From Underwear To Haircuts: Make It Do Or Do Without

Dan Morelle/Flickr / Creative Commons

'It looked okay to me until my wife came home and said the back didn't look too great.'

"Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do, or do without." People have been living by those words since long before the Great Recession — I first heard them in Maine, probably about the time we were driving a century-old spile into a freshly tapped maple tree. Sugar's free, if you've got time to make it yourself.

From the world today, two new looks at doing more with less:

First, more people are cutting their own hair or getting a family member to do it for them (count me in), which is great until someone goes a little wild with the clippers and lands in the Wall Street Journal.

Second, when times get tough, tough guys stop buying new underwear. The Washington Post reports that the men's underwear index, or MUI, has been falling but lately at a much slower rate. The idea is that since underwear don't show, men who are worried about money will wear a pair until they're in tatters. A spokeswoman for Target says sales have picked up recently, especially sales of multi-pair packs. No less an eminence than Alan Greenspan himself has used the men's underwear index as way to gauge the economy.