Arabic has a saying, rajaʿa bi-khuffay Hunayn — "he came back with the two slippers of Hunayn" — meaning someone returned from an enterprise with nothing at all.

The story inside

Hunayn was a cobbler. A Bedouin haggled over a pair of slippers and left without buying them. The cobbler took a shortcut, dropped one slipper on the road ahead, then dropped the second some distance further. The Bedouin saw the first, thought it a pity it was not a pair, and rode on. Then he saw the second, dismounted and walked back for the first — and returned to find his camel and goods gone.

Why compression works

Nobody using the phrase today needs the story. The saying carries the meaning on its own, and it carries it more efficiently than any explanation would. But the story is why the phrase has an emotional colour that "he got nothing" lacks: there is a particular flavour of loss in it, the loss that comes from your own greed being played against you.

This is what an idiom is for. It is a pointer into shared memory, and it works because the culture holds the referenced material even after most speakers have forgotten it.