I got a mailer from Omaha Steaks pitching their “The All American Celebration” package of various meats at a 73% discount, and I’m having a hard time convincing myself to buy that crap again.
Their entire business model seems to be centered around peddling individually frozen cuts of meat at ridiculously inflated prices while competing with themselves by offering equally ridiculous discounts.
This “deal worth celebrating” has five-ounce portions of filet mignon and sirloin, four-ounce pork chops and hamburger patties, some stuffed sole and even potatoes au gratin. They call their three-ounce hot dogs “Gourmet Jumbo Franks.” They’ll even throw in a six-piece cutlery set and cutting board to sweeten the deal. Everything for $79.99.
But wait! There’s a $20 coupon right there at the bottom of the glossy full-color solicitation! It will bring the final cost down to $167 and one cent less than the regular price of $227!
Omaha Steaks, I know you “want me back,” but are you freakin’ kidding me? I fell for this deal once (okay, maybe twice) over the last decade even though I knew I was spending ten bucks a pound for your variety package of utterly average meat, but did you really think I would come back and spend over thirty bucks a pound for more of the same crap? So now you want to pitch me your sucker deal again, like I’m going to come back and spend forty bucks on a pound of frozen T-bone? I’m sure your potatoes are still starch-a-licious, but your bonus knife set sucked! I had to wait until I made a friend who didn’t have any kitchen knives at all before I could unload them!
The best thing, though, was playing with the dry ice. I’ll admit, that was indeed fun. And I kept the big styrofoam box for years until I couldn’t stand living around it anymore. (I’ve had that deep-discount mailer with the super-valuable coupon for a week now, and every time I consider tossing it in the garbage, I think about the practicality of a big styrofoam box and the joys of dry ice.)
My question stands. Who buys all that outrageously priced crap from Omaha Steaks? Generous relatives? Rich invalids? Hermits on mountaintops? Who?
People who don’t know any better and give gift boxes of this junk thinking it will impress would be my guess. I’d be very surprised to find out any significant number of people order from them regularly.
There was a similar service targetted at Japanese people where you could send a very expensive package of frozen steaks to your beef-starved relatives back home. However you could not, at any price, receive one yourself in the US, so you had to trust that it would be edible.
Japanese people are mostly too polite to complain about the quality of a gift, so how would the sender ever know?
None of my Japanese friends had bought it for those reasons.
My mother used to buy from them. The only thing I ever tried was the hamburger which tasted a lot like hamburger. I’m not even of a beefeater to judge steaks if I had tried the other stuff; is it the consensus that they’re just okay? (My mother liked them but thought they were too expensive after the initial couple of orders for which she had coupons.)
There’s certainly nothing wrong with them. I’ve had them before and they’re about as good as what Outback serves. Not fantastic, but at least a bit better than what’s sold at most grocery stores.
My limited experience with their customer service has been excellent. I sent them a note about how one of the steaks in the box wasn’t sealed properly - there was a little air space and even though I said th meat seemed OK, three days later, I had another box of ribeyes.
The person who invented the gift box industry was brilliant.
The paying customer does not mind paying a high price because that implies the quality of the gift will be excellent and they will appear generous. Plus, the person who is paying will most likely never see the actual delivered product, so they will not have a basis to complain about the quality.
The recipient will be happy to get something for free and is therefore unlikely to complain about the quality (who wants to appear ungrateful?), only about gross defects like the improperly sealed steaks a previous poster mentioned.
These companies can stay in business because the cost of gift boxes, the fake easter basket grass they use for packing material, and the sheets of decorative tissue that they use to wrap a couple of apples in a box of twelve hardly makes a dent in the several hundred percent premium that they charge for average quality food items.
If anyone does want to spend a whole bunch of money on really good steaks, I can heartily recommend www.lobels.com or Niman Ranch. Lobel’s is probably slightly higher quality, but Niman Ranch offers sustainable, humane meat from happy cows and pigs.
I’ve had both, and can say it’s well worth the rather hefty price.
I don’t know how they do it, but I pass two Omaha Steak stores on my way into work every day. They must be doing something right.
My one uncle sent us two gift boxes from there, and another sent us a box as well. Maybe they stay in business by selling Gift Boxes to everyone’s uncle. They don’t have to know what size Chateaubriand you take.
My sister said she wanted to buy us a “of the month club” for a gift. We chose breakfast.
So far we’ve gotten three of them, one included shelf stable bacon, which looked really weird but cooked up ok. We’ve had biscuits, beignet mix, various jellies, chocolate fudge, pancakes and syrup. Overall, the quality of the products has been above average.
My wife offhandedly asked if we should continue this service after it runs out and I laughed. “Hell no,” I said. “There’s no way we’re paying $25 for a 12 ounce jar of jelly and a pound of flour.”
I’m sick of all the Obama bashing!! If the guy wants to sell some meat to supplement his pay as President of the U.S., why don’t you right-wing creeps just get off his back and let him go about his business?? Jesus Christ on a cracker!!
My only experience with them is that a friend of mine, when she gets a gift box from her oldest brother who doesn’t really know her all that well she gives me the hot dogs that invariably are included. They’re good hot dogs.
But yeah, there’s a location near me and I don’t know anyone who goes in there except to have an anniversary gift shipped to their parents or some such. No one I know uses it like a regular butcher or even grocery store.
Nitpick: Following the miracle of the Transubstantiation, Jesus Christ is the cracker. There is no point at which He could be said to be on the cracker.
… or you can buy half, or half of a half, of a happy grass-fed dairy steer from a local farmer and have it processed and packaged, and end up with a year’s worth of frozen meat for about $4 a pound. But then, it’s not gift-boxed.
I knew people who ordered from them regularly, for themselves. They were credulous money-wasters who thought it was impressive. They also had ionic air purifiers in every room and the wife wore a mink coat. In Indiana.
My girlfriend will occasionally avail herself of Omooha Steaks for gift boxes for her relatives. The selling point is, she doesn’t have to shop (they have big families), it’s a reliable system, and she usually gets a free pack of hot dogs or a couple of free steaks out of it.
Yeah, they’re mediocre, but free mediocre is still free.
Ouch. You need better meat departments in your grocery stores!
We’ve got people that keep sending us Omaha steaks. They’re pretty ordinary at best, and not nearly so good as what we can find in the grocers, even at our local Pig (Shop the Pig!!)
They’re not bad when used in stews and chowders or stroganoff, though.
The Omaha Steaks website is truly a wonderland of shameless price-gouging.
Just to push the swindle further into the stratosphere, they have this section called “Private Reserve” where the cuts offered “can only be described as perfect.” Filet mignon is “on sale” now for $65 a pound.
There’s even such a thing as “Private Reserve” potatoes that cost over six bucks per “absolutely amazing” pound. For a potato!
If someone sent me a six-dollar potato, I would not be absolutely amazed. I would think they were an idiot.
[hijack] Why wouldn’t one wear a mink coat in Indiana (assuming, that is, that one doesn’t have any ethical objections to animal-fur garments)? Indiana can get pretty damn cold.
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Why wouldn’t one wear a mink coat in Indiana (assuming, that is, that one doesn’t have any ethical objections to animal-fur garments)? Indiana can get pretty damn cold.