Thursday, January 8, 2009

Resolution Update

So far so good on my New Year's resolution related to spending less on food. I'm four days into the work week and I've spent $15.17. Best of all, I've avoided table service meals altogether. I'm in the cafeteria having "lunch" right now at a cost of $2.06. I'm eating a cup of pudding the size of beer stein and drinking a cup of water (I had a big bowl of oats for breakfast). Miraculously, I was not charged for the water. Maybe there's a new system set up by my company where the cost was automatically deducted from my paycheck. You think I'm kidding? Get a load of yesterday's meal in the cafeteria:
  1. 1 dinner roll
  2. 1 order chicken tenders (3 small tenders, each the size of a roll of quarters)
  3. 1 order potatoes, mashed
  4. 1 cup pudding w/ whipped cream and crumbled up cookies on top
  5. 1 cherry coke zero (bottle)
Before my 20% employee discount, this meal was...wait for it...$9.18. As you can see, my employee discount makes our cafeteria's food merely exorbitant, but just short price-gouging. During the summer, my co-workers and I save money by eating at the local amusement park. Seriously, this meal should cost about $6 at most regardless of any discount. It's not like my company employees topless waitresses. Hell, we have plastic cutlery.

As it happens, there's a McDonald's on our campus. Now, while McDonald's doesn't serve mashed potatoes or dinner rolls, if I' d purchased the exact meal there substituting Super Size fries for mashed potatoes and, say, a box of cookies instead of the dinner roll, this meal would've cost less than $7 and it would've come brightly packaged and served to me by a surly teenager of indeterminate ethnicity. Anyway, I guess I'm going to have to start eating my fatty meals at McDonald's, which seems counterintuitive to the mission of most health care systems, or so I'm told by the one I work for.

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