Sloppy reading on your part. If you read the next line past what you quoted, you'll see that I think demand for corn fed beef will fall if its price rises, which wouldn't happen if it were "required for consumers".piscator wrote:You talk like labor is optional for McDonald's, but beef is required for consumers.Warren Dew wrote:Yes.piscator wrote:Is this the same guy who previously argued the demand for labor at McDonald's would drop if the minimum wage increased?Warren Dew wrote:Higher cost of grain causes higher cost of producing grain finished beef.
Higher cost of grain finished beef causes higher prices for grain finished beef.
Higher price of grain finished beef causes some consumers to switch to grass fed beef.
Consumers switching to grass fed beef causes increased demand for grass fed beef.
Increased demand for grass fed beef causes increased prices for grass fed beef.
A minimum wage increase increases the costs at McDonald's, so demand will drop.
And yet, some people buy it anyway, because it's more humane, or because it's healthier, or both.Grass fed beef is expensive
You're completely confused here. Most grass finished beef is not dry aged, as you describe. Certainly none of the grass finished beef I buy is dry aged, and I buy a lot of grass finished beef. It's true that some grass finished beef is dry aged and thus even more expensive, but it's actually much easier to find corn finished beef that's dry aged.because slaughter cows weigh less, and grass fed beef needs to spend a month aging in cold storage before it's marketable. 6 weeks in a feedlot is cheaper than a month aging on a meathook in a refrigerator, and not solely because the same cow will weigh a couple hundred pounds more when finished on grain.
Cold storage is expensive as fuck, and inefficient because you can't optimize the space in a big refrigerator with hanging beef. So you have a big expensive power-hungry refrigerator that you can only fill 50%.
Then you have supply chain costs. It's not like slaughterhouses have acres and acres of refrigerators to handle a month's production. No. Sides of beef have to be shipped around in half-full trucks of swinging hanging beef sides. Not only is that inefficient trucking, but the inertia of swinging beef is dangerous and expensive to insure because trucks are more likely to roll over. It's no mystery why the world beef industry switched to grain fed 40 or 50 years ago: it's much more profitable.
The beef industry mostly switched to grain finished beef because grain became cheaper than grass, partly because of fossil fuel derived fertilizers, and partly because of agricultural subsidies. It had nothing to do with aging requirements.
Actually what we have is Piscator responding without actually reading and understanding what he's responding to.So we have Warren and CES thinking that labor is optional for McDonald's business, and Seth who thinks he can skip feeding his cows on hardscrabble Texas Panhandle pasture and still produce a marketable product. Absolutely bygod brilliant, boys.
