Sub prime ham-based loans will be the true end of the American economy.

Also what is this Aperture science abortion doing on their sign?

Food on layaway.

Food on layaway.

One more time: Food on farking layaway!!

I haven't had a good ham in a long time. Need to change that. But not on layaway.

If the hams are only good for a very limited amount of time wouldn't placing it on lay away make essentially result in the seller providing a rotten product to the customer in the end?

I've been slowly paying for grotesque, sweetened pig my whole life. How is this any different?

I love ham as much as the next person, but NO ham is that good.

Food....on layaway. That is retarded on so many levels.

I can appreciate they want to make their overpriced hams more accessable to the masses, but you could just as easily do that by, oh I don't know, not overpricing them.

My mouth started watering when I saw 'Honeybaked Ham'.

Last year I was working in an office that had three people, and we used to bring in food and desserts and would feed each other when there was a surplus of leftovers.

I found some 'after Thanksgiving' hams and practically stole a 4 lb honey baked ham from Safeway for around 25 bucks. I thought I'd trim it all down and bring in some Tuperware with three pounds of glorious ham and make everyone's week.

That was on a Saturday. I spent the time and energy to carve that ham down to a few pounds of pure sweetness. I was gonna suprise the hell out of my coworkers.

The only problem was that I had about 36 hours to spend in a house with pounds of perfectly trimmed ham.

I ate a whole ham in less than two days.


*runs out of room crying and slams door*

AverageAmericanGuy: You shouldn't use layaway. You're likely to pay in layaway fees more than you would if you had simply paid with a credit card.

You do realize that there are people out there who don't have credit cards? It's one of the reasons that the concept of layaway still exists.

Homer Simpson: Marge, prepare the celebration ham.
Marge: All we have left are the earthquake ham and the condolence ham.
Homer Simpson: Marge, they're just hams. OK?

I enjoy a good ham now and then. I enjoy the scent of a well prepared ham cooking in the oven. Though I'm not willing to pay the price of an ounce of gold which is what a ham of any form basically costs today.

I'm fond of a store brand ham sold by Winn-Dixie, precooked. Though I have enjoyed many types by various companies, both precooked and raw. I tend to avoid those not only precooked, but pre-seasoned with a glaze or whatever. Winn-Dixie used to sell a store brand ham that came wrapped in a cloth bag and sealed in plastic. You peeled the bag off before cooking or serving. It was excellent.

Ham, though tasty, is pork and, until the late 70's, was cheap as was most pork. Pork remained low in cost because of the fat and cholesterol content and the fact that, no matter how well raised, raw pork had to be thoroughly cooked to avoid a once common parasite in the meat.

I could buy a 10 pound ham for about $6.00.

Now, I can buy one for around $18.00. Go to the popular brand names and up the cost for a similar ham to $30.00.

I've always wondered what these 'exclusive' hams would taste like. You know, kind of like those in France that are babied and cuddled and tenderly smoked and stored carefully for up to 5 years in a carefully environmentally controlled room before being tested, tasted and either sold, if they meet the quality, or the whole run tuned into pet food.

You see Europeans buying such ham by the paper thin slice, which doesn't resemble American hams and enjoying it as much as we would enjoy a well seasoned, porterhouse steak fresh from a high end butcher shop.

They pay about as much for the ham as we would for the steak. A whole ham, meaning one not split in half like in the US, would come close to the cost of a new car.

Then again, here in the US, you about as much for a cheap ham as you would for one new, steel belted car tire.

If it's sliced into ham slabs, by the company, and sealed in packs, the cost just explodes.

I suppose I should not be surprised and so sarcastic, but I recall when you could buy those tasty, small beef ribs for BBQ for a couple of bucks and feed the whole family. Now, you get about 4 in a tiny pack for around $8.00. They might feed just one. Two 'Kuntry Style' beef ribs, meaning more fat, will run you about $6.50. (I used to buy an 8 lb tray of them for around $4.00 in the early 70's and the butchers left on less fat.)

I like to buy what used to be called a beef roast: a slab of meat, weighing a couple of pounds, triangular in cut, often with a distinct line of gristle going through it. It went at about $0.60 a pound. Even at $1.00 a pound it was a good deal. Often, I'd cut it up into 'pan steaks'.

Now, it's not only around $3.95 a pound, but most stores leave on a great slab of fat, hidden on the bottom, which, to me, is 'dead weight' since most of us have learned to watch how much fat we consume. That slab, weighing sometimes a pound by itself, gets cut off and tossed.

It's reaching the point that if you want quality meats, you're going to have to put them on a payment plan or charge card. It's actually cheaper, if you can afford it, to buy a quarter or half a cow from a butcher, who will provide it all cut up, packaged and ready for your big freezer. However, we're talking anywhere from $500 to $1000 for such a bulk package, but it should last you nearly a year and you'll come out ahead of those buying beef from the store, one chunk at a time.

A couple of decades ago, you could go to a farm, negotiate with the farmer over the price of a cow and he would butcher it for you and cut it up into easily transportable sections. You went and picked it up, wrapped in butchers paper, in cardboard boxes. He kept the hide, various innards, the head, the leg parts and trimmed off a lot of fat. Upon request, he would toss in a couple of pounds of bones, cut into sections, for soup for free.

You paid about $0.75 a pound. That beat the grocery store price of around $1.50 a pound and up, depending on the cut.

Now, I find a whole lot of farms offering cows and pigs for sale, butchered. Their cost is not much lower than the cost of beef at a store. More if the farm offers 'organic' beef -- basically meaning grass fed in the pastures and/or given basic feed like oats and grains.

Some farms charge more than most stores per pound for the beef.

The soaring cost of food is becoming a problem. Everyone in the food provision chain offers a host of excuses from the increasing cost of feed and fuel, to conglomerates buying up independent farms by the ton that used to help regulate the prices to genetically modified vegetable seeds that don't yield viable seeds for the next crop, forcing the farmers to buy even more.

It mainly boils down to a few getting real rich off the meat industry and YOU having to pay heavily for the right to eat.

Get those charge cards out -- and don't forget about the hidden fees or high interest rates. Buy your food on time payments. Maybe they'll even develop a way to 'lease' it like car dealers, who switched from selling you a car, to 'leasing' one.

Repossession might be problematic, though.

Rum ham!!!

Wittenberg Dropout: I love you and will make babies for you.


If by 'babies' you mean hamwiches, I'm all in!


/;-)