A FB buddy posted the following: “Dude at gas station was drivin a steak truck and out of gas. Said he’d give me a box of steaks for 20 dollars. …just scored 8 6oz filet mignon for 20 bucks.” This sounds like a scam, and one that I’ve heard of, I’m just not sure how it works. Is it bad meat? Just a really cheap cut of meat? I didn’t ask the FB friend for the details, I just mocked him and asked him if he also bought some speakers from the same guy, or from the guy in a van next to the meat truck.
Let’s go ahead and talk about the speakers out of a van scheme. I have actually been approached with this one, but I turned it down. (I didn’t need any speakers, plus it seemed sketchy anyway.) I don’t remember the details because it was over 10 years ago, but they had some speakers that were just going to go to waste somehow and were really trying hard to sell them to me cheap. Do they just sell you empty speaker boxes?
I think the speakers are real. I’ve been approached by both speaker people and watch people. I have - in the past - been a seller of both products. The speakers were big looking (no name that i can remember) speakers and I think they were claiming they were worth big money. They looked ok, but how could I tell by looking.
The watch was “Geneve” brand. I don’t know if it was real or not. That isn’t a brand real well known in the US. Whatever he was saying about it was very exaggerated - he had some ad with him or something, but it just screamed scam - and seemed fairly amateurish. IMHO - the watch was ugly - and it was really of no interest to me.
One scam I’ve heard is selling VCRs (back when people bought VCRs) and they would just put a brick in the box.
Of course if you do that, a person would probably notice that all the weight is in the center, and that nobody who buys one would open it to check it before going home.
Nailed it in one.
The reason it’s a scam is there’s no way it’d be legal in stores. If the product is good, that means it’s stolen. If the product is bad, it’s a ripoff no matter the price.
The speakers are real in the sense that you can plug them in and they’ll make sound. But they’re just cheap junk boxed up to look expensive.
I know someone who bought a set. Paid around $400 cash, believing them to be worth several thousand. They even had a fake web site set up so if you google the brand they sound like the real deal. But you could buy better speakers for far less than the $400 he paid.
The way the scam was originally supposed to work is that the victim would assume that the merchandise was really a good brand, but stolen, and that that accounted for the price. So the victims would be reluctant to call the cops on you, and if they did, well, you’ve got your merchant license in order, and you never actually said it wasn’t a piece of crap, it’s not your fault your customers made assumptions. It’s described this way in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, where Malcolm sets his brother up with it as a relatively safe way to make some money.
Nowadays, though, the scam is so much more common than genuine stolen goods, that I think most people just jump straight to the (correct) conclusion that it’s low-quality crap.
EDIT: That is, if they think about it at all. Obviously there are enough people who don’t think about it to keep the scammers in business.
Had a friend who bought the speakers for $100. They were garbage. We took them apart to examine them. Cheap, cheap paper cones with tiny magnets. You could play sound through them but it sounded like it was being played through a speaker phone.
I guess you could use them as props or end tables.
I’ve seen the steak guys also. Supposedly they draw you in with the cheap price but then continually hard pressure upsell you into buying large package assortments. The meat is also apparently sub-par quality. Edible but anything from your local grocer would be better.
You’ll be getting cheap cuts of meat rather than filet minion. You’ll probably getting short-changed on the quantity also. It may be labelled six ounces but can you tell without weighing the difference between a four ounce and a six ounce cut? So figure you’re paying twenty bucks for two pounds of low quality steaks.
Some of the beef scams have correctly labeled meat in terms of cut and weight, but of grades that are below what you’d find in a store. Stores typically carry “Choice” meat, or “Prime” for the higher quality stuff. But there are six USDA grades below that, some of which are normally used only in processed food products. It’s not illegal to sell these grades to the public, it’s just that most stores don’t want to tarnish their reputation with it.
“Select” is very common, too, but it’s usually just unlabeled. So, if you see something that says “NY Strip” without any other descriptor, it’s most likely select, as “choice” is something that you would advertise on the label. It’s also pretty easy (once you know what you’re looking for) to look at a piece of meat and judge its grading. You’re basically looking for an abundance of marbling. It’s going to vary a bit depending on the cut, but if you see all red meat without fine lines or flecks of fat running through it, you’re looking at one of the lower grades.
Here’s an example, although that middle “choice” cut seems a little more on the lower end of “choice” to me. If you look through packages of steak at, say, Costco, you can often find choice that looks pretty darned close to the prime on the left.
Was offered “extra” speakers that were “accidentally” added to an order.
I said, “Your kidding”. He replied, “No.”
I said, “OK, where’s the camera?” and walked away.
To think some people fall for this is mind boggling.
The meat in a truck guys come around occasionally and they are pretty good at responding to your doubts about the meat, but telling them that you are a vegetarian stops them in their tracks every time.
Beef is graded by evaluating an entire carcass. Any one cut may be of exceptionally good, or poor quality from a carcass of any grade, though probably not much in the exceptionally good category from carcasses graded below Select.
Anyway, you’re not likely to run into guys selling you Select as Choice from the back of a truck. If you’re getting real meat at the right weight it’s probably old or stolen. It’s hardly worth the effort to butcher a carcass for this scam.
That would explain why I see so much variation with Costco’s choice. I’ve always assumed they were individually graded. I’ve been able to find such great examples of choice there that I would swear are prime.
I have once been approached by a steak truck, but having a look at the wares and the prices, nothing really seemed like a good deal to me. Maybe these guys were amateurs or something, but nothing they were selling screamed “bargain” to me. I could get meat of known provenance and quality for cheaper.
Since it’s already purchased. Give it the sniff test. If it’s ok, throw it on the grill. I would cook it completely done.
I prefer mine medium, but since theres concerns about the meat. Well done please. If it tastes good then buy more from the meat truck. I don’t think it could be shoplifted if they are selling that volume.
They’re not butchering their own cattle. They’re probably buying their meat from the same legitimate wholesalers as stores and restaurants use. But they’re buying cheap cuts and then selling them as quality cuts. They’re probably figuring a lot of their buyers can’t even tell the difference between a select and prime cut.
It makes sense to do it this way. There’s no point in breaking laws you don’t have to. Steal a couple hundred pounds of steaks and you’ve committed a major felony. Sell a couple hundred pounds of old spoiled steaks and you give a hundred people food poisoning. But buy a couple hundred pounds of select steaks and sell them as prime steaks and you’ve only committed false advertising. The police aren’t going to put much effort into chasing you down for that.
Here’s the USDA page on Beef Quality and Yield Grades. The Yield Grade has a lot to do with the variation. Throwing out a useless anecdote here, a meat inspector once told me that grading wasn’t a good way to determine the quality of sirloin cuts, but he didn’t tell me why. Of all the useful information he could have told me about beef quality, he gave me that bit of info, and moved on.
You’ll need to sell a lot of Select to make money that way. I doubt that’s going to happen selling steaks in a parking lot. Look at the difference in price between Select and Choice already cut. It isn’t that great and you have to sell below Choice prices. Meat suppliers do this all the time, selling in volume. From the back of a truck you just can’t make money that way. Sure, some dumb guys might give it a try, but they’re likely to end up with half a truck of meat they can’t sell to anyone.
