How to Lunch When You’re Busy & Broke

Oh, carp. Your belly is rumbling, your wallet is nearly empty, and your work is piled higher than you are tall. It’s not a fun situation to be in. Luckily, I’ve figured out some ways to eat on the fly without breaking the bank.

Let me also preface this by saying this isn’t another article about how to eat healthy. This is an article about how to get a gourmet pizza for $6. Okay, fine, you can get a salad or turkey sandwich. But let me tell you: that pizza is delicious. I digress. Anyway, there are two schemes that I’ve either come up with or joined a cult for to devour all that New York—and the Financial District—has to offer. I’ll share them with you.

First: Amazon Prime Now.

If you’re in the five boroughs and have a desk drawer or access to a refrigerator, lunch is almost ready for you. I like to order a loaf of bread, fresh-sliced cheese, fresh-sliced deli meat, fixins (e.g., mayonnaise), and a few snacks—I’m personally addicted to vegetable chips—to keep around.

I make a sandwich, nom down some veggie chips, and drink a sparkling water. Everything is delivered fresh to the office, and I don’t have to cart the stuff around on the subway or up and down tourist-filled Broadway.

If monotony isn’t your game…

There are other, less boring options. My FAVORITE interwebz hustle/app is something called MealPal. This is an app where you prepay your lunches, in bulk, at around $6 per day. I, and my fellow BlueSwitchers, eat pizza, burritos, poke bowls, burgers, sandwiches, falafel, curry, ramen, sushi, and myriad other things. For six bucks. SIX. BUCKS.

There’s a caveat to this, however. You buy the lunches in advance, twelve at a time, then select vittles from a preselected menu of goodness. Unfortunately, if you don’t use all twelve of those meals, you lose them to the nether. You have a month to use twelve meals, which is three meals per week.

This works as a cost saver in the long term because of the quality of the restaurants and food available. Let’s use a margherita pizza at this fancy, fast-casual pizza joint on Wall Street as an example. The pizza is $9. You pay $6. That’s a savings of $3. If you eat that pizza twelve times, that’s a savings of $36 a month, or something over $400 a year. It’s a deal.

Remember, kids: Blue Archer needs sustenance to run the gauntlet and so do you. It is possible to eat cheap in the city that doesn’t sleep.