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Can't say for sure this will happen but it's a good guess right now. Cattle herds in the Midwest have taken a beating with all the blizzards, rain, and flooding. A friend was saying she bets it will drive up the cost of beef. Made sense to me so I went out and bought 25lbs of hamburger.
I wouldn't use 25# of hamburg in two years for the two of us. So that would be a waste.
I have given up looking for a slab of beef that is $10 or under. So a dollar or two more wont hurt.
We eat far less beef than we used to.
I learned years ago when beef was CHEAP due to glut of cattle on the market, that "stocking up" can still cause you to lose out. We were flooded here, and i had a small freezer and a fridge freezer just packed with sale beef, and lost all of it as the power was out for 7 days ( substation flooded too). It was tgen that we bought a generator, but it wont run everything!
The prices are what they are. Just eat a little less, tighten your belt and/ or cut down/out other things if you want the beef. Thats all.
Beef has slowly risen to what I regard as insane levels, for reasons that are not clear. I think hamburger got more expensive when the new grinding requirements (for content and safety) came in, and I refuse to buy ground meat packaged in some factory in one of the essentially unregulated states.
Most grocery store beef has become very second rate as well. Once in a while I will splurge on a couple of strips, and I am almost always disappointed. I managed to score two decently-thick Prime strips a few weeks ago, at a bargain $10 a pound, and they were good... but only about as good as Choice was a year or two ago. Restaurant servings have become disappointing as well - places like Outback have raised their prices as much as they can, which isn't a lot, and now serve steaks that are just as big on the plate... but half as thick. I wouldn't mind overall except that it's nearly impossible to cook a 3/8" steak properly. I'd rather have a smaller diameter and a normal thickness, but that would look "cheap."
Beef... it ain't for dinner any more.
But chicken and pork continue getting cheaper and cheaper, to the point where I joke with other shoppers that next week they'll be paying us to take it away. I stock up on boneless breasts and center cut chops at around $1.50 a pound.
Meat prices do fluctuate up and down. The thing I noticed my last shopping trip was that the price of onions had doubled.
Pork and chicken bounce around in about the same price band. Not the same every week, but limits to the highest highs and the lowest lows. I occasionally check the on-the-hoof prices and those bounce around a little bit, but not much.
Whatever meat is bringing, the middleman is getting it and not the farmers who have raised the meat.
I need a chuck roast and the sale price this week is $3.85. I'll go into town in the next couple of days to see what the bagged and bloody price is. Then I will decide whether to buy one roast, or the entire shoulder to cut up and freeze. I looked at the store yesterday and that store was almost $6 a pound for the chuck roast. It's a very high chance that both grocery stores paid the same price for the roasts they are selling with a price spread of $3.85 - $5.95.
All three of the meat sources above sell good quality meat.
On the hoof for beef this week is $1.29, which is high. Figure 50% cutting loss and beef costs $2.58 a pound, wholesale. Then there is shipping and mark-up.
Strip steaks were recently on sale for 8.99 lb. Previously the lowest I'd seen them was 9.99.
I wondered if there is a lot of beef flooding the market now as they get them out of the flood zone. And that prices will be high later as the herd numbers are down not to mention the cost of hay will probably go sky high if they can't plant.
Goes for food prices generally really.
Strip steaks were recently on sale for 8.99 lb. Previously the lowest I'd seen them was 9.99.
There are sales, of course, but I never see it going below about this 10%. The times there is a cold case full of roasts or something at a notable discount, they look like low-grade Choice... and the times I've bought them, I was disappointed at the quality.
I have also noticed that beef selection has shrunk in most stores, including places like Sam's - maybe half the linear case space, with much smaller selections of each cut and most "better" cuts in very small selection. I don't think I'm the only one who's found day-in-day-out prices to have gone up too much to buy beef regularly any more. There's always someone who quotes long-term beef prices in these discussions, but I know what I've paid over the last 10-15 years and my reaction these days when I glance over the packages is something a lot like "Holy Cow!"
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