You Win Some, You Lose Some, And Then You Win Some

It’s fun being a Frugal, but not all the frugal things I have attempted to do have turned out to have been fun. I’ve had my share of disappointments and just plain failures. Every once in a while I’ll tell you about one, because these things happen. The important thing is to keep going.

Now I will tell you about the Great Ham Disaster of 2007.

I send my husband off to work everyday with a brownbag lunch.  This is usually a sandwich.  Luckily, he really likes bologna, so we have saved some major green over the years with this one frugal strategy.

It’s kind of monotonous to eat bologna for lunch everyday, so I decided I would mix things up a bit.  While out grocery shopping one day at WalMart Neighborhood Grocery, I noticed a 10lb chub of pre-cooked pressed ham for a very good price.  My husband loves ham.  Inspiration struck.  I took it over to the meat counter and asked to have it sliced up.

Well, they wouldn’t do it.  When I asked why not, they said that they just didn’t.  This made me mad, but it was a good deal so I bought it anyway.  I’m pretty handy with a kitchen knife after all.

So I got home, put my groceries away, and immediately wrote a letter to the CEO of Walmart, complaining about this instance of terrible customer service and cc.ing, the store manager.  I named names, but I was polite.  I pointed out that I was a loyal customer, even using their pharmacy.  I told him I spend a lot of my hard-earned money at their store, and they seem pretty willing to take it. If they don’t want to use their meat slicer in the service of their loyal customers, what’s the point of even having it?  I sent that off in the mail (I don’t know if it’s true, but I have a belief that if you take to the trouble to write a real letter to the CEO of a multinational corporation rather then e-mail you’re chances of getting a response are greater), and went back to the kitchen to slice and dice my great deal and freeze it in user-friendly portions.

Uh-oh.  I had a bad feeling.  As I was slicing, I noticed that this ham was really greasy.  I’m not a ham fan (don’t eat pork), so I don’t have a lot of experience with it, but even so, this seemed excessive.

But I forged ahead anyway.  After all, it was already paid for, and besides, my husband likes bologna after all.  He probably would really like this.

Fast forward a few days.  One morning I’m about to make my husband yet another cheap-ham sandwich.  He comes out to the kitchen as I’m doing this.  When he sees what I’m making him for lunch, he gets a funny look on his face. When I asked what was the matter, he said “Nothing.”  A little more pressing and the floodgates opened.  He revealed that he hated that ham.  It was greasy, flabby, and just all-around disgusting.  But he manfully choked it down every day because he didn’t want to waste it.

Oh, boy!  I felt bad! Poor guy!  Surrounded by his fast-food eating colleagues (he loves fast-food), and forced to eat this dreck.  But he did it and didn’t complain.  What a guy! But a man can only take so much.

I sent him to work that day with a bologna sandwich, and re-thought this circumstance. I had 8 1/2 lbs. of disgusting ham taking up valuable space in my freezer.  Well, I thought I could still use it if I was a little creative.

I like to read a lot, and I know that in the old days sauces were frequently used to cover up the fact that foods suffered from a lack of refrigeration.  So I thought I would cook the ham in my slow-cooker doused in lots of homemade barbecue sauce.  This is Texas - everyone love barbecue, right!?!

Well, it was still disgusting.  I gave up.  Sort of.  The fact is, when you have dogs you really don’t have to waste any food.  So my “bargain” ham ended up being occasional doggy treats.  They loved it! It took me about a year of occasional distributions to use it all, but I finally got that meat out of my freezer.

About  a month after purchasing the ham, I finally got a letter back from Walmart.  I was surprised that it wasn’t actually written by the CEO (ha ha), but it was a nice letter of apology.  (But I  did notice  that they didn’t say that they would henceforth be agreeable to meeting all my slicing needs.  Strange.) In addition they sent me a $20 gift card, which meant that ham ended up being free. The ham was less than $10, so I came out ahead in the end.  Go team!