Picture this; You’re finishing up your Aldi shopping trip, checking out your week’s worth of fruit, veggies, and multiple-gallon bottles of Ito En Unsweetened Green Tea (if you’re me) when you notice a new box next to the cashier. “RAFFLE,” reads the plastic jug filled to the brim with scraps of paper. “Enter to win a lifetime supply of our house-brand almonds, peanuts, cashews, and walnuts.”

Intrigued – and in desperate need of a good source of vegetarian protein – you grab the capless pen attached with a frayed strand of yarn and jot down your contact information before bagging up your haul and heading on your merry way.

Two weeks later, you open your email to find the unthinkable – “CONGRATS!” reads the banner splashed across the message. “You’ve won a lifetime supply of Aldi’s Nuts.”

So how many packages of all those nuts will actually arrive at your door? The answer is probably not what you’d expect, as several Redditors who have actually won these contests can attest.

Earlier this week, u/LordFrieza8789 took to r/AskReddit to determine what, exactly, constitutes a lifetime’s worth of any given prize, asking winners to share the specifics of their strangely vague spoils.

“Redditors who have actually won a ‘lifetime’ supply of something, what was the supply you won and how long did it actually last?” they wrote in a post that has since garnered more than 15k upvotes.

In short? It varies, quite a bit – just ask u/watabby, who said their lifetime supply of meat from a local butcher helped their family survive some financial hardships.  

“When I was a kid, I won a lifetime supply of meat from a large butcher shop in my hometown,” they recalled. “My dad put my name in one day and a few weeks later we get a call telling us we won a custom bbq pit and a monthly supply of meat and supplies for life.”

Each month, according to the Redditor, their family would “get a foam ice chest of various beef cuts, sausages, and steaks, a couple of dozen sodas, a bag of charcoal, lighter fluid, and a bag of whatever veggies they had around.”

“We were really poor at the time, so this was exactly something that could help the family out in enormous ways,” they continued. “My dad would have a bbq every weekend, sometimes several times a week. I remember sometime afterward realizing that I hadn’t felt hunger in days or even weeks, and that was so unusual for me.”

This monthly supply continued “for years” – the number of sodas and meat even doubling at one point – until the butcher was ultimately scooped up by a larger company.

“I remember near the time I was going to high school we got notified that the butcher shop got bought out by a larger national chain and the parent company just wanted to cut us a check to end it all,” they continued. “We gladly accepted. The check was for like $10k or something like that. By that time, my parents had gone to school and got their degrees and got better-paying jobs, so the free supply of food was just bonus.”

Yet not every lifetime supply story is a tale of wholesome meats as u/OrwellWasRight101 learned the hard way after winning a bunch of crappy soups.

“As a consolation prize for losing on a tv game show I was given a popcorn popper, a little girl's bicycle, and a lifetime supply of Dinty-Moore Beef Stew,” they wrote. “I gave the popcorn popper as a Christmas present and sold the bicycle. When the beef stew arrived it was one case of 12 cans. After trying the first can I realized that the other 11 would indeed last me a lifetime.”

But sometimes, the lifetime supply wins aren't exactly a win.

“When I was a kid 30 years ago, my dad said he'd won free pizza coupons (I think it was Dominos?), and he had a massive stack of these little business cards, each for a free large pizza,” remembered u/shyblonde83. “My dad said we had to be careful using them, though, so we would only use them occasionally, and I remember my dad sometimes making me order the pizza, and answer the door to get the free pizza, even though I was only like 9.”

Why, exactly, was their father so stingy with the coupons?

“Looking back, my dad worked for a commercial printing company and was not exactly an upstanding citizen,” they wrote. “I'm pretty sure he didn't win those cards....”