When I vacuumed out Tyler's truck last Sunday, I found fourteen Casey's receipts stuffed in the driver's side door pocket. Two slices of breakfast pizza and a big fountain drink, over and over, going back to the middle of April. Each one was $8.46.
I'm not mad about it. Tyler works twelve-hour days at the plant some weeks, and on those days he's out the door at 5:15 in the morning. If he didn't pack a lunch the night before, Casey's is right there on the way. But fourteen stops at $8.46 is $118.44 in about eight weeks, and that was coming out of his spending money and, a couple of times, the grocery line.
So we made a deal. I'd help make lunches easier to pack, and he'd give up the pizza. Here's where we landed.
What a twelve-hour day needs
Tyler is a maintenance tech. He's on his feet all day, climbing, carrying, crawling under machines. A sandwich and a granola bar won't get him to 6 at night. He needs a real lunch and a real afternoon snack, and the food has to hold up in a cooler, because the breakroom fridge is always packed. There's a microwave, but there's also a line for it, so he likes food that's fine cold.
He also told me, very clearly, that he will not eat a salad at work. So no salads.
The lunches he'll actually eat
I worked these out over three weeks of trial and error. The cost is per day and covers his lunch and his afternoon snack, at what we paid at the Walmart in town or the Aldi in Columbia.
- Two ham-and-cheese sandwiches, a banana and chips: $2.31
- Leftover chili in a thermos with crackers and an apple: $2.62
- Rice, beans and a chicken thigh with salsa in one big container: $2.28
- Two bean-and-cheese burritos, which he swears are better cold, and a hard-boiled egg: $2.14
- Pasta salad with salami and cheese cubes, plus a sleeve of crackers: $2.65
Those five come to $12.00 for the week, which is $2.40 a day. Some weeks it's a little more, if the chili ran out early. Some weeks it's a little less, because a pot of something made extra.
The sandwiches look like the expensive one, but they're not. Deli ham from Aldi is about $4.50 a pound, so four ounces is $1.12. Four slices of bread, two slices of cheese, mustard and a banana come to about $0.94, and the chips are a quarter's worth out of a family-size bag.
How we keep it from falling apart
The whole thing works because most of the lunch is made before the night he needs it. On Sunday I boil half a dozen eggs, cook a pot of rice and roll a batch of burritos. Whatever we have for dinner during the week, I make one extra portion and put it straight into his container before it goes in the fridge. He packs the cooler himself at night while I do dishes. It takes him about five minutes.
He has a hard-sided lunch cooler that holds one big container, a thermos and two ice packs. It cost $24 three years ago and is still going. He fills a water jug at home and takes coffee in a second thermos, which used to be another stop on the way in.
The pizza we gave up
If he'd packed on those fourteen Casey's days instead, those lunches would have cost $33.60. That's $84.84 back over eight weeks, or a little over $45 a month.
He hasn't sworn off pizza entirely. When his supervisor buys pizza for the crew on a Friday, Tyler eats it, and I'm not going to argue with free. But the morning stops are done. He says the burritos are "fine," which from Tyler is basically a five-star review.
The $45 a month is going to the house fund. The timing is good, too. He started mowing yards in the evenings this month, so he comes home hungrier than ever, and I've started making the chili in our biggest pot.
