Why Cheap Meat Isn’t Cheap

Occasionally someone will look at our case and ask,

“Why is this so expensive?”

Most people aren’t forward enough to say, “I can get this cheaper somewhere else.” But the perception lingers.

I once had a woman question the price of ribeye. I asked her what she normally paid. She said she had no idea.

That interaction taught me something.

Sometimes “expensive” isn’t a comparison to a known number. It’s a comparison to an assumption.

And once a small business develops a reputation for quality or craftsmanship, the perception of being pricey tends to stick, regardless of the actual tag.

My internal reaction isn’t frustration.

It’s more like,

“If they buy it and taste it, they’ll understand. If they don’t, they won’t.”

⸻

Scale Changes Everything

If we’re talking about large grocery stores, the comparison is difficult from the start.

Their model is built on scale.

Big chains don’t necessarily need to make much profit on each item. Some products act as loss leaders. Milk is the classic example. It’s often priced aggressively and placed in the back of the store. The goal isn’t to make money on milk. The goal is to get you through the aisles.

While you’re there, you buy other things.

A 1,700 square foot butcher shop cannot operate that way.

There’s no maze of aisles. No massive product mix to subsidize thin margins. No daily foot traffic in the thousands.

Large stores succeed on volume. They can afford to make less per pound because they sell far more pounds.

A small shop doesn’t have that luxury. The math is different.

That isn’t greed. It’s structure.

⸻

Tradeoffs Are Everywhere

As Thomas Sowell once said, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

Years ago, one of the catalysts for opening this shop came from buying a single pound of ground beef. I noticed the country-of-origin label listed four different countries.

Four.

That meant the facility producing it was operating at an enormous scale. It had to be. You don’t combine beef from multiple countries unless you’re processing an immense volume.

Ground meat is perishable. It has increased surface area. It doesn’t last long. When production operates at that scale, most of what you see is the finished product. The details behind it are harder to trace.

Where was it raised?

When was it ground?

What muscles went into it?

How long did it travel?

The lower the price, the more the curtain tends to close on those questions.

That’s not a moral accusation. It’s an observation about complexity and scale.

⸻

What Cheap Often Requires

Cheap meat doesn’t appear out of nowhere.

It usually requires some combination of:

• Massive production scale

• Commodity sourcing

• High processing throughput

• Extremely efficient distribution

• Thin per-unit margins made up by volume

None of those things are inherently wrong. They’re just different models.

But every model has tradeoffs.

Lower prices often mean less transparency.

Less transparency means less clarity about origin, process, and handling.

And scale introduces its own risks.

The output isn’t just inexpensive meat. It’s a system built to prioritize price above almost everything else.

⸻

Earning the Difference

I don’t want anyone shopping here out of obligation. I’ve never wanted that.

If someone prefers the grocery store model, that’s fine.

But if someone values knowing where their food comes from, how it was handled, how it was cut, and who is standing behind it, that has a cost structure attached to it.

Not because we decided it should.

Because the system requires it.

Cheap meat isn’t free.

It’s just that the tradeoffs are rarely printed on the label.