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This Governor Is Getting Mocked for Brown-Bagging Lunch Every Day

By: Kaitlin Mulhere
Kaitlin Mulhere, expert in Student loans, college costs, and Editor at Money
Kaitlin Mulhere
Editor | Joined March 2015
Kaitlin Mulhere is an editor at Money.com. Since joining in 2015, she’s written and edited about a variety of personal finance topics, including banks, credit, student debt, saving strategies and more.
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Published: Nov 04, 2016 3 min read
Scott Walker Campaigns At Chicago's Famed Billy Goat Tavern
A rare instance of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker eating something other than a ham-and-cheese sandwich, while campaigning in 2015.
Scott Olson—Getty Images

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker tried to show the Twitter-verse Friday that he's a simple ham-and-cheese-loving kind of guy.

Walker tweeted that for 26 long years in a row, he has eaten not one, but two ham-and-cheese sandwiches almost everyday for lunch. "Like millions of Americans, I bring my own lunch to work," Walker wrote in the tweet.

His Friday announcement followed a picture he shared on Thursday of a rather sad-looking ham-and-cheese sandwich to celebrate #NationalSandwichDay.

Twitter users, naturally, had a lot to say about Walker's eating habits, especially his uninspired sandwich of choice.

Jokes (and the oddity and mind-numbing boredom of eating the same thing everyday) aside, Walker's right that he's not alone in brown-bagging it. In fact, Americans are packing their lunch even more this year in response to higher restaurant prices. Lunch traffic at restaurants was down 4% during the second quarter of 2016, and the average customer bill was down 5%.

So perhaps Walker has just been ahead of his time--by more than a quarter-century--in terms of this whole brown-bagging lunch thing.

Read Next: Americans Aren’t Going Out to Lunch As Much

Bringing your lunch from home even a few days a week can be a big money saver too. People who buy lunch every work day burn through about $2,500 a year, according to What Are You Doing for Lunch, by Mona Meighan. Calculations done by Money columnist Dan Kadlec show that if you skip the $15 daily lunch in favor of brown-bagging a meal that cost you $3 to make, you’ll save $31,000 over the next 10 years. (However, Walker, who has a history of being in credit card debt, apparently needs to do more than brown-bag his lunch to pay off his bills.)

In sum, Walker reminded us of two important lessons today: Eating out for lunch can be a huge money suck, and people are going to roll their eyes when you share pointless life stories on social media. That goes whether you're well-known politician or a regular guy.