Thrifty Scot

"In Scotland, panic buying of petrol is rampant, with Scots putting in as much as five pounds at the pump."

—Brian Blessed, Have I Got News for You. For reference, £5 is around $8.

Along with being brave and violent, Scottish people are also often stereotyped as being thrifty with their money and belongings. Within Scotland itself, people from Aberdeen may be stereotyped as being especially thrifty. Probably Truth in Television, since Scotland has always been a poor area compared to England, not to mention being considerably less fertile than the south. Thriftiness is a necessity under such circumstances.

In the past this trope was exaggerated into the "Stingy Scot" stereotype, where every Scot was a penny-pincher who'd rather die than open his purse. Since the 1960s, though, the "Stingy Scot" has firmly entered Dead Horse territory and is well on its way to being forgotten.

Examples of Thrifty Scot include:

Comic Books

• Scrooge McDuck hails from Scotland, probably because of his love of money.
• Middenface in Strontium Dog is one of these, and usually asks Johnny for a loan whenever he appears.

Literature

• Flashman's father-in-law is a wealthy Scotsman who does no approve of Flashman's profligate ways and often threatens to stop supplying him with money.
• Laura Ingalls Wilder was of Scottish descent on her mother's side. A couple of times in the books, Pa makes an admiring comment about Ma's Scottish resourcefulness with food when they're living in the middle of nowhere.

Live Action TV

• The "Poet McTeagle" sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus chronicles what are ostensibly the poems of Scotland's greatest poet, but are actually all requests for money.
• Classic Doctor Who serial "Terror of the Zygons" used this stereotype a punchline to the last episode. The majority of the action took place in Scotland but for the finale the action moved to London and at the end the Doctor and Sarah Jane are retrieving the TARDIS. The local duke whom they had rescued then berates the Brigadier (who had been earlier wearing a kilt) for calling himself a Scotsman yet not getting the refund of the return tickets.
• One of the first claims discussed on Would I Lie to You? was from Scottish multimillionaire Duncan Bannatyne of Dragons' Den fame, saying that he'd banned his employees from buying paper clips, forcing them instead to use only the ones that came in with the mail.

Angus Deayton: Lee, what are you thinking about this?
Lee Mack: Well, I have to say, the idea of saving money on paper clips is absolutely ridiculous, although the accent is swinging it a little bit... Okay, we think that's true.
It was true.

Radio

• The characters Hamish and Dougal, created by Graeme Garden and Barry Cryer for the Sound Charades round in I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. The Catch Phrase "You'll have had your tea?" is intended to be heard as "You're not expecting me to feed you, right?"

Stand Up Comedy

• This, combined with Violent Glaswegian, is a major part of Billy Connolly's act. "My uncle once dropped ten pence; he bent over to pick it up, and it hit him in the back of the head."
  • "You may have heard that nasty rumour floating around that copper wire was invented by two Scotsmen fighting over a penny."
  • One time, Connolly was on Conan O' Brien explaining that he once bungee jumped naked on his travel show. Why? The place apparently had a policy that if you jumped completely naked, it was free. When Conan asked why he did this just to save a few tens of dollars, Connolly replied "You'd have to be a Scotsman to understand".

Western Animation

• In Disney's The Wind in the Willows, Angus McBadger is in charge of Toad's finances and thus is very concerned about money. Although Mr Toad being an UpperClassTwit who writes off several expensive cars and racks up an impressive number of fines for speeding and reckless driving in the original canon, he has good reason to worry.
• In the Disney cartoon Pigs Is Pigs (and the short story upon which it's based]), the conflict in the story is partially because the Scottish McMorehouse doesn't want to pay an extra 4 cents to have the guinea pigs shipped as "pigs" rather than as "pets" (probably justified in this case because 4 cents would be a lot of money in 1905).
• In the wartime cartoon "The Spirit of '43", Donald Duck's thrifty side is represented by a Scottish duck.
• In the Looney Tunes cartoon "My Bunny Lies Over the Sea," the Scotsman whom Bugs Bunny messes with is shown as being thrifty. He has only one bullet that he has kept in the family for years, and he is tricked into lowering Bugs' golf score because Bugs makes it seem like an auction and his immediate reaction is to want a lower number.
• The Tex Avery cartoons The TV of Tomorrow and The Car of Tomorrow have a "thrifty Scotchman's model" joke; a flashlight on the former, a pedal-operated car on the latter.

Real Life

• This trope originated in 18th-19th century England, and is a shining example of a stereotype being built upon one population only being exposed to a very specific subset of another population. The Act of Union of 1707 linked the English and Scottish economies in a way they had never been linked before, and more or less eliminated all difficulties in crossing the Anglo-Scottish border by making them, you know, one country. As a result, almost every Scot in Scotland who had a desire to get rich beat a fast path down to southern England, where the wealth was. Needless to say, the English recongized the traits that tend to be typical of such go-getters (including thrift) in these Scots, while failing to see the same traits in themselves...
• A large proportion of the jokes about Gordon Brown while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer played on this trope (ha, ha, the frugal Scot is in charge of the country's finances! It's so funny!). Brown didn't help his case by playing into another stereotype about Scots: that of the "dour Scotsman" who shows no emotion and is consistently gloomy in his mien if not his outlook. The jokes persisted somewhat during his tenure as Prime Minister, given that he was overseeing the country during the financial crisis and money matters were front and center, but strangely, his Chancellor, the equally-Scottish (if born in London) Alistair Darling, did not receive the same treatment.