get one's money's worth

To get a proportionate or sufficient level of satisfaction on one's investment of money, time, effort, etc., in an item, event, or activity. Admission to the museum was so expensive that I felt like I had to stay all day just to get my money's worth. We certainly didn't get our money's worth out of that toy—it broke in a day! Suzie is really trying to get her money's worth out there on the playground—she's playing hard!

Receive good value, as in They performed four extra songs, so we really got our money's worth, or We got our money's worth at the beach-there wasn't a cloud in the sky. This expression often but not always refers to a monetary expenditure.

To obtain full value for something. This term actually dates back as far as the fourteenth century, and from that time on there are numerous appearances in print citing the legal exchange of “money or money-worth”—that is, payment is to be made in cash or its equivalent worth. It is spelled out in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (2.1), in which the King of Navarre explains that, in surety of the hundred thousand crowns still owing, “one part of Aquitaine is bound to us, although not valued to the money’s worth.” The precise modern wording dates from the nineteenth century. The English scholar Benjamin Jowett wrote (1875), “I give my pupils their money’s worth.”