The Best of Bread [Remastered Gluten-Free Edition]

When last we joined our hero [http://bit.ly/1VdrSKK], he was mired in sadness and not just a little bit of outrage at the exorbitant cost of a 24 oz. loaf of Udi’s Gluten Free bread at his local Target store.

As I stated in that post, the cost of the 24 oz. bag over the regular 12 oz. loaf they carried was just a shade under three times as much (for only twice the content). My suggestion was that this smacked of either taking advantage of those Target considered easy targets because of their hipster trendiness or being evil shits for making it insanely expensive for those who have a serious medical need to avoid normal baked goods and use a popular alternative.

My normal mode of operations is to create a personal boycott when such methods arise. I don’t need to drag the rest of the world into my temper tantrum; keep it small and confined to my own actions. And it would be easy for me to just simply not shop at Target anymore. There is nothing that they sell at Target that I cannot find elsewhere in the vicinity or even online. The only upsides of the place are that I can get many of the things we need in one place at the moment we need them and that they are only a mile away. So, it should be fairly easy not to shop there if I chose not to do so. If I could only instill and maintain longevity in such actions, a personal boycott would work for me.

However, my record in these things is pretty hit and mostly miss. I skipped most of a season of The Simpsons when Fox cancelled Firefly, but I melted like butter when there was something I really, really wanted to watch on (actually several somethings, but I don’t remember what), and so it didn’t take me long to relent on my anti-Fox stance. I went full vegetarian for about a year after seeing the movie Babe, then decided hamburgers didn’t actually have ham in them and I missed them, so then it became “I no longer eat pork products.” That lasted about two more years until I decided one morning that maple-cured bacon was just too delicious a thing to not have in a breakfast burrito, and my revolution lost its leader. Hypocrite, thy name be Rik.

And it wasn’t like I was going to change the minds of the others in our household, including my wife. I was not going to add even more to the tension in our current living situation with a frivolous denial of a local shopping outlet just because the place had what I considered too high a price on one item. So, I let it out in a blog post and just decided to see how long Target would carry the item at that ridiculous cost.

Cut to Tuesday, and a stop on the way home at that same Target a few weeks after my initial outcry. I wanted to see if the price was still set at $14.99 per loaf or if they were even still carrying that larger size of Udi's anymore. As you can see from the photos above, the regular price remained the same, but they had a special sales tag on the shelf reading “I’m New” and a price of $8.99, six dollars below the normal.

I was overjoyed to see this, so the question then was whether or not to purchase a loaf at this price. Right before our Target visit, we had gone to Trader Joe’s, where we picked up a bag of their own brand of gluten-free bread, so I had what I needed already for lunches. But here was a reasonable price on a very large loaf of GF bread (as in, what you lucky folks who can consume the real stuff would say was a normal-sized loaf, and bought for only a few dollars).

Of course, we did buy the larger loaf from Udi’s. My main reasoning was that, even if they price it regularly so high, I would rather have the option of buying it there than not have them carry it at all. Assuming that their tendency to carry a product is based at least a little on the public’s continued purchasing of said item, I figured that I should at least take full advantage of such an excellent sales price when I can. 

It’s odd that I have to consider such things when purchasing something as seemingly commonplace as a mere loaf of bread, but as I am finding out, when you are living suddenly in the realm of specialty foods, nothing can be taken for granted. We shall see what happens next.