Eating From the Trash Can: At 7-Eleven, Pizza Goes On Welfare

Oh, how sad the face of poverty in America truly is. 7-Eleven’s by-the-slice pizza offering is such an exemplar of how time and hot boxes conspire against surprisingly good pizza that I’m going to go off-menu here and turn this into a two-for (and it’s not even Tuesday! Well, unless you’re in Australia, and I’m pretty sure it’s Tuesday in Europe by now as I write this at 5:30 in Seattle) about the slices and the “mother” pizza from whence they come.

See, 7-Eleven gives you a choice. Your slice from the hot box comes two plus a Super Big Gulp for three bucks plus tax, but if you’ve got $5.55 (and even if you’re on food stamps, since because what you’re buying is a raw pizza that they then heat for you, it’s not technically “prepared hot food” and is therefore eligible to be purchased with SNAP benefits, hence “when pizza goes on welfare” in the title), you get a large pie (and it’s a legitimate large in the Domino’s sense of the term) that can take a few add-ons like a 2-liter soda, often at a discount.

The pizza on the whole, when fresh, is worlds better than Little Caesars’ gods-awful “Hot N’ Ready” five-buck pizza (which I’ll get to another time.) The sauce won’t fool anyone from the Northeast (where New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut provide America with pizzas to be proud of, unlike the fast food monstrosities of flyover country and the “gourmet” disasters inspired by Wolfgang Puck on the West Coast), but it’s six bucks with the tax.

The amazing thing about this is that the sauce has flavor. The pepperoni has flavor. The cheese? Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

The crust is soft, doughy, Midwestern. Which is probably a good thing, all things considered, because if they were going for New York thin crust, they’d screw it up, and what’s more, a bready, filling crust is exactly what makes this such great poverty food.

So the $5.55 full-pie welfare pizza? It’s a solid entry.

The slices, on the other hand…we need to have a talk about this, because they’re absolutely dreadful. Being kept on a steel plate in a hot box gets the pizza coming and going. It makes the crust crunchy, in a stale sort of way, and it does so frighteningly quickly. It makes the already flavorless cheese even more rubbery. And somehow, against common sense, it seems to scorch the sauce just enough, at least after awhile, to render off flavors onto it.

Put another way, if you’re cheaping out here, don’t bother with the three-dollar deal when a hot dog and a Big Gulp are available for two bucks and form one of life’s greatest guilty pleasures.

PROS: The whole pie is a worth-the-wait (they heat it up for you after you purchase it, which takes a few minutes) exercise in the very best things a cheap-as-hell pizza can be.

CONS: By the slice, it’s a textbook example of how a good thing can go horribly, disastrously wrong.

THE VERDICT: 1 out of 5 stars for the slices, but the whole pie gets a 4 out of 5 and the Trash Can Seal of Approval.

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