Does every Little Caesar's have the "$5 Monday" special, or is it just ours?  They're franchise stores, so it's hard to tell.  There is a Little Caesars store in the next town over where all day Monday you can get a large pepperoni pizza for five bucks.  

Of course, despite the fact that the offer applies to their "Hot-N-Ready" pizza which is theoretically always ready to go, you often have to wait a few minutes, because they have trouble keeping up with the parade of people through the door.  

The risk during those few minutes is that you will decide to order something else - soda, or some of that Crazy Bread that looks so delicious, and tastes so salty and awful and good.  But you must resist!

I happened to be in town yesterday, and all day long I couldn't stop thinking about $5 Monday.  I tried to convince myself I wanted something better to eat.  Something decent, maybe with a vegetable.  Since I'm a vegetarian I end up picking off the pepperonis and feeding them to the neighbor's dogs (with her blessing  - and they're very large dogs, so they can handle it).  This always strikes me as a bit of a waste, but the dogs do love the pepperoni, and a large cheese is a whopping $8.  

Regardless of $5 Monday, Little Caesars is still pretty affordable.  Their pizzas cost only slightly more than a frozen pizza from the grocery store, but are served up at the ultra-hot temperature that's required for a really decent pizza.  (That's the big difference between "real" pizza and the ones we make at home: the temperatures.)

Nutritionally though… maybe it's best not to think about it.  I checked their website, and was not able to find any nutritional information whatsoever.  Maybe that's for the best.

For the longest time, Little Caesars was "that place with the square pizza."  They seem to have moved away from that in recent years, although their Deep Dish Large pizza is still square.  I remember a promotion they had years ago, where you could order a rectangular pizza that was (if memory serves) three feet long and two feet wide.  Horrifying!  And tasty.  You could tip that thing, and the grease would pour off.

These days, Little Caesars is perhaps better known as "that pizza you buy at K-Mart."  It is true that it doesn't help the ambiance to walk through a K-Mart in order to get your dinner.  Oh how I wish they had an external door, like so many in-store Starbucks cafes.  But I'm pretty sure that's the point, that you will be lured into buying some cheap jewelry or sweat pants on your way in to pick up a pizza.  (I only wish I was being snarky, but the truth is that the last time I went to a K-Mart Little Caesars, I bought both of those items.)  

The worst part about going to K-Mart for dinner is the combined smell of stale popcorn and stale cotton candy from the K-Mart Café, which is the precise smell of sadness.

Photo credit: Flickr/mastermaq