A guy I know
whilst we were on a trip to China bought a watch in Tiananmen square. Featured a smiley Mao, his mechanised hand waving in time with each second. I can't remember how much it cost him, but the number was pretty damn small (and the exchange rate at the time was about 14 Yuan to the Sterling).
After about an hour it had stopped. Dead. Smilin' Mao's arm motionless.

Didn't even fit round the guys wrist either.
( Green Spanner and his magical lack of activity, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 22:05, 4 replies)

I was on the lookout for a cheap mouse
to use with my laptop, as for some apps the trackpad just doesn't quite cut it.

I found an optical mouse in Tesco for 75p. It's great. It works just fine and if it breaks at the bottom of my bag then fuck it - it only cost 75p.
( Mystery_Bob, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 22:00, 2 replies)

Cheap useless crap
One time when I was 6 I bought one of those children's mobile phones (the ones they play with that have no electronics in them at all) thinking it was a bargain.

There is also a lot of school material that I have bought over the years that has been pretty useless as well e.g. Away (Michael Gow), Raw (Scott Monk), and Summer of the Aliens (Some other deranged cunt).
(Berzerker, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 21:52, 1 reply)

Reeboks of doom
Rachelswipe reminded me of this one

Not cheap tat I bought but that I sold

We were poor. Down on our uppers. A lightbulb appeared above my ex hubby's head..TING! "Lets sell all our shit! At a car boot sale!"

Well, I was a bit embarrassed, but then my tummy rumbled again and I thought "Fuck it!" We raided the loft - black bag after black bag of hidden treasure. My wardrobe yielded fabrics not seen since since the 90's (Lycra anyone?) and the kitchen was a haven of never used crappy, tatty gadgets.

He packed the majority of it up and off we headed to a cold and foggy field in Kent to sell our wares.

On arrival, we unpacked our van of shite and as we emptied out our bags and boxes onto a wallpapering table I noticed that a pair of my oldest, stinkiest, scruffiest Reebok trainers had somehow found their way into our trove.These babies were at least 5 years old and not at their best, to say the least. Oh! how we laughed! "Look at these poor sad fuckers" I thought, "Lets hide them away under the table"

Not 10 minutes later I was confronted with these abominations being waved in my face by a.. and I'm holding fire here..CHAV
"How much for these babes?"
"Erm, they're not for sale actually, they're horrible"
"Nah, how much?"
She waves fist threateningly
"50p?"
"Done"
Fuuuuck.

Pretty cheap, definitely useless. 50p? RESULT
( my_cat_has_no_shoes meh meh meh MEH MEH, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 21:45, 2 replies)

....................
My sister.

Doesnt get much cheaper than her.
(kickstandrich last had sex with your mum/sister/wife/daughter on, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 21:28, Reply)

Right, I'm going to rant...
I build and fix bicycles for a living. I like it. I like riding bikes, I like knowing how they work and I like helping people ride bikes. I'm not a self-righteous eco-warrior, but someone's got to know how to fix bikes and what's best to replace the bits with and I'm happy for that to be me.

So if you go to Toys'R'Us, Woolworths, Halfords (usually), Argos, ads in the Daily Mail or (God forbid) the sodding internet and pay a two-digit sum for something with two wheels and maybe even "full suspension", do not expect it to work like a bike, much less the sort of bike you see on the World Cup circuit, Tour de France or even the ones you see fluoro-yellow-clad commuters trundling about on in all weathers.

There's a reason they're known in the trade as BSOs: that stands for bicycle shaped objects - they may look like bicycles from a distance, but try riding one of these and you'll rapidly understand why they just don't count.

If you don't know anything about the componentry (and there is _no_ shame in that), can't recognise brakes and gears that appear to be made out of cheese, don't appreciate that bolts that hold critical parts of the bike together are supposed to be made out of something other than silly putty, then at least look at the welds, and try picking the flippin' thing up!

The old saying "strong, light, cheap: pick two" is generalised but a good standby.


I recently had an argument with a friend of mine who needed a new pickup for his electric guitar. It was going to cost around £140. I laughed and said the obvious "you could buy a new guitar for that" at which point he explained in great deal about acoustics, resonance, circuitry, impedance and suchlike; in short, why you would need a proper pickup and how it would work and sound different from an Argos guitar.

Three minutes later (I kid you not) he was telling me his rear mountain bike wheel was buckled; I explained the options between fixing and replacing it and how much a basic pair of mountain bike-worthy wheels would cost (around £70). Without even hinting at backing down, he spent a good while arguing with me that there was no point paying that much when you could pick up his'n'hers mountain-style bikes with full suspension direct from China through an ad in the back pages of his local paper for less than that. I argued that for around £200 you could get a bike you could reasonably expect to commute on every weekday for a year but he simply couldn't see the point when "you just don't need to pay that much money, it's all snobbery."

There really is a lot more bile backed up here, I'm just not eloquent enough to vent it.

Please, please don't spend as little as possible on a BSO and then expect it to work like a proper bike.


That is all.
( sanityclause is waiting until, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 21:27, 14 replies)

Indoor TV antenna
Allegedly advanced digital technology. In reality a wire encapsulated in a massive chunk of plastic. Of course I am guessing about the wire thing, since I never actually managed to open the plastic chunk.
(spinoza, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 21:26, Reply)

The poundland guide to getting your mate pregnant.
Not me but a friend let call her amy!
Well she wanted some condoms for the local chemist and wouldnt buy them herself because she's a big jessie so I got talked into it.

Me being a tight arsed student (tighter than a camels ass in a sandstorm !) as my next door neighbour says. Well i wouldnt pay the £3.50 price tag in the local chemist so set about sourcing some cheaper johnnies.

So while wondering round our local cheep tat shop noticed packs of condoms on sale. Bingo! So brought them and told amy she owed me 3.50 for the pack.

Two days later she comes into my flat and announces that not one, not two, but all three of the johnnies had split and now she needed a pregnancy test and would I buy it for her. Did I learn my lesson, did I fuck. Poundland pregnancy tests should do it. First one negative, second one negative, still no period, Doctors test.....positive. Oh fuck.

length around 9 months n a baby boy!
(snugglesacks, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 21:26, 7 replies)

8p own value noodles
Love them, can't get enough of them. Absolutely bloody brilliant.
( jim_bob can herd cats., Fri 4 Jan 2008, 21:24, 5 replies)

Three words:
Ultra-cheap supermarket meatballs. :S
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 21:18, 1 reply)

Ballroom Dance Outfit
I bought a used, robin-blue, rhinestone-studded spandex ballroom dance 'cat suit,' for cheap. Then I got a desk job and put on a lot of weight. The costume hangs still in the closet, mocking me....
(Perv With A Dog had his eyes pecked out by scrub jays on, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 21:15, Reply)

sorry but...
yo' mama was the cheapest tat i ever bought

ooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh no i didnt!

*hides face away and crawls back to the hell from whence i came*
(scarydylan has lost his scare :(, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 21:14, Reply)

Over here they're called Dollar Stores.
When I was in my last apartment we had a Dollar Store in the little shopping center at the edge of the apartment complex. My son went up there one day and returned with two big bags of those thick rubber bands, which he proceeded to tie together into a very long rubber band rope.

Then he stood at the edge of the balcony on the third floor and dangled the end of it down to his brother, who stretched it across the parking lot. The one on the ground let go, and the rope made a truly evil sound as it snapped toward the balcony- where my son was crouched behind the railing, protected as it slammed into the balcony.

After much giggling they did it again- only this time the one on the balcony let go, resulting in a couple of pounds of rubber bands slamming into his brother's testicles. There was a howl, almost drowned out by the rest of us cracking up...

I think he's still got that bag of rubber bands somewhere.

Length was about 300 feet when stretched.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Fri 4 Jan 2008, 21:07, 1 reply)

Expensive cheap tat
Signed up with BT internet. They sent me a 'BT home hub'. Cheap bastards. The thing has been built by chromosomally abnormal chinese gibbons for about 8p a unit.

As soon as I have soak tested my new netgear router that box of sweatshop crap is going to be thermited in the garden. Hope they don't want it back.
(Prof. Moriarty put his foot in it on, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 20:51, 3 replies)

Cheap tat?..not exactly...
After 12 years of paying £400 the most for any car I owned my bank manager kindly accepted my loan application for £5k to get a tidy car....

£3,500 ,3 years later I am the proud owner of a Vauxhall astra which now sits outside MY FRONT FUCKING DOOR NEEDING A SECOND HEAD GASKET!!!
I have just started a renovation job on my sons bedroom (which now started must be finished ,knocked a few wallls down)which is gonna cost about £400 the price of a new gasket for the car.
How am i gonna pay for this? in work, which I need the car for.....If theres a moral to this story please tell me cos i,m pretty fucked off at the moment.
(andycrass loves two hats on, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 20:39, 2 replies)

Plastic Bow and Arrows
Bought a cowboy and indian set from a pound shop, the bow was pretty decent. However the lick & stick sucker arrows were about as effective as Middle-East peace talks.

Therefore I decided to modify it a little, out went the platted string on the bow and in came some elastic bands that I'd cut and bunched together. The bolts were chopsticks, one had a pen-nib tip to it and the other had an old key. The flights were made with old laminated bus passes.

They fly quite far and punch through cardboard, I usually aim at squirrels who eat all the bird food, but I can't hit the buggers for shit. My old man had more luck with the air-rifle, shot one of their tails clean off...he wont be balancing no more.
(Jonald Poor power ranger putties, they can never hug, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 20:38, 2 replies)

Mrs. Kites' Family
Now I'm a cheap bastard and don't like spending money on others (equally I'm not mad on receiving gifts). Mrs Kites' family however are always sending gifts to each other, but they are always 'orrible £shop tat - pottery figures with string legs ? How charming. A "cut glass" (?resin?) swan ? Delightful.
Worst thing is pretending to be over the moon at what you have receieved. Please, just save your time and money.
(kitescreech still here, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 20:26, Reply)

cheap rubbish.
A group of friends and myself decided to play the 'one pound game' at our local one pound store (for those uneducated, the pound game consists of finding the most pointless item in the store and buying it. The person with the most rediculous piece of rubbish wins all the items).
These items consisted of:
a bottle of 'urine gone'
a dog tie
a pack of plastic sheet underwear
a mock bacon wallet
and an 'orgasm keyring' (oooh, it's just like the generation game)
proof that there's hope for our local pound stores yet.
(Emily's Pet Badger Because I Move Like An Arctic Lizard, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 20:25, 3 replies)

A pair of swimming trunks for 2 quid
It was summer, and I had decided on a little trip to Wales to see the family with my 2 lovely little boys and boyfriend.

We arrived on Friday and after the long drive settled down for a drink or two of wine. 4 bottles and a VERY iffy Chinese takeaway later my boyfriend and I stumbled to bed feeling a more nauseous than amorous. Saturday morning dawned sunny and bright. Bastard. The children bounced into the bedroom like little balls of silly putty..."Mu-um, Uncle Steve says we're going to Tenby today! Hooray!" Hoo-bloody-ray.

My boyfriend had never seen the beauty of the Brecon Beacons, my uncle had a new sat nav device. We therefore tried to get to Tenby (Seaside town) via Brecon (Landlocked mountain range) It took 3.5 hours. About the same length of time it took me to get from London to Wales. Hooray.

Got to Tenby, exhausted, hungover and, quite frankly, ready to die, my youngest son pipes up "Mu-um I need to go to the toilet"

I choke down a little bit of sick

"Ok, give me a moment"

2 minutes later "mu-uum, I really need to go"

Sea air helping a bit, so off we go. Get into the toilet, I hang on for dear life while my son is next door, singing away happily. Exit toilet, detect scent of satan's arse emanating from son's arse area.
"You ok son?"
"Yes mum" son grins up cheerfully. I notice strange cappuchino-esque froth emerging from his trouser leg. NOOOOOOO.

YES! He has extravagantly and wilfully shit himself. As I struggled to remove his trousers I realised that he appeared to still have a pair of kharki coloured shorts on.

To cut a very long, and sadly, reeking episode short, My boyfriend and eldest son finally (20 minutes later) came to see what was taking us so long in the toilet (this after I frustratingly tried to clean my son with toilet roll, soap, hand wipes and eventually - out of desperation - bog washing, arse first. He cried a bit, the water was cold)

We required one pair of shorts that would cover his shame, URGENTLY.

My poor befuddled boyfriend returns with a pair he got for £2.00. Not only were they circa 1983, but they were white. Marvellous.

A dip in the sea to clean off the remaining shit was all that was necessary. YUP! Cheap tat - as see through as a Spice Girl comeback.

We hastened back to the car, got in and drove home.

Length? 3.5 hours there, 40 minutes of sheer (no pun intended) horror, followed by 1.5 hours journey home. Never.Again
( my_cat_has_no_shoes meh meh meh MEH MEH, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 20:05, 2 replies)

One hundred long drinking straws
Made a friend buy them because they were so long, about two and a half foot long. No other reason, other than they were huge.

No good for drinking through though, couldn't suck hard enough to make the drink come up the straw, not to mention the fact that the only way you could use it was to put your drink well out of your arms reach. I think simply using your hands to hold the drink was a better option.
(Stevie Ruggling, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 20:05, Reply)

Cheap CD-Rs
Are a bad idea. I bought a five pack for about $1 (I live in the U.S.) And made a few CDs. Didn't ever listen to them, that was about five years ago.

Went to rip them when I recently got a MS Zune, listened to the mp3s, and realized they sounded like shit. Never buying cheap media again.
(travishayes89 is tired of people starting fights at school., Fri 4 Jan 2008, 19:52, Reply)

I love pound shops
Me,I love poundshops and the "cheaper"shops like lidls and aldi,you get what you pay for,as long you only want to use it once....
I,ve come to the conlusion that pound shops sell thier shite for said price cos whos gonna take it back when it fucks up rather than the manufacturer bin the shite in the first place.
(andycrass loves two hats on, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 19:42, Reply)

Money loss..
I bought some scarecrows from the 99p shop.
The birds just laughed and shat on them.
(davric, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 19:32, Reply)

An insult to hatchets everywhere
One day whilst on the phone to a friend who often goes by the name of Colin, he told me that he was looking to buy an axe in order to chop up some old trees in his garden before they could go on the fire. Since I was already in town, I said I would have a look and see what I could find.

Now, being a studenty type, I was drawn into the emporium of crap that was the local pound shop, where I just happen to find a hatchet. "Aha," thinks I, "why spend lots of money on an axe, when you can get a hatchet for a mere £2?" (why it was £2 in a pound shop I'm not entirely sure. I'm also not sure why they were selling hatchets in a pound shop.)

Anyway, I bought said hatchet and took it to my friends house in order to try it out.

I watched in wonder as Colin raised it up high above his head, and brought it down hard on a log. My look then changed to one of confusion as he lifted the hatchet back up revealing the tiniest of dents in the log, and one very flat hatchet blade. Now I'm not talking slightly blunt, I'm talking about something that now resembled a hammer.

Turns out it made a rubbish hammer too unfortunately, otherwise my faith in pound shops may not have been totally destroyed. Now he just throws it at a telegraph pole instead.

Length? He can hit the telegraph pole from 10 metres.
(PenguinOfDeath is Scottish, and most likely angry, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 18:51, Reply)

hmm
I buy EVERYTHING in Poundland. Therefore, I've got loads of crap stories about it's crapness.

I bought the Hyundai batteries once. They leaked inside my £20 generic japanese mp3 player and it broke :(. Not to worry though, I got another one for free! After that I only commandeered batteries from my school. They used them once in productions and then had to throw them away because they didn't want them to fail at a "crucial" moment. Free batteries!

I'm surprised that OneEyedMonster could even buy a screwdriver to be honest. They got into trouble with Trading Standards or something because they were selling lighters and stuff to under 18s. Even though I'm sure we could legally buy them anyway. The point was, from then on you weren't allowed to buy anything "dangerous" without id. So, of course, we weren't allowed to buy:

• Allen keys
• Screwdrivers
• Silly string
• Airhorns
• Lighters
• A pair of pliers
• Windscreen wash
• A laser level thingy ("you could go out and blind someone with that!")
• And a load more.

In fact, that's a lie. They let me buy the windscreen wash after I pointed out that if I wanted to kill myself, I wouldn't drink Poundland windscreen wash to do it. Although she did say "the receipt's got my name on so I'll rip it up and you can buy it". How incredibly deviously illegal of them. They seem to have given up on enforcing this now though.

Vaguely on topic, who else is annoyed that none of their staff seem to be able to be polite to customers/speak english? There's some woman at my local Poundland called "Gifti" that wouldn't let us buy a basket of airhorns. Couldn't imagine why. I wouldn't really mind usually, but she was really rude about it and then called over the supervisor (who was incredibly obese) to shout at me and my delinquent friends. So of course we got the number of the Croydon branch, got Gifti on the phone (told the person it was a family emergency cos she wouldn't get her otherwise) and taught her how to call the customers "sir". Then we got the supervisor (couldn't remember her name so identified her as the "fat one") and said the same thing but with more shouting. Ahh fun times.

That said, I'm amazed by the cheapness of their CDs (although the DVDs are useless and degrade after a few months) and their card readers and usb hubs are excellent quality. So feel free to call them on 0800 731 5622 and express your satisfaction.

That is all. (apologies for length, it were only a pound)
(tty, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 18:51, 11 replies)

curates egg
Over the years I have for no good reason bought a selection of torque limiting screwdrivers that turn into mush on tightening a screw.

At one point I had one of these and straightened it in the vice then using a blowtorch hardened and blue tempered it ( the bit they misssed at the factory) I probably used more gas than I`d paid for the ruddy thing, I still have it after 20 years and its great for plug screws and electricals.

The only cheap tools that aren`t completely pants are from Lidl or woolworths.( but I`m sure I`ve just been lucky)
I too have had a pair of pliers explode on me, A posi screwdriver that has just sheared off the point in the screw. a toaster from asda that burned little black bands with white bits into bread and many others. Poundland pens are truly magnificent items that protect you from ink stains by not writing.

You really have started one with this !!!!!!!!
PS
Don`t know If I`d trust poundland condoms still It`s your cock and your money and your child support payments.
(tootired Is searching for a funny sig, nothing good so far, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 18:49, 1 reply)

Don't knock on pound shops
I work at poundland. We're not actually that bad.

We sell Porn. And Condoms.

EDIT: And the Porn is Penthouse stuff, the condoms are 12-packs of Durex
( Popidge Last ate a kebab on, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 18:43, 2 replies)