There are certain rules that are just plain common sense when it comes to prolonging your life. If someone holds you up at gunpoint, you don’t try to be a hero. If you see a burning building, you don’t run in blindly in an effort to save a crying little girl’s cat. But perhaps most important of all, you DO NOT buy food from the Dollar Tree.

Don’t get me wrong, the Dollar Tree (Or DT as the lazy kids that don’t want to spell out Dollar Tree for the rest of this article call it) has a place in the grand scheme of retail. It’s a go-to place when you want some of the most random odds and ends you can find, and on occasion a truck might tip over on the highway and some DT employees may snag some name-brand products and put them up for sale. However, when it comes to the consumption of foodstuffs… stay far away. I’m not saying that the Dollar Tree is purposefully trying to harm you or anything like that, far from it actually. I just think that their stores may not be fully equipped to handle consumable goods, especially frozen items. Something about those freezers just doesn’t sit well with me. It is possibly the fact that they seem to be roughly room temperature on the inside, and my sense of self-preservation is way too high to snatch up a box of meatballs from out of there, and then down them when I get home.

So with my stance on DT food being what it is, you can imagine the shock on my face when I was walking past my local DT and saw a sign proudly proclaiming the arrival of a brand new product:

3oz STEAKS

Yes, steaks. Long considered to be one of the fancier and more expensive pieces of meat, with it generally being assumed that the more expensive the steak the better the taste. To be honest, that does seem to be the case a lot of times. Your better/tastier cuts of meat do run a bit more in the cash department, and I’ve seen people drop way up in the double digits for a choice cut. Now, just think about this for a minute.

The more expensive the steak, the better the quality.

$1 Steaks.

With those two thoughts in your head, you can begin to ask yourself what is pretty much the question this article poses…

How good can a $1 steak be?

Well, before I learned that answer I was immediately able to answer another question you may be asking yourself. So for that “How good can a $1 steak LOOK” crowd, I present to you the answer:

As you can see here, good ol’ Murry’s is bringing their A-game to the table with this boneless rib-eye offering. It should be noted that the package appeared to be vacuum-sealed (it should also be noted that I have never been fully aware of how to spell “vacuum,” no matter how many times I use it), making me at least feel a little safer about the whole idea. So with common sense apparently taking the week off, I do what I feel is necessary: I snatch up one of them and immediately rush home to cook it up and review it for the site so Jeremy can’t yell at me for lacking content ideas. No matter how awful/dangerous they may be.

One immediate thing I noticed is that the steak is roughly the thickness of a coin, or at the very best two coins stacked. There was also absolutely NO blood in the packaging or on the meat. It has been my experience that when I buy raw meat that there is at least some blood still dripping off of it. I just assumed there was no blood in this steak because Murry has some superior process for preparing their meats and that I should not be alarmed, and should remain confident that what I was eating was actually a meat-based product. It’s just mind over matter at this point. Now I could just spontaneously lose my eyesight for the next hour, things may go even better.

As you can see here, unpackaged it does a good job of resembling a steak. Though it is a bit darker than frozen meat usually tends to be. I thought perhaps my mind was just making things worse than it seemed, making me think my turd-colored steak was far worse off than it actually is. Then I got another good look at it.

It was at this point in time that I told my girlfriend to go ahead and let the ER know they will have some business later tonight. I’m not the biggest meat connoisseur, but I know what looks harmful to my damned health, and this was giving off a serious warning. That is when I made a very wise decision that I think any sane person would have made. No, I didn’t decide to just throw it away. I decided that I would just try to not look at it unless it was necessary. This worked fairly well for me, and it was only till I cut in to see if it was done that I had to eyeball this beast again. Fortunately, it had started to lose that whole aborted fetus look it had going on earlier.

If you’re wondering how I cooked this pathetic piece of meat, I basically left it going for a good while longer than I normally do with meat, in the hopes that the longer exposure to the heat would destroy the never-before-discovered bacteria that were most likely crawling on this thing. It was also at this time that I started to mentally prepare myself for what was about to take place. Luckily the smell wasn’t too horrible, which gave me a little bit of hope that if it smelled normal, then it may just taste normal.

It didn’t.

I can’t tell you how the steak itself tasted, because as far as I know, I never really had it hit my taste-buds in an effort to swallow it as quickly as possible. What I did taste however, was the MASSIVE amount of flavoring added to this bastard. This was not a glazing, nor was this a generous helping of flavoring added to this meat. This meat was Pearl Harbored. This poor slab of meat was doused in smoke flavoring the way I hope I am to be doused with water if ever I am on fire. If I’d have known this beforehand, I would have given it a thorough ringing-out. Even with that though, I doubt it would have stopped the smoked-flavoring tsunami coursing through my mouth.

It’s about this time that I just started to plain worry. Why did they have so much flavoring added to this thing? What were they trying to hide? Did the meat itself taste so horrible or was it so incredibly rotten and old that they felt the need to smother it in artificial flavoring? Much like an awkward teen who hates bathing so they just saturate themselves with perfume / cologne, was Murry’s trying to hide their awful stank by dowsing this fucker with smoked flavoring?

At any rate, I managed to finish the son of a bitch.

It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t horrible either. I would say that if it had less flavoring it would be okay, but without that coating who knows what I would be dealing with. I think we’ve all been to a Halloween party and found ourselves having intercourse with someone wearing a mask. At first you want them to take it off, but then you are filled with concern that what is underneath that mask may very well cause you instant-regret and send you to the bathroom for a round of yelling at the commode. I think I was trying to prove a point with that, but now I can see that I am just making myself look sketchy so this is the point in time in which I tell you that I have no clue about experiencing that personally and I’ve only heard it from a friend. We’ll call this friend “Jeremy.”

Do I recommend you try these out for yourself? No, I do not. While this thing wasn’t the worst food item I’ve ever had, it by far was not a pleasant experience. Dollar Tree already has its market, and I think they need to stick to that. Leave the food to the grocery stores and sketchy country fruit-stands where there are three flies for every apple, and you are guaranteed to hear a good solid racist rant while you are in line waiting to pay.

It has been about four hours now, and I feel my stomach rumbling.

If you enjoyed this article, don’t bother commenting. You can instead show your thanks by contributing to my future emergency room bill.