(By half loaf, I mean a one-pound portion.) Anyhow, the point isn’t the quality of the bread. If your budget is limited, you can find perfectly serviceable sandwich bread for a buck. Heck, I have a big food budget, and I still buy the buck-a-loaf bread for every day eating.
My example above included the wheat version of the sandwich bread, but the white bread here is 99¢ as well.
It may not be the best quality, but in a “down to your last $20” scenario, a loaf of that cheap bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a jar of jelly—even at expensive convenience store prices—is still more bang for you buck than take-out pizza, and requires no cooking skills to make.
This is not totally 100% accurate if you are creative. It depends on why the transaction was declined.
I have had this happen more with debit cards than with credit cards, but at least twice I have had a card come back as declined - when I knew there was enough “room” for it. Once - I had the clerk call it in (vs using the pad) - it was approved. The other time (I later found out there was a fraud warning on the account - as there was some low $$$ multiple exact same charges that had been attempted to be charged). I did the transaction again - this time using the PIN as a debit card - and it went through.
Now I know neither one of those make total sense (why would they accept a transaction if they thought the card may have been used fraudulently - maybe PIN “proved” it was me).
I worked retail for quite a while and usually people were embarrassed when this happened - and I always tried to make them feel better by acting like it was no big deal (which it isn’t - but I wasn’t delivering) - bank probably flagged their account for fraud protection or something. I’d always “run the card again” if they asked. It didn’t happen that often.
Luckily for me - most acted like no big deal or were embarassed - none really took it out on me, but some did say stuff like “I know there is enough in there” - which I don’t blame them - they weren’t mean about it.
Oh and you are 100% correct about the card reading error thing of course. If it says “declined” - that means that the bank/merchant service/whatever has looked up the card number and transaction and rejected the transaction.
Sometimes it would say “call bank”. Now this was over a decade ago - so maybe different now, but every once in a while I’d see one of those. When I worked for a Jewelry store - and it involved a large transaction - they usually would talk to the customer and verify a few things in what appeared to be an attempt to make sure transaction was legit.
When I worked for a video game store - it usually was Amex that this happened with - often they didn’t even ask to speak to the customer - and 99% of the time it was approved. A couple of times when Amex did ask to talk to the customer I got the impression they were being told something like “we are approving this transaction, but your going to need to pay down some of your balance before we approve any additional charges”. This was back in the day when Amex had a much greater % of charge cards vs credit cards.
Yeah, I’ve definitely had this happen to me before. This past year I was picking up my car from valet parking, and my credit card was declined. As in actually “declined,” not “unreadable.” (I saw something to that effect on the receipt.) So I just handed the guy a different one. On the way back, I stopped by to pick up a six pack and tried the “declined” card. It worked fine. There was no reason that I could think of as to why it had been declined. It had almost the entire credit line (like $12.5K) free on it. I could maybe understand if it was some fraud algorithm flagging it as suspicious, but this was in my home city, on a weekend, with a type of transaction I have a habit of making. And the other card–from the same bank–worked fine. So who knows.
From now on it’s gonna be “I KNOW YOUR MANAGER!!! GET HIM OR HER OUT HERE AND WHEN HE OR SHE SEES WHO I AM HE OR SHE’LL DO IT RIGHT!!!”
I won’t goof that up again.
When I was with a certain credit union, my card would regularly be declined as a debit card, not because of a lack of money but because the processing would time out. Never had a problem running it as a credit card though.
Oh, bollocks. Every 7-11 has a frozen pizza for under $10. PB&J and Mac and Cheese are not exotic recipes.
Not sure if my irony meter is busted, but none of those are fresh foods.
Walgreens, to its credit, has started to stock fruit.
Out of curiosity I just looked up egg prices here in the UK at Sainsbury’s. A box of 6 Mabel Pearmans Burford Brown eggs is £2.15 while a box of 18 basic barn eggs is £1.45. That’s a 4x per egg difference between cheapest and dearest.
The debit card fraud triggers are strange. A few years I was buying a phone for around £200 and it was blocked and I had to call the bank. A couple years later I bought a £15K car on the card with no issues.
“Hello sir, I wish to buy a pizza, but all I have is a cashier’s check for 12 millions dollars from the National Bank of Nigeria. I will sign it over to you and you give me the pizza and change, yes?”
I was trying to use my EBT when the whole East Coast system went down. After having it rejected three times, the cashier looked at me and asked extremely sarcastically “Don’t you have some other way to pay?”
I very calmly asked for the manager and told him that “lady” needed to learn a few things about making false assumptions about customers. Yeah, I’d be on food stamps if I had another way to pay.:rolleyes:
Around here, the Super Americas (we don’t have 7-11s in the market any more) does stock fresh fruit. As do the Walgreens - its expensive - in part because it usually gets tossed. But its available. You can even pick up a few hard boiled eggs and a small salad or some carrots and dip.
But no one has starved eating Mac and Cheese. Nor is it like the pizza being offered as the alternative meal here is healthy - if I’m reading between the lines of Askthepizzaguy’s description - he isn’t working for a place that is making pizza with buffalo mozzarella, sliced tomatoes, spinach and artichokes in a wood fired clay oven then topped with arugula and a balsamic vinaigrette when it leaves the oven. He’s talking about a place where you get a crust the equivalent of wonder bread topped with a quarter cup of sauce that is half sugar, cheese that only passes for cheese because the food processing lobby has spent a lot of money and some heavily processed pepperoni. (Delicious, don’t get me wrong - but it isn’t like its better for you than Mac n Cheese).