The price of beef, and especially holiday cuts of beef, is going through this season.
House brand prime rib roasts at Sam’s Club — a warehouse market where people pay membership dues to access lower prices — are currently priced at $27.38 per pound, leading 6-8 pound rib roasts to cost around $200.
Other markets are offering slightly better deals. Safeway is charging $17.99/lb. for rib roasts. City Market has not yet advertised their holiday prime rib roasts but bone-in ribeye steaks there are currently selling for $20.99/lb. WalMart is selling rib roasts for $14.87/lb., but some online reviewers who ordered rib roasts from WalMart this year said the meat they got was too fatty or tough to eat, and/or was beyond its use-by date and had a stale odor. Some of the people leaving bad reviews documented their complaints with photos of the meat they got.
Why is beef so expensive?
Amid strong U.S. demand for beef, American cattle herds are the smallest they’ve been in decades as a result of extreme heat, drought and burned-up pasture lands. Immigration raids have also detained hundreds of workers from meat processing plants, including many who are U.S. citizens, leaving fewer workers to process meat. Inflation and fuel prices have added to the increased costs, as have Trump’s tariffs, which include a 50% retaliatory tariff on Brazil, a major exporter of beef to the U.S.
Trump levied the tariff against Brazil after a jury there found former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro — a Trump ally — guilty for his role in attempting to overturn the results of that country’ s 2022 election. Trump tried to portray Brazil’s prosecution of Bolsonaro as an “emergency” in order to levy the tariff. In late October, the Senate voted to end Trump’s 50% tariff on Brazil, but so far the House hasn’t voted on it, and even if the House passed it, Trump would probably veto it.
By all accounts it will take many years to restore America’s cattle herds, if it is even possible, especially as long as Trump remains in office.
As long as 4 corporations control the processing of beef and 5 corporations control the grocery stores, we will have monopolistic inflation of the price of beef. The ranchers certainly aren’t getting rich, even though grain prices are at historic lows when factored for inflation, and BTW, it takes about 4 years to raise a calf to breeding age, breed it and get a marketable calf, so this “Crisis” has no short tern relief, other than to import cheap beef from Argentina (MAGA stands for Make ARGENTINA Great Again!) further depressing the incentive for ranchers to increase their herds, and you can expect the corporations to continue to gouge us until such time as stock buybacks and windfall profits are taxed.