CNN reports the alarming high cost of beef now reaching $4 a pound. That’s been the price for cheap ground beef around here for a long time. We’ll pay 4 times that much for quality cuts of quality beef. Probably 4 times for Prime now.
What are you guys paying?
Yeah, I probably pay around $5 per pound. If I saw beef for $4 flat, I’d assume it’s low-grade. (And in fact, when I’ve had ground beef around that price, it’s been pretty terrible.)
I meant 5 times for Prime. So $20 a pound for a prime boneless rib steak or roast wouldn’t be surprising. I’ll probably find out at Christmas time.
There was a time where I paid $2.50/lb for ground chuck and I know it wasn’t that long ago. It was a good price so I bought 10lbs and stored it in 1/2lb blocks.
How often do y’all consume ground beef? I try to have it at most once a week. For expense reasons and I feel bad for the animals. Also, I only serve 1/4lb per person and we supplement the rest with beans/rice/fillers.
On a side note, Walmart wanted 9.40 a lb for sliced roast beef the other day. I did a double take! I don’t normally get Deli meats as I grew up in Rhode Island and the local stuff pales in comparison.
I don’t know exactly how much I’m paying for beef. I usually get a couple of rib eye steaks from the corner market a couple of times a month, and I buy ground beef five pounds at a time from the supermarket and freeze it in one-pound parcels. I think the nicely-marbled rib eyes cost around $11.95 or $12.95 per pound. A couple of months ago I bought four USDA Prime rib eyes from Costo. IIRC, they were $15/pound. The corner market rib eyes were actually a little bit tastier than the ones from Costco, so I’ll continue getting them there. It’s much more convenient. (FWIW, they get them from FSA.) I really don’t know how much the ground beef is. I’m guessing around $3/pound.
And since we’re on the subject of the cost of meat per pound, I bought a six-pound package of bacon from Cash & Carry on the weekend. It was $4/pound.
I haven’t bought ground beef in…probably years. Seems to me it used to hover around two bucks a pound, depending on the cut?
According to my current Kroger ad, ground sirloin is on sale this week for $4.99/lb.
ETA - We have a couple of really good independent butchers around here. I can usually buy a nice rib-eye or T-bone steak for about $8.00/lb on sale.
Yeah, it’s about $3.50-$4.00 for the cheapest choice grade cuts. (Usually shank and chuck, with chuck being about a quarter per pound more expensive.)
Whole Foods had grass fed ground beef on sale for $5.99. It’s usually $8.99. So I consider that very good.
If I’m just buying angus ground beef from a supermarket, I’ll typically pay $5.99. Less if it’s on sale.
Way too much. It’s typically $4.99 at the local quality grocery store, sometimes on sale for $3.99 and once in a while $2.88 to $2.99 with a store coin. I buy 80-85% because the leaner stuff is flavorless and hard to cook with unless you just saute it into browned bits.
I buy most meat at Sams, being selective about which cuts, but their prices have shot through the roof - literally. 85% is $3.40, more than 50 cents up. Most grill cuts are well past $10. Most stew cuts are past $6.
The real shocker yesterday was center-cut pork chops, which have slowly risen from $11-12 a flat to maybe $16 for a heavy one. They’re pretty much our standard cut these days. Yesterday I reached for one and the flats were $24-27… pigf*ck that!
Boneless chicken breasts stay pretty cheap, so we work around those a lot. I won’t buy the southern-processed brands most stores have as a low-price option; I’ll take Foster’s or Perdue for fifty cents more and things like passing USDA and OSHA inspections.
But yeah, wow, when even ground beef is into what we’ve been paying for lesser cuts, it’s bad. Thank goodness we have mega-acres of ethanol corn, right?
$7/lb for organic, free pastured, grass fed, family-raised lean ground beef. $9/lb for London broil; ~12/lb for sirloin tri-tip steak. That’s buying direct-from-farmer. And it’s @&!? delicious. I almost can’t eat beef out anymore because I find the meat used in restaurants bland.
I stopped buying beef muscle meat decades ago. I was furious when the price of beef liver suddenly doubled (to $1.97 a pound) a couple of years ago. WalMart has beef liver for 1.59 a pound, but it is vacuum packed in Chicago, and is of very poor quality, mostly bits and pieces, not slices. I also buy beef heart, which is less than 2.50 a pound.
I buy Laura’s Lean beef, so I’m used to paying $5+ per pound. Sometimes you can get it on sale for $3.99 but I think that it’s usually ~$5.79/lb for the 95%.
I bought ground beef in chubs yesterday and the 85/15 was about $4.50/lb. Brisket, a barbecue staple here in Fort Worth, is running close to $3.50/lb itself. Both prices are probably up a third vs where they were 6-months to a year ago.
Near as I can gather, it’s a genuine shortage in beef and pork production due to drought (beef) or disease (pork).
My sales territory runs from Fort Worth out to the Texas Panhandle so I’ll hear a lot of cattle talk when I am out that way. I know Texas ranchers had been grazing cattle in Montana due to the Texas drought and unable to feed them here. Last time I was out west, I hardly saw any herds and happened to mention this to a cattleman I met. He allowed that he had pretty well dumped his herd and had only kept his … breed cows… is that the term?.. and he knew plenty of others like him. Figured it would take 2-3 years for herds to recover. The Cattle Raiser Assoc was worried that with the high prices and low supply, Americans would learn to eat chicken instead and have a long term impact on beef.
For pork, ISTR an article that a virus was killing the piglets and the supply of pork was going to drop, too. Ahh, here we go, Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus.
I know someone who buys a whole butchered cow about once a year, directly from this farm. Grass fed, pasture-raised. A couple of years ago I am pretty sure she told me that it worked out to about $3.50/lb, which is a great deal since that includes steaks and roasts as well as cheaper cuts and ground meat. I’m guessing she’s paying a bit more now, though - that farm doesn’t list prices on their website.
Fresh Market on Tuesdays has ground chuck for $2.99 a lb. That’s when I get it.
We pay $4.09 a pound for ground turkey, $5.79 for ground turkey breast. This is from the turkey farm. Their ground beef is usually just a few cents cheaper a pound.
My plan is to do that from a local butcher for next year. The price is just about the same as your friend’s, and they even grind it up and cut it up for you. We have a dedicated freezer in the garage so that we can buy cheap and have it ready when we need it.
But I’m amazed at what people are paying in this thread. Sometimes I’ll splurge by spending $8 or $9 on something like ribeye. We can usually get ground beef at about $3/lb. For other cuts, we aim for $4 to $5/lb. Sometimes that means picking things up on sale. (Albertson’s sometimes does buy-one-get-one deals, for example). There is no piece of beef in the world worth $10/lb to me.
Same here, essentially; the 90% is being advertised this week at $4.99. I agree with you about the flavor.
The heart is a muscle. 
It might be nice to resurrect this thread yearly just to reminisce what everyone is paying right now.
As of earlier this week, my wife says she paid about $3.50-3.75 per lb for 80/20 ground chuck at Kroger.