Posted on 11/01/2013 5:41:13 AM PDT by pabianice
The story is probably hyperbole
Useless article. What are the pay grades involved? How many dependents? How much are they cutting back by? They can’t afford a turkey or they’re only getting an 18lb vs. a 24lb turkey like last year?
These Military Families give up so much. Always has and always will.
They get treated like 2nd class citizens and they still keep plugging along.
God Bless them....they deserve better
I find this article highly unlikely.
Upper-rank soldiers can' afford to buy the fixings for Thanksgiving, which aren't even particularly expensive as food goes? They have to eat something that week.
Buying a turkey, if you use it frugally, is a great deal cheaper than the equivalent amount of beef, for instance. I get a turkey regularly during the year for that specific reason.
Just wait until Christmas, when millions of families who have been kicked off of their health plans have to budget for hikes of hundreds of dollars a month for health care next year instead of spending for holiday shopping. If I were a retailer, I’d be canceling orders.
Let me point this out...having well over twenty years of military service, and another fifteen years of contractor/GS service with military personnel. Everyone eats a full-up meal. Between the local NCO Club deal, or the chow-hall deal...it’s generally always a reasonable cost factor. Toss in comissiary items at a reasonable price.
The only time I ever felt pushed to curtail my Thanksgiving was when I was sent TDY, and the local chow-hall had some add-on fee for temp-duty folks of $11 for the holiday meal, which I felt at the time was outrageous.
I curtailed a lot of things when I was a young sailor. This isn’t news.
Pound for pound, turkey is one of the cheapest foods you can buy and so are the rest of the trimmings. There is nothing particularly expensive about the traditional Thanksgiving meal unless you are talking about the wine and fancy desserts.
No doubt our military families are having trouble making ends meet. It was like that when I served back in the early 1980s. I just think Thanksgiving is a poor example to use here.
Total compensation for someone who has been in the military for 6 years ranges from a low of about $43K per year to a high of about $71K per year. Based on the article claiming “mid grade” service members I suspect that the poll asked leading questions.
I served for 20+ years and the only time my compensation was such that I had to curtail anything was when Jimmy Carter was President, inflation was running at 18% and we were used as pawns in a two year budget battle.
The rest of the time I was paid pretty well overall.
I served during Nixon, Ford, Carter era. I was not married but people in my sphere of friends were. We had big pot lucks with many ethnic foods and plenty of beer and football. Some of the best times of my young life. After I got out and was scrounging for work during the dying days of the Carter administration, I just felt impoverished. When you have the friends everything is possible.
Ridiculous story.
I recall our family and others in the 1950s. Many times money was tight. However, even of the humblest means, creative people found ways to have a Thanksgiving Day dinner.
The families cited several ways of being more frugal this year. Some 29 percent vowed to reduce traveling, 23 percent would stick to a set budget and 22 percent said they would spend less on food.a. Airfare this time of year is outrageous. No biggie there.
I haven't heard any of my Soldiers say anything like this article mentions.
With no disrepect to the military, the “symptoms of suffering” discussed in the article are NO different than the challenges facing almost all of us.
I coordinate the home deliveries to 400 seniors in public and private housing plus families 80 in Transitional Motels. On top of that we will serve 350-400 more at the high school. Thanksgiving is the CHEAPEST holiday to celebrate.
Cooking at home means food for several more days afterward and a carcass and drippings for at least 6 servings of soup. With a big turkey, I’ve always frozen some leftover meat because we would just get sick of it. Freeze some of the leftover sides, too, otherwise it will spoil.
The bigger the family, the more food other people bring. I’ve had to beg folks to take more home because I’d run out of room to store it. As a guest, sometimes I took more home than I brought.
I resent the media for publishing this sort of article. When I still knew military folks, I was always envious of their commissary prices.
I can,t buy food for thanksgiving either, but i know some one who is an unwed mother so she will have a plenty for the whole family.
Dad spent 30 years in. We never missed a single turkey, and that was when the military made far less.
I hate to break anyone’s hyperbole but a huge majority of servicemen with families is on food stamps. When I was an eligibility worker for food stamps we had to process boxes and boxes of them every quarter when they would redo their income statements. Edwards Air Force Base was our biggie.
That’s what I meant, they can buy turkey with food stamps. They canal get together and share the costs if they have to.
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