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Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

Meat is like $30/lb. What a joke, I see almost no one at the butcher counter in grocery stores anymore.

>Meat is like $30/lb.

???

Maybe if you're buying organic grass fed steaks every day, but chicken/pork is still available for less than $5, especially on sale. Kroger's weekly ad for Dallas, TX shows:

1. beef for $6.97/lb

2. pork for $1.99/lb

3. chicken breasts for $3.99/lb, or organic for $6.99/lb

https://www.kroger.com/weeklyad

Yeah my local Safeway has been having whole chickens, leg quarters, thighs or drumsticks for 0.99 per pound. Still that price as of today.

> 1. beef for $6.97/lb

You'll want to specify what type of beef. The price per pound varies immensely based upon what cut you're getting.

$6.97/lb is a price I can only assume refers to ground beef. Once you start talking about steaks, though, the price climbs rather quickly. Near me, sirloin regularly clocks between $14-16/lb, and NY strip/ribeye at the best of times may go on sale for close to $20/lb, but they also regularly exceed $30/lb.

I get ribeye pretty regularly for $10/lb on sale in South Carolina. But, yeah. Normally it’s $15/lb here. Not something I’d be eating regularly.

AFAIU, when beef prices started to spike a year or two ago, ranchers decided to cash in and slaughter much of their herd, including breeding stock. This was on top of a decades-long decline in herd size, and a recent drought that has driven up costs of maintaining a herd--another reason why they decided to cull and cash-in.

The current situation will be the new normal for at least the next several years. Chicken hasn't risen nearly as much, just moderately more than inflation, perhaps because of a shift of demand away from beef.

There also seems to be greater price discrimination going on with beef than previously, with larger spreads between, e.g., bulk ground vs vacuum packed ground vs whole cuts.

There's also a screwworm outbreak going on.

One of the most common interactions I witness at our local supermarket butcher counter is the guy explaining to yet another customer that the advertised weekly special sold out before lunch a couple days prior.

We buy a side of beef at a time from a farm down the street for $6/lb, up from $4 a few years ago. Can’t buy beef any other way.

$7.35/lb where I am with a $600 deposit. It ends up being about $2k all things considered. It may even out, but a lot of folks don't have that kind of money around, ~5% of a yearly salary isn't nothing for a lot of people.

I completely forgot about needing a chest freezer and space for a chest freezer..that's also not nothing.

That’s before or after trimming? Because you could do crazy arbitrage at those prices. I get trimmed beef for $14/lb at the farm down the street.

I believe that’s hanging weight, so after the butcher it’s probably closer to $9, but still a bargain and a half compared to what I see at wal mart, which is the only place we buy groceries because of cost.

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