Office is having a company potluck and I was assigned to bring chips and dip since I wasn’t willing to make anything myself. It’s for about 30 other people. We were given no money amount required so my immediate response is to buy six “party sized” bags of Walmart brand chips for $2 each, then four jars of Walmart branded salsa for $2.50 each. I got two bags of their Ruffles equivalent, two bags of their brand of Mexican tortilla chips, a bag of their version of Salt and Vinegar chios and their version of Cheetos. Similarly the salsa are all Walmart branded salsa, I got Mild, Medium and Hot, and then one jar of Jalapeno Queso. I also bought for 99 CENTS each a can of slice jalapenos and a can of nacho cheese sauce. Everything will be self serve.
Am I a jerk for deliberately spending as little as possible?
No-You are a hero for buying as much as possible with that much money. Also, once the chips are transferred to a bowl and the dip to a condiment dish they automatically become premium quality snacks.
Also, a point of order: you spend 25 bucks on chips and dip - you could easily do a respectable potluck dish for less than that. You may not be ‘putting in the work’ to cook, but you definitely haven’t cheaped out.
That would have meant buying the minimum amount of chips possible. You did the opposite.
The only thing I would say is that often the cheap Cheetos knock-offs taste weird. The rest you probably couldn’t tell are generic. But people might not like the Cheetos knockoff. It’s the one chip (besides regular Doritos) where I tend to get the name brand.
But I still don’t fault you for the store brand. You b(r)ought a lot of food.
Back when my workplace had regular potlucks, most would go all out with homemade dishes. Those who did not or could not cook would bring a fancy bakery cake or something else store-bought but appropriate.
One person - and she did this every time - would bring a single, 2-liter bottle of a non-name brand soda. Often it proudly displayed its low price as part of the label - I think it was 79 cents at the time.
And yeah, she was usually first in line, filling up her plate to the edges. It became a running joke.
Pretty much, yeah, you’re a jerk. You don’t provide many details about the potluck, but I’m guessing that it was the office Christmas party; in other words a celebratory event. You had a chance to show your work colleagues how well you regard them by doing your best to bring in a festive dish. You weren’t willing to cook anything, so you were given a fallback of buying chips and dips. And you brought in Walmart chips and dips. You basically sent a message to your colleagues that you’re cheap and you don’t value their relationship with you.
In my opinion, the great majority of store-brand stuff is just as good as the name-brand stuff. Yes, some of them are crap, but some of the name-brand stuff is crap too. So my advice is like most of the other posters (that buying lots of cheap stuff is a good idea) PROVIDED that you stick to stuff that you have personally bought in the past, so you know that it is at least average quality.
ignore this, look upon it as an edible Rorschach test. Those people who interpret your gesture in this way are exactly those that deserve to feel that they’ve been slighted somehow and you could certainly question if a relationship with such a person has any value.
Bring enough food that, if I ate all of it, I’d be really full. If everyone follows this rule, there’ll be enough food for everyone, even if some folks eat more than others. Six party-sized bags blows WAY past this rule, even without the dips.
Bring food that’s not especially challenging–nothing too stinky or strange-looking. It’s okay if other folks do, but I want my food eaten, not suspected. Chips & dip definitely follow this rule.
Don’t be a judgy asshole about what others bring. Sure, I might like to bake fresh biscuits for the potluck or make my warm spicy pimento cheese, but not everyone enjoys cooking, and that’s just fine.
If your office potluck has turned into a competition where you are looked down on if you don’t bring expensive and high-class enough food, something has gone wrong. I would want to get out of that office if that happened. If it’s literally true that you are in trouble if you don’t spend enough time and money on food, you should think of it as being part of the equation of whether the job is acceptable. The money you get for your job is then your salary for the year minus the money you have to spend on food each year. The amount of time you work at your job each year is then the amount of time you work at the office each year plus the amount of time you have to spend on preparing food each year. Think about that when you compare your job to other jobs.
I bring chips and dip frequently to office potlucks, so I’ve decided to make my own salsa. It’s a combination of red and green salsas. It also has various fruit flavors.
So, question to the OP: did you actually put forth any effort at all? Your post says:
So maybe that’s inability, maybe it’s disinterestedness, or maybe it’s just laziness. None are appealing qualities, but they’re human fallacies that everyone experiences. The usual way around those fallacies is to buy your way around them - to pay someone else to put forth the effort you’re unwilling to provide. Or, if you can’t, then you decline to attend the gathering, and don’t cheapskate on your colleagues.
The way I read your OP, you couldn’t be bothered to cook something, and when given a non-cooking option, chose to deliver that option in a cheap way. Did most of your colleagues deliver low-effort, cheap dishes? Novelty_Bobble seems to believe that as long as you’ve made a minimal effort, that’s sufficient and no one should expect more. The thing is, if everyone makes a minimal effort, you’re going to have a pretty lousy potluck or whatever else collaborative enterprise you’re trying to accomplish.
There are store brands and then there are crappy brands. I’m not a chip snob, and as long as they’re fresh, I really don’t care about the brand. So I wouldn’t care in the least about your contributions.
Eons ago when I was still working and we did these office meals, I had a Filipino coworker who used to bring amazing dishes that he made himself. Meanwhile, one guy would bring a bag of napkins, and maybe paper plates. And guess who was in the front of the line?
So the first guy got fed up one year, and he brought in a bag of really, really generic animal crackers with bilious pink icing as a mini-protest. I don’t know if Cheap Guy noticed, but I thought it was great!
Honestly, what I thought was the jerkiest thing: the men expected the women to do all the clean up. But that’s another thread…
The OP stated they were assigned to bring chips and dips, that seems to suggest that chips and dips were a welcome addition to the party, that being the case I can’t imagine people are going to be disappointed that they have supermarket salt and vinegar rather than swan and truffle flavour.
It seems to me the problem with bringing commercially produced stuff to a pot luck is the transparency. Everybody pretty much knows what you spent (Hmmm, five two liters of Coke? That’s around $8) and how much effort it actually involved (practically none.)
OTOH, make something from scratch and nobody really knows or cares. I mean, yeah, you decide to bring something based on crab and people know you probably spent $$$ and a ton of work if you cooked and picked the crabs yourself. But you bring your granny’s “secret” chicken-rice casserole? Who really knows? Maybe it took one rotisserie chicken and a box of Minute Rice plus a few spices? Maybe it took two days of marinating the chicken in a forty ingredient mix plus rare and pricy add-ins? No one knows for sure, and nobody cares so long as it tastes acceptably good.
At my first summer job while I was in college I ‘had’ to bring something to the company picnic. It cost me something like 85 cents for a three pound bag of potatoes plus half a jar of mayonnaise (I think it was around $1.50 for the whole jar) plus some grated onion and some other bits not worth pricing out. It made a reasonably huge bowl of potato salad, took way less than a hour to make (not counting the time I was just waiting for the potatoes to cook, since I could do other stuff while that happened), and the whole bowl vanished and people seemed happy.
Learn to cook a couple of quick dishes that involve cheap ingredients. It can save you a ton of money over the years.
