The best place to get a cheap meal is no longer your local McDonald's, Burger King or other fast food establishment - it's Costco. The warehouse store, known for its enormously sized products and low prices, is also known for good eats at even better prices.
The first way to eat there, and certainly the least expensive, is by stopping in for free samples. The store gives out samples of many of its products every day, with the highest concentration of sampling stations set up around meal times. The range of foods is huge, form coffee (roasted in-store) and cookies to crab cakes and beef taquitos. Even without making a second round through the tables, there is a lot to eat.
The slightly more legitimate way to grab a meal at Costco is to stop by their, for lack of a better term, food court. They only sell a limited number of items, including pizza, hot dogs and Polish sausages, but the foods taste great and are an incredibly good deal. The pizzas, which are a whopping 18-inches in diameter, sell for about $10 (or $1.99 per slice) and the huge hot dogs (with soda included) are $1.50. That's a complete fast food meal for next to nothing. Costco also carries a couple of salads, for the slightly more health conscious, as well as the very excellent berry frozen yogurt sundaes. They are enormous cups of frozen yogurt, layered with a delicious berry sauce (with real berries in it) and cost only $1.55.
Granted, the prices may vary a bit from state to state, but the deals are undeniably good. Some people have even been known to organize office carpools to go over there at lunchtime. The phenomenon can't be uncommon because the store sells 57 million dogs/sausages and 11 million pizzas a year. Those are impressive numbers for anything, let alone a simple, inexpensive menu.














