Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 8/26/26
"Beef Prices Skyrocket And
Nobody Can Afford It Anymore"
"There is a moment that keeps repeating in American grocery stores this month. Someone stops in front of the meat case, looks at a sticker, and takes their phone out. Not to complain to anybody in particular. Just because the number on the label no longer makes sense to them. Twenty Americans filmed that moment, and this is what they found. A man picks up a basic ribeye and it is $18. Another looks at a family pack of extra lean ground beef marked $35, with regular ground beef at $24 beside it. A shopper in a Publix meat department holds up a single pound and it is almost $13 - over $3 for a quarter pounder before it ever reaches a pan. Someone else finds ground beef at $6.29 a pound and says flatly that it was $2.99 a year ago. A woman puts a box of Hamburger Helper and a pound of 80/20 in her cart and the till says $15 for a dinner for two. A shopper at Walmart stops mid-aisle because the number on the package does not match anything she remembers paying. And then the arithmetic that has been passed around all month: the average pound of ground beef in the United States is $8.69. The federal minimum wage is $7.25. In 2009, when that wage was last set, a pound of ground beef was two dollars. An hour of work at the legal floor no longer buys a pound of the cheapest beef in the case. That is not a talking point. That is a receipt.
What makes this different from every other price story is who else is in the video. The people who raise the animals are here too, and they are not comfortable either. A rancher watches three-day-old bull calves sell for $2,200 apiece and explains what a bet like that says about where prices are heading eighteen months out, because that is how long it takes to turn a calf into beef. A cattle family loads calves onto a trailer early, before the market moves against them, and says out loud what that decision costs them. A pitmaster shows how a 19-pound brisket bought at $8 a pound cooks down to six pounds of servable meat, which puts his true cost north of $25 a pound before he has paid himself a dollar. A fifth-generation cattleman watches live cattle drop forty cents a pound in a single morning and points out that nothing on the shelf moved at all. The price fell for him. It did not fall for you. That gap is the whole story, and the numbers behind it are not complicated.
The American herd is the smallest it has been in about seventy years. Drought thinned it, feed and fuel costs kept it thin, and rebuilding a herd is a multi-year decision that nobody makes while the future looks like this. Four processors handle over 85% of the beef in this country, and the Justice Department has now said out loud that it is looking at them. Foreign beef is being brought in by the hundreds of millions of pounds, priced under the domestic market - and the ranchers who are supposedly protected by keeping it out are the same people telling you plainly that letting it in will not lower your grocery bill much either. None of the people in this video are analysts. They are standing in an aisle or a field with a phone, and the number in front of them is bigger than the paycheck it is supposed to come out of. That is the only qualification any of them needed. One family here did the sum that everybody keeps talking about. They split a steer with friends: $2,000 for the animal, $750 in feed and hay to finish him, $800 for the butchering and packaging. Split two ways that is $1,700 each, and against a hanging weight of 624 pounds it works out at $5.60 a pound - ribeyes, roasts, ground and all. Cheaper than the case, if you have a freezer and somebody to split it with. That is the workaround people are actually using, and it says a lot that it has come to that.
If beef has quietly dropped off your weekly shop, you are not imagining the change and you are not managing your money badly. The cart costs more than it did and your wages did not follow. There are still a few things that help. Chuck and round still cook down well in a slow cooker and cost a fraction of the steak cuts. A whole chicken still goes further than anything in the beef case. Splitting an animal with another family genuinely does beat the supermarket per pound if you have the freezer space and can put the money up front. And it is worth asking a local butcher what they have that is not on the display - the answer is often surprising, and often cheaper. Tell us in the comments what a pound of ground beef costs where you live, and what you have swapped it for. Somebody scrolling past is trying to work out the same thing, and these comments end up being more useful than the video. If this is what your grocery run looks like now, subscribe. We put out videos like this every week, made entirely out of what Americans are filming themselves."
Comments here:
No comments:
Post a Comment