances or for “deluxe” versions of the content.

Here’s the thing. Content has a cost. Someone had to invest a significant amount of time creating the material you enjoy. It’s reasonable to think that the creator would want to be compensated for the time and energy invested in it. When you step back and look at a broader scale, there’s an enormous amount of people involved in making a film, showing it in theatres, and then making it available for you to easily rent or buy. The same is true for any creative work.

When do I think it’s okay to sample such content? It’s fine to sample if the person who created it or the retailer says it is. So, if I want to jot a note out of a book, it’s fine if the bookstore clerk says I can. If I want to listen to a particular song, I can go hear that thirty second sample or listen to a streaming source like Pandora. If you want more, pay for it. That “pay” might mean enjoying it with ad support for free (like on Hulu) or enjoying it by paying for it without ad support.

Some people might go further and just completely give away their content, and that’s fine. They’re choosing to give it away because they believe they’ll build a bigger audience for their live events that way. However, just because one person is doing it doesn’t mean that consumers can then treat every person producing anything in that same fashion.

All that being said, I think most content companies make it ridiculously hard (even now, with the internet) for people to adequately sample the content. How do I know if I want to watch this movie or not? Well, I can probably find a trailer for it (maybe) or a review here or there. How do I know if I want to listen to this album? I can hear some thirty second samples of the chorus and (maybe) a full song or two on a service like Pandora. At least with bookstores, readers are encouraged to read the first part of a book in a bookstore so they can make up their mind – I think that’s one of the reasons why bookstores aren’t having the difficulty that music stores are having.

What do you think? Where’s the line between sampling so you can make an informed decision and stealing just so you can save a few bucks? Where is the line of right and wrong?

Over the upcoming week, I’ll be posting a series of articles on the ethics of frugality. How far can you take things without crossing an ethical line or diving into seriously socially unacceptable waters? I’ll be recounting some of my own stories – and some stories from readers – along the way.

A few weeks ago, an acquaintance of mine told me that they’ll often go to grocery stores, go around to every sample stand in the store twice or three times, and call that good enough for their Saturday lunch. Do they also buy groceries there? “Not usually,” she said. “That store’s prices are too high.”

Is this type of attitude right or wrong?

On the one hand, the store is giving away the samples. They expect customers to walk up, take one, and try the wares on offer. The whole point is to give these samples away, so I might as well take the samples, regardless.

On the other hand, the sample giveaway implicitly assumes a few things. It assumes that you’re actually a customer of the store, there to buy things. Sometimes, it also assumes that you have some interest in purchasing the sampled product.

In the end, though, I don’t really think it’s appropriate to go into a business, eat their freebies, and leave, with no intent whatsoever of purchasing an item.

Society is built around value exchanges. In the case of samples, the store is giving one value – a free sample – in exchange for another – being a customer and/or being a potential buyer of that item. If you’re just walking in to gobble samples, you’re neither one of these.

Here’s an analogy. Imagine a friend of yours stops by. He walks into your home, opens up your refrigerator, and grabs a bite to eat – that’s often okay if it’s a close friend. But what if they then just walk out your front door without sitting down to chat with you? That’s blatantly rude.

Why is it rude? It violates a simple value exchange, the kind that society operates on. You don’t mind giving your friend some food, but you expect some conversation and friendship in return for it. By just walking out, your friend is not living up to his end of the unspoken bargain.

Society operates on such unspoken bargains. Traffic operates in this way. Almost all interpersonal relationships work in this way. Workplaces operate in this way. Without these unspoken bargains, society collapses.

What do you think? Is the idea of free samples at a grocery store really such an unspoken bargain? Is it a situation where people should feel fine walking in and taking samples without even thinking about it?