What's the biggest Christmas waste of money?

quartzz

I'll put this here. I bought some [cheap like a budgie] fairy lights from ebay. There were two versions, one was 3x aa battery powered, one was USB powered (easy to search for them if you want to see them). Each had 8 flash modes. the USB powered obviously didn't use up batteries and so would be cheaper to run. But.....the USB powered lights didn't have quite the same flash modes. I wanted to use the "slow" flash modes, but the USB versions "slow" flash mode was slightly quicker than the 3xaa version lights. So I ended up buying 3 of the USB lights for £14, finding they didn't do what I wanted, bought  2x aa powered lights for £15 (I already had some others), which did do what I wanted, then had to supply them with batteries. I ended up not returning the £14 worth of USB lights because sending them back would have cost £3 and it seemed better value spending £14 and getting something, rather than £3 and getting nothing.

plus I had to buy some suction cup hooks to get them attached to the windows (needed 24 of them which cost a total of about £20), and also had tried using mini bulldog clips (£6 for 24) to fix them to the curtains which didn't work

so in the end spent £14 (3xUSB) + £15 (2xaa) + £20 (suction cups) + £6 (bulldog clips) (£55 total) for some random lights which stayed up for 20 days. plus....the batteries to power them. did someone say first world problems.

you can get USB 3xaa battery eliminators for £5 a pop, so in 12 months time I might have another £10, to not need to use up more batteries