These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find a decent sandwich for less than $10. Even McDonald’s, the stereotypical bastion of cheap food, has taken heat for rising prices. But there’s at least one place in America where you can snag a delicious pimento cheese sandwich for less than two bucks. (If pimento cheese isn’t your thing, you should reconsider your life choices, but you can get a ham and Swiss on rye for $3.)

Unfortunately, this restaurant is pretty hard to access. It’s the concession stand at the Masters, the uber-elite annual golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. Tickets for the Masters are infamously hard to snag. Although they technically cost $150 at face value, they are currently going for over $4000 on Stubhub. It’s worse than the Eras Tour. I guess after shelling out thousands of dollars for a ticket, you’re gonna need that budget-friendly sandwich.

What's on the concession menu at the Masters?

Luckily, the Masters' concession stand offers a great bang for your buck. Chicken salad on honey wheat, pork bar-b-que, and chicken biscuits all go for $3, and nothing (even alcohol!) will set you back more than 6 bucks. And of course, the iconic pimento cheese sandwich rings up at an astonishing $1.50. While the pimento sandwich is a fairly simple creation — mayo, cheese, pimentos, white bread — the Masters could easily get away with charging at least $12 a pop, no problem. So why does the concession menu look like it was written in 1982? The answer is simple: tradition.

The Augusta National Golf Club, where the Masters is held, is all about tradition. Compounding the 1980s vibe, cell phones are still not allowed on the course. (But not all of this obsessive adherence to tradition is so innocent: Augusta National didn’t admit its first female members until 2012, which is just…wild.)

Why is the pimento cheese sandwich so famous?

The pimento sandwich is an iconic part of the Masters' lore. Legend has it the tradition originated in the 1940s when Hodges and Ola Herndon began selling their homemade pimento cheese sammies for 25 cents a pop. Like all origin stories, there’s multiple conflicting versions of this tale to be found on the internet, but the point is, pimento cheese sandwiches have a very long history at the Masters. And because the $1.50 price tag is a part of that legacy, the Masters has kept concession prices fixed for years, even as inflation rises everywhere else.

Pimento cheese sandwiches may be an acquired taste for some, but IMHO they’re truly delicious. I mean, spicy cheese and mayo, what’s not to love? And as a college student, $1.50 sandwiches would be a godsend for my food budget.

Is the pimento sandwich a cheap snack or a status symbol?

I have to admit, I find it kind of ironic that the people who have access to this budget-friendly menu, in this era of inflation, are the ones who need it least.

The kind of people who are willing to spend the equivalent of several months of my rent on a golf ticket are probably not going to care how much they pay for a sandwich. I imagine them exclaiming “I mean it's one sandwich, Michael, what could it cost, 60 dollars?”

Not to make this into a social critique, but the artificially low concession prices at the Masters kind of feel like a twisted form of elitism. It’s giving, we actually don’t care how much our food costs, because we’re so rich that it literally doesn’t matter. In a way, paying $1.50 for a sandwich has actually become a status symbol. 

But for most of us, paying $1.50 a sandwich has nothing to do with status signaling — it's just a really great deal. So if anyone is reading this from the Masters, please pick me up a pimento cheese sandwich. I’ll pay you back.