Funny this should come up today. We picked up two whole beef this morning and put one of them in our chest freezer, the other one went half to each daughter.
We bought our Kenmore about 8 years ago. The one we had before that was one my dad found when he was helping with estate sales. The deal was, "$50, but you have to get it out of the basement and dispose of everything in it". I have no idea how old it was, but maybe 1970s. We got it, took it home and cleaned it up, and used it for 25 years, including one move. What was in it was a bunch of okra, trout, and some sweet corn. That all went into the compost pile, and the freezer worked fine.
So, a few years ago, I asked my wife "Do you realize we have $2,500 worth of food in a $50 freezer?". So we bought the Kenmore, the largest one they had, and sure enough, the old freezer quit a few months later. The Kenmore has four sliding baskets on top, and plastic dividers in the bottom that can be moved around.
Three years ago, when we moved into the new house, we raised three steers and realized we needed more freezer space (son has a small one, about half the size of ours). We went looking for a new chest freezer, and now all of them have ONE sliding basket, and nothing in the bottom, just a big box. So we bought an upright, Whirlpool, I think. Early this year, we had decided to sell the upright, but shortly after, it quit working. There was a gasket that had come loose on the bottom of the door, so we gave it away to some friends of our kids. They got it working for less than $200, and are tickled to have it.
All this to say, if you have a choice, find one that is easy to organize, or you will have to be creative with boxes and bags to keep from having to dig through a giant box of frozen food to find what you need. One thing that works well for us are the cloth grocery bags, that way you can pull a whole bag out to get what's under it. I was able to buy a bunch of those through my business, and write them off as advertising.
