Food | Budgeting In the Fun Stuff

Tipping after a Bad Experience

October 19, 2011, at 6:00 am

I’ve always been a fair tipper at restaurants, but I’ve noticed that I’ve started tipping even more lately. When I was in college, I made sure to leave 10% for mediocre service, 15% for good service, and 18%-20% for great service. Those were my tipping numbers for the last 10 years. But lately I find myself almost pitying waitstaff. I actually sit there thinking, “That poor person has been on their feet waiting on all of us for hours…I don’t think I could pull that off…” and my tips have been around 20%-25% most of the time.

Our Visit to Outback Steakhouse

My husband actually pointed my new tipping standards out to me when we were eating out this past weekend. We had a gift card to Outback Steakhouse so we decided to make a date night out of it. They sat us immediately, but it took 15 minutes before anyone bothered to take our drink order. It took another 10 minutes to get our drinks (apparently because the wildberry lemonade on their menu is pretty hard to make…yeah, right).

They took our food order when they delivered the drinks. I ordered a medium 6 oz sirloin with a small portion of Mahi (fish) and a baked potato. My husband ordered a medium-rare 10 oz ribeye with mashed potatoes. We got served about 20 minutes later. My husband’s ribeye was perfect but my sirloin was gray inside and the fish was so overcooked it was rubbery. I very politely pointed out the problems to our waiter and asked if he could possibly at least have a new piece of fish thrown on the grill since I could deal with the steak but the fish was inedible. He agreed and took my plate.

A few minutes later, the manager came by and apologized for the mistakes. He ensured me they were recooking me steak and fish to order. Then the waiter came by again to apologize as well. I said it wasn’t a big problem and thanked them both. Then I sat there and watched my husband eat for 15 minutes and ate yet another tiny loaf of the rye bread I adore.

My food was redelivered by yet another employee and they asked if I could cut into it to make sure it was great. It was perfect, so I dug in. While chewing, the manager and waiter came by yet again to make sure everything was okay. I nodded, swallowed, and thanked them. I then asked if refills were free on the lemonade but the waiter said no. I cannot believe I paid $2.50 for a single lemonade. Oh well.

Our Tipping Compromise

I was pretty full from the food I already had eaten – the bread, baked potato, and about 10 bites of steak and fish - and ready to go home since we had been there for more than an hour and a half, so I asked for a to-go box and the bill. I handed over our gift card to cover the $33 tab. When I went to leave a tip, I was about to write in $40 total and my husband pointed out that would be about 20%. I asked what he would tip and he said $3 since they made us wait 25 minutes for drinks and screwed up my entire order so I sat there watching him eat. I argued that they were really nice about correcting my order, and we compromised at 15%.

How Do You Tip?

I have been thinking about this since then (not alot, but enough to write this post, lol). What is the proper way to handle tipping when service sucked but they tried to correct it? Do you agree with what has been in the back of my mind – they should have given me another lemonade? I know it’s funny, but that ticked me off more than messing up my meal…

What would you have tipped? Do you have the tendency to overtip like me?

Financing Food and Fun for $20

October 11, 2011, at 6:00 am

This is a guest post from Jana, who blogs at Daily Money Shot about the intersection of money, life, relationships, pop culture, and all things in between.

When I was in graduate school, I was living with my then-boyfriend in a small apartment near campus. I was working as a research assistant making a paltry $11K per year and he was a lab tech making about $20K. We usually had enough to pay our bills, buy some food, go to the movies and, of course, drink. We had our priorities in place.

Broke and No Food

There was one week, though, where funds ran low. Really low. That same week, food ran low. Really, really low. Low to the point that we had literally nothing to eat in the house. There were some pretzels, water, and condiments in the fridge. And payday was 3 days away. So we did what any young, starving couple would do. We scavenged for loose change.

We left no stone unturned. We were checking couch cushions, underneath floor mats in our cars, in the cup holders, our wallets, pockets, the bottom of my purse—everywhere. We put it all in a cup and drove to our local supermarket to use the CoinStar, not caring that the machine took out 8.5% of every dollar we put in. We just knew we needed to eat. And drink.

Our Priorities

You see, one part of the story that I left out was the fact that Thursday nights was the best night to go out in our town. It was mug night at The Stone Balloon (RIP, Stone Balloon) which meant that beer was $.50 per mug in our reusable Stone Balloon mugs and if we got there before 9PM, it was free to get in. Also, Thursday nights had the best bands so we were not missing it.

So there we are in the supermarket with approximately $20 in hand. We knew we needed food but it was mug night! So what did we do? Nope, we didn’t buy healthy, nutritious food and sit in our apartment. No, we stood in the middle of the supermarket and did some creative, on-the-spot budgeting.

Our $20 Budget

This is what our budget looked like (the prices are a rough estimate and they are from 11 years ago):

$2 pasta and sauce– $18 remaining
$1 frozen vegetables– $17 remaining
$1 English muffins — $16 remaining
$2 peanut butter– $14 remaining
$0 cover charge (see above re: arriving before 9PM)–$14 remaining
Me: 5 beers x $.50 + tips=$5– $9 remaining
Him: 7 beers x $.50 + tips=$7–$2 remaining

We could do it! We could get food and go drinking! It was a huge victory for us, and I’m pretty sure we spent that last $2 on some sort of edible item (probably apples or bananas).

Pros of that Budget

While it may not have been the most responsible way to handle our money, it did highlight some strengths.

One, we showed that we could accomplish everything we wanted because we were on a budget. We recognized how much money we had and we made our choices fit into that money.
Two, we showed that in a desperate time, we were able to pool our resources and get through the situation because we worked together. Had we not been a team, we would not have been able to accomplish the goals of eating and having a good time.
Three, as irresponsible, fun loving 22 year olds, we recognized our priorities and spent the money on that instead of wasting money on stuff that wasn’t important. Going out was more important so we reserved the money for that rather than food.
And four, by beating cover and buying food that would last more than one meal, we maximized the money that we had available to us. While these are small cost-cutting measures, they made all the difference.

While our logic might have been flawed, and our priorities slightly off, we made it through. And I’m happy to report that since that day, I’ve never again been in that situation. But having this story in my past makes me proud of how far I’ve come, not only in my ability to budget and plan during each pay period, but in that I’ve learned to reorganize my priorities so that I don’t have to choose between food and fun.

And the band we went to see that night? Totally worth it!

Crystal’s Comments: I know what you all may be thinking – sheesh, how about using that $20 for food for the next week or two? BUT, as Jana said, she and her boyfriend had different priorities back then. That said, in my opinion, it was great that they worked together to stretch their $20 budget to cover their normal Thursday out and some food to last them 3 days until they were paid. I remember having slightly different priorities than them in college – like food, dating, and Dungeons and Dragons – but I was proud of myself for making that work in a budget too. Thanks Jana for an entertaining post!

What were your spending priorities in college other than the basics? What do you think of Jana’s story?

Eating Healthy on a Budget

September 21, 2011, at 6:00 am

When we first joined Weight Watchers Online, we went nuts with only name brand expensive foods that were diet-friendly. I sort of overlooked the wide variety of regular foods that would work just fine and keep my grocery budget from exploding. We have now been on Weight Watchers for more than 6 months, and here are the diet friendly foods that we enjoy that also don’t break the bank:

Breakfast

Honey Nut Cheerios – $6 for a double box from Sam’s Club
Eggs – $1.50 on a bad day for a dozen
Turkey bacon (12 slices) - $2 a package

Lunch

Smart Ones frozen dinners (great for lunch and I like them a lot) – $1.50 – $2.25 each
Progresso soups (2 servings) - $0.80 a can
Leftovers – negligible

Dinner

Lean Turkey (93% fat free) – $2.89 a pound on sale and we stock up
Chicken breast – $2 – $3 a pound
Tilapia – $3 a pound on a bad day
Frozen green beans – $1 a pound

Snacks

Sugar Free Jello – $0.50 for 8 servings
Bananas – $0.45 a pound
Green seedless grapes – $1 a pound right now
Nectarines – $1.30 a pound
Plums – $1 a pound

Since our diet assigns a certain number of points to each food, we actually eat a ton of different things, but the options above are great fall backs to conserve as many points as possible.

A normal week day for me would be:

1 cup of Honey Nut Cheerios
1/3 cup of whole milk
Banana
Smart Ones lunch
Nectarine
Grilled chicken breast
1 cup green beans
1 cup rice or chopped roasted potatoes
Sugar free jello or 4 ounces of frozen yogurt
Sweets to finish off any points I have left

Overall, my husband and I usually spend about $15 jointly on food a day as our average. Some days will be $10 and some will be $20. Overall, we try to keep ourselves fed on $500 a month but have strayed up to $650 before and down to $350 before. It all depends on what we want to eat on a given day, lol.

How do you eat healthy on a budget?

Restaurant Menu Tricks to Get More of Your Money

May 10, 2011, at 6:00 am

MikeS forwarded me a really interesting article, Tricks of the Restaurant Trade: 7 Ways Menus Make You Spend. I knew that restaurants wanted their food to entice you to spend, but I never actually thought about the menu layout being a part of that technique before.

Here is my take on the 7 different marketing techniques mentioned:

1. First in show. Many restaurants group their offerings under the obvious headings: pasta, beef, seafood, entrees, appetizers and so on. Testing has shown that if you decide on chicken, you are more likely to order the first item on the chicken list. That’s where a savvy restaurant will place its most profitable chicken dish.

Okay, I must be one of the weird ones, because I look at pretty much everything when eating out and then narrow it down to my 2-3 top choices. From my most recent experiences, I can honestly say that I have yet to pick the first item on any list. My husband’s eye rolls can confirm that too.

I can also say that I will never pick sweetbreads. Not ever.

2. Menu Siberia. Unprofitable dishes, like a seafood combo plate that require expensive ingredients, and lots of work, are usually banished to a corner that’s less noticeable or in a multi-page menu stashed on page five.

That makes sense to me. Although, if there is a main course or side dish that you rather not mess with, why put it in the menu at all? My best guess is that they don’t want to lose the business of those few people willing to order the banished items.

3. Visual aids. If you draw a line around it, people will order. That’s why many menus box off something they want to promote.

I will admit that the little dashed box around a restaurants steak selection does draw my eye. BUT, I will still look at everything else so I’ll know I am ordering my best option at the time. Sometimes the steak wins, but usually it’s a soup and salad combo or grilled meat of some sort…

4. Package deals. So you stop by McDonald’s for a mid-afternoon burger. When you get to the counter, however, what’s really in your face are photos of Extra Value Meals.

My husband used to fall “victim” to this all of the time. Now that we are on Weight Watchers, we rarely ever want the fries and the drink, so we are saving a little more when we do decide to splurge on fast food.

5. Dollar-sign avoidance. Focus groups who’ve been asked to opine on menus display an acute discomfort with dollar signs and decimals. Keeping money as abstract as possible makes spending less threatening.

I have seen this at all of our favorite once-a-year expensive restaurants. I’m sorry but not placing a dollar sign next to the “15″ or “40″ doesn’t fool me. I know I am paying $15 for a really great salad and $40 for a Brazilian meat buffet. Call me crazy, but it actually annoys me since it seems incomplete without the dollar sign – still expensive, yet incomplete. Maybe that’s just the personal finance geek in me though…

6. The small plate-large plate conundrum. A restaurant may offer two chicken Caesar salads, one for $9 and one for $12. You may think that you’re getting a break ordering the small one, but, says Ez, that’s really the size they want to sell. And if a diner decides, hmmm, I may as well get the larger one because I’ll never get rich saving three bucks, the restaurant will throw on some extra lettuce, making the price differential almost pure profit.

This one confuses me a little. If the restaurant will make almost pure profit from selling the larger plate, than why is the small plate the one they really want to sell?

7. Ingredient embroidery. Foodie-centric restaurants practically list the recipe for each dish making each ingredient sound ultra-special.

Again, I’ve noticed this all over and it annoys me. First of all, I don’t like them trying to describe a basic ingredient like it is made of gold. Secondly, they sometimes start calling an ingredient by a special name that I don’t know so I want to skip it altogether. Maybe I am just an odd duck…

Which one of these restaurant menu tricks may work on you? Which ones don’t?

Are Your Food Costs Rising?

March 8, 2011, at 6:00 am

Mr. BFS picked up some salmon last week for dinner and it was running $9.99 a pound! I know salmon is an expensive fish, but we still can usually get it for less than $8 a pound on a bad day. So I took a closer look at our past few grocery receipts. The price of healthy groceries and some others all went up.

Everything seems to be going up except for dairy items like milk and cheese. Our eggs were 20-30 cents more than usual, the frozen fruit was an extra 50 cents a pound, and even the one case of Diet Cherry 7-Up was a smidge more expensive. What’s going on?

I know gas prices zoomed up because of the unrest overseas, but what’s causing almost all food prices to rise too? Is it the extra cost of gasoline for the delivery trucks? I sort of hope so.

If I have to suck up an extra $50 a month in gas and food costs while Libyans kick out a dictator, I’ll consider it a donation to the effort. If prices are rising just because they think our recovering economy can take it, I am going to be ticked off.

If food prices and gas prices start rising to the point they were in 2008, this is going to drain away a little of our savings power. Even if I use as many grocery tips as I can, we’ll still be paying through the nose for the basics. I remember paying nearly $4 a gallon for gas and the same for milk. I rather not go through a repeat performance.

I know we aren’t being hit as hard as others since we don’t have to buy as much gas with our Prius and Aveo, but it still hurts. Food hurts even more since we are grocery shopping way more now that we are on Weight Watchers Online. In fact, 20 cents here and 30 cents there could easily add an extra $50 to our monthly grocery bills all by itself since we are eating through a small cart of groceries every week – especially fruit.

UPDATE: I wrote this post last week. Now our gas is at $3.40 a gallon and milk has gone from $2.50 a gallon to $3.29 a gallon! OUCH!

Are food costs rising in your area too? How bad is your gas? We’re at about $3.15 per gallon right now…

Living Cheaply in College

March 2, 2011, at 6:00 am

Thousandaire wrote a post last week, Living Gas Tank to Gas Tank, that just hit the rewind button in my brain and I started thinking about living cheaply in college.

Like a lot of college kids, I was living as cheaply as possible. I shared a 2 bedroom apartment with 3 other ladies for $288 a month. I cringed if I ever had to turn on my car. I also spent the last 3 years living on $2-$3 a day for food.

Comparing that life less than 10 years ago to the one I’m living now is like comparing a Chevy Aveo to a stretch limo. Seriously.

Here was a normal daily menu for me in 2003 when living cheaply:

Breakfast – Banana or an off-brand granola bar
Lunch – Peanut Butter and Strawberry Jam Sandwich (I still love these, lol)
Dinner – Bean burrito from Taco Bell, another sandwich, a bowl of cereal, OR I sponged off others that freely shared (thank you to everyone who ever fed me!)
Snacks – Nothing or sponging again

Here is a normal daily menu for me now in 2011 when not living as cheaply (now that I’m on Weight Watchers…last year’s menu was way bigger and had less fruit, lol):

Breakfast – Banana AND a bowl of cereal
Lunch – a Smart Ones or Lean Cuisine meal or leftovers
Dinner – Grilled lean meat (steak or chicken usually), some form of potato or starch, and a huge helping of a green vegetable (we are big on green beans right now)
Snacks – Fruit, baked chips, and/or a granola bar

Yep, I went from less than $3 a day to at least $5-$8 a day in less than 10 years. And I very rarely regret it. It is nice to have enough money to spend on better food without giving up our savings goals. I truly am thankful for where I am today but living cheaply is the only reason we’ve been able to get this far this fast.

Do you remember living cheaply or even cheaper? What are you thankful for today? If you are having a cruddy day, sorry for bringing all this up…

Lean Turkey Costs How Much?!

January 17, 2011, at 9:00 am

As you may have read, my husband and I joined Weight Watchers. They assigned each of us a certain amount of daily food points. In an effort to conserve as many of our assigned points as possible, my husband decided to buy us some 99% lean ground turkey instead of the regular 93% lean stuff. Do you know how much that stupid turkey cost?! $12 for 2.5 pounds!!! Almost $5 a pound! I am sorry, but that is nuts.

After a few minutes of questioning my husband’s sanity followed by a few more minutes of just being ticked off, I asked my mother why the heck super lean ground turkey possibly costs so much. She then explained that turkey has to be put through the meat grinders twice as often as beef since turkey has tougher “fibers”. Plus, 99% lean means that we bought pure ground turkey breast instead of a jumble of turkey meat. That makes me feel a teeny-tiny bit better.

Okay, that sort of makes sense…but come on! $5 a pound?! We can’t afford that on a regular basis. How many people can?

A closer inspection of the final bill also made me realize that we paid $3.19 for a small package of Fat Free Shredded Cheddar. Last week he paid $3 a pound for grapes ($8 total for 2-3 days worth of grapes…). Not only am I scared to ever let Mr. BFS shop for us again, but I am extremely worried that I cannot afford to eat much healthier. Regular $77 grocery bills for 3 bags of food is just not going to happen.

Here’s my current plan of attack:

Reduce portion sizes to ACTUAL portion sizes.
Leave out the higher point ingredients whenever possible.
Save up my 7 daily “extra” points for the weekends since I don’t want to give up potlucks.
Cry/whine a little about the $8 grapes and $12 turkey.
Convince hubby that the 93% lean ground turkey at $2.30 a pound is nearly as great…we talked and he said “okay”, but he used his pouty voice…grrr…

*Update* Jennie O’s 99% lean turkey was $6 a pound but HEB’s brand was $3.50 (hubby just didn’t look)…much more reasonable, but still a little crazy to me. How are you coping with food prices? Are you also avoiding some healthier options since the price is so high?

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