I get Harry & David gifts for my parents. My dad loves their specialty jellies and jams, which you’d have to go to a specialty store to find anyway – blackberry, boysenberry, other oddballs. And their fresh fruit, while quite overpriced, is also fabulous.
(although my 3yo niece was not impressed that Uncle Lightray got grandma fruit for her birthday: “Fruit! I mean, what the heck! Birthday fruit, what the heck!”)
Because it looks pretentious and offputtingly out-of-place there; absolutely nobody has them. It doesn’t even impress people there, it just looks weird. Yes it gets cold. You wear a down parka.
Vermont Country Store sells ridiculously priced food items, too. They do have a couple of jellies that are hard to find, like beach plum, but any good sized grocery store has shelves full of all kinds of jellies and preserves, store brand to goor-may, that are a lot cheaper. But it’s the gift thing, again - ‘we have to send them SOMETHING - how about a selection of jams from this catalog?’
I have received a box of Harry & David pears at Christmas from my brother. I got the impression he was buying ‘gift towers’ for business people gifts and just tacked on a box of pears for me. ‘Cool, that takes care of my sister, now for Al Jones at Acme, Inc., how about …’. :rolleyes:
And I have a good friend, she and husband retired, who LOVE Omaha steaks and order boxes and boxes. I don’t know where they get the money, maybe they buy them with a credit card. She shops shops shops SHOPS every day, it’s not like she doesn’t have time to drive to a meat market and buy stuff there.
My husband’s company sent him an Omaha Steaks gift box last Christmas. It consisted of 4 steaks & a cheesecake. I’m sure the company paid far too much for it, but it was an easy gift for them. Just order up a bunch of gift boxes, provide addresses, and they’re off. Easy for the company, appreciated by the staff.
I think part of the allure IS the exhorbitant price. It gives the illusion of quality, and brand snobs can feel superior when gifting them.
'Kay, I guess it must have something to do with where she is in Indiana. Because there are several fur stores in Indianapolis and other Indiana cities, and I presume the reason they stay in business is because some Indianans do buy, and presumably wear, fur coats.
When we’ve gotten them they were corporate gifts, usually from my husband’s bosses. I did buy a gift pack once as an additional Xmas gift for my sister and her husband. They had both been laid off and money for basics was tight, and I did not know him very well beyond knowing he liked to barbeque. She says he was very happy with it and so were the dogs.
They are utterly average. If your local grocery doesn’t have a good beef selection (and I agree, many don’t), Costco always has good beef at reasonable prices. Plus, you can often find prime cuts, which most supermarkets (besides Whole Foods) usually don’t. Your better supermarkets will also have dry aged beef–I don’t seem to recall Costco having dry aged, but I may be mistaken.
Yep, we still have the cooler, too. Their potatoes au gratin are great - I once stopped by the store just to get those, like a damn vegetarian or something.
I had a friend who used to buy from them. They guy came to the house and sold them all of this food, but darn it, they didn’t have the freezer space to store it all. Oh, and you’re not going to cook those high-quality steaks on THAT grill are you? You need a much better, nicer grill to do these babies justice.
So they signed up for the payment plan for the grill and the stand-up freezer. At about a 200% mark up from what he could’ve bought at Home Depot or Sears.
No argument there. I’m not even sure if the local grocery store has a butcher, or if meat is delivered pre-cut and the “butcher” is just packaging it.
I pine for the days when I was able to go to the store and get two inch-thick ribeyes or whatever cut to order, but this place seems to be a culinary black hole.
Interesting comment regarding beach plum jelly. I live on Cape Cod, and the beaches here are covered with beach plum bushes. It is just a wild plum-small, and tasteless-cultivated plums are much better.
Tourists seem to go gaga over the stuff-why, I have no idea.
To me, they are almost tasteless.
We send them as gifts a half dozen times a year as a way to say, “Wish we lived near enough to you to have dinner together for ___ occasion.” We buy them in a way w/ discount codes and the like that we wind up paying a fraction of the listed price and about what you’d spend in a store. Plus, free sturdy-enough-to-be-a-stool cooler and hours of fun w/ the dry ice! Win win!
They are also quick to fix any issue as was noted in a previous post. A bag of au gratin had a hole in it and a new box was shipped out that day.
