What Happened When I Tried To Get Everything Free For A Week

Sometimes it seems like everyone has a trick up their sleeve to save cash. Some people use their student ID for discounts years after graduation. Others complain about the sound at theaters for free tickets (ahem, Broad City). We've even heard of makeup customer con artists who buy expensive cream, take it home, swap it with Ponds, and return it the next day complaining about "reactions."

To test the waters of the land of the free, I tried out one tactic every day for a week. Does dumpster diving really work? How about returning used clothes at a high-end department store? Is it easy to get free samples at the mall? Click through to see whether these experiments were successes or failures. These are not recommendations by any means, nor are they surefire wins. But if you yourself are a dumpster diving freegan who manages to snag $10 of juice? No judgment.