You can pretty much guarantee that anyone coming to your door and offering you a good deal because they were already working in the neighborhood is a scammer. As others have noted, it is done to create a sense of urgency and to cover up the fact that they are just going door-to-door cold calling, and to give the impression that your neighbor trusts the workmanship/goods/service so you should too.
To put it another way, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Words to live by.
Chances are the meat was stolen, or couldn’t be sold under regulations, if it exists. One scam is to offer a freezer full of meat, which they will neatly carry in and pack in your freezer down in the basement, carefully following your direct instructions on how to place everything in the freezer, while one of the their confederates ransacks your home. Don’t expect to find real meat in the freezer either. Or they might just be checking to see if you have cash on you before they hit you on the head and take it. The odds of coming out of this situation intact are pretty low.
These are the kind of guys who would be carnies in the old days.
I miss the circus.
Look, they’re not going to conduct a home invasion robbery. If they wanted to pull a home invasion, they’d just pull a home invasion. This is exactly what it sounds like–a guy going door to door trying to sell you overpriced dubious meat by tricking you into thinking you’re getting a great deal that’s only available if you act now.
Infected meat does not necessarily look rotten or otherwise decayed, it can and has killed people.
If meat has been frozen and then thawed out, it should never be refrozen.
If this is what has been sold to you at the door then you might not live to regret it.
I don’t know. He’s been here twice. The first time I was home alone and it was just after we moved in, so I didn’t know if he was a neighbor or a local businessman. I told him I’d have to talk to my husband and kept the black-and-white photocopy he showed me of our “aerial” photo. The last time was just a year ago and he caught my husband out in the yard. My husband pointed out to him where the camera operator stood to take the photo, laughed at him, then said we weren’t interested and sent him on his way.
I did ask one of my neighbors about him after the first incident and the neighbor didn’t know anything about it.
With that profit margin, I suppose it’s worth it to drive around a bit and try to make random sales, but I think I could hire somebody to fly me over to take my own actual aerial photo for less than $400!
Yeah, probably you could. But why you would want to… I mean I guess if you had “an estate” type of home an aerial view might be the kind of thing you’d want a framed print of… but for your average house in the suburbs or along a rural street? And even less so if you’re in a city! Just seems like an odd thing to sell!
And doesn’t Google have pretty good satelite photos?
Not good enough for a reasonable-sized enlargement (8"x10" and up), in my opinion. If you’re the type of person who wants to buy an aerial photo of your property, you’re probably going to want to print it up fairly big, I would think. Now why people want these photos? Your guess is as good as mine. Some people apparently like good pictures of their stuff. There are companies who cater to this.
I have experienced the ‘meat from truck’ pitch.
I was grilling in the alley at my former residence (far NW side of Chicago) three or four years ago. A man with a (guessing) Polish or Russian accent pulled up in a beater minivan and asked if I’d like to buy some meat, cheap. He opened the side door and I recoiled at the horrible stench of … rotting meat. The floor of his van was covered in stained packer boxes. No way was he going to move any meat in this manner.
Honestly, it smelled so terrible, it was comical.
Some guy cold called us years ago. There was no story; he sold meat and sea food off his truck. We tried a box. It was good. Filet steaks, salmon, scallops, all top quality at a reasonable price. A story like, “I couldn’t deliver” would have warned us off. Now he shows up maybe once a month and we buy stuff from him. He has changed suppliers a could of times when he felt their quality was going down.
Omaha Meats is not the same as this. Omaha is a legit company. Pretty decent cuts of meat (still overpriced, of course). Some of the sides they sell are very good. But they’re a legit company, and definitely not in the same scam as the ones being talked about here.
Would I buy it? Neigh-he.
Geez, that’s so totally awful it makes me think the man may have had some mental and/or substance abuse problems. It’s hard to fathom anyone in a rational, clear-headed state of mind actually attempting this, much less thinking anyone would pay money for what is clearly garbage (no hyperbole).
It’s worse than you think. The meat in those boxes was… PEOPLE!
Yes, I know. The last line was a joke.
The meat came today. The delivery guy just left it on our porch and didn’t even ring the doorbell (although our dog was barking, so my wife knew he had come). So he wouldn’t even have known if we weren’t home, to try to do what the OP’s scammers were claiming. (They were packed in a thick-walled styrofoam cooler, packed with dry ice.)
Some of my family, who live in rural areas, have paid for photos like that. I haven’t a clue what they paid but the end result was pretty good, especially years later. And a few of them have bought updated ones 20 or more years later. It’s a nice before and after set up.
The last guy who tried selling me anything door to door was a traveller guy who was smoking a cigarette. He tried to sell me pillows, and when I wasn’t interested he tried to throw them in the door at me. It was quite surreal.
I was in a bar with one of those “fashion shows” where ladies in their undies sold tickets for a drawing. Fellow walked up and asked if I wanted to buy some sausage. I thought this was an unlikely place to find customers for such a transaction, but it turns out he meant meat.
My mom lives in AZ but spends her summers at the family lake house in NH. Two summers ago at the end of the year she had several steaks and burgers left over from, I think, Omaha Meats. My husband, son, and I live in the Boston area, so it was easy for her to drop this shit off at our house on her way to the airport, to keep until next summer!!! Which we did, in the bottom of our freezer… kind of grossing me out (my son and I are vegetarians) and wondering when it would go bad. But the following summer when she arrived she collected it all and ate it that summer. So is it true that Omaha Meats can last a YEAR in a regular fridge??? that seemed so unnatural to us! But what do we know? We don’t eat meat!