> Pork officials say the retail value of pork, which has remained around $5 a pound since the start of 2022, has been too high to attract more customers.
$5/lb where? Boneless pork butt, the objectively best cut, is about $2.50/lb here in my major US city through instacart, which notoriously marks up prices. I'm sure that if I went to the store instead of having someone bring it to me it would be even cheaper.
Wow. Before the post-pandemic inflation, I refused to buy pork shoulder butt at anything higher than $0.99/lb and always encountered it often enough to keep at least a few pounds in reserve in my freezer. Of course, nowadays my realistic target has to be more like $1.25-$1.50.
Inflation sucks but groceries have gotten disproportionately expensive, especially meat. The good deals are out there but it requires a lot more legwork and shopping around than before. People who go to the store and just load up the grocery basket without looking at prices, I don't know how they are even affording to live these days.
Inflation really became noticeable for me when the per-pound price of oats went from $1.00-$1.50 a pound in 2020 to $4.50-$5.50 a pound in 2023. Those prices make oats often more expensive than buying garbage toasted corn cereals with sugar additives.
I used to buy the bone-in pork shoulder to cut up and use in pressure cooker soups but even those have doubled in price since 2021. I've had to cut back and use more beans and legumes and more bouillon and less meat since then.
Minced pork one pound went from $3.99 in 2017 to $4.99 in 2020 to $5.99 today. This should be the cheapest pork in theory (random pig parts into a blender), but for some reason seems to be fairly expensive and hard to find (given that it is essential to Chinese cooking, we go through a lot).
Just checked my go-to grocery store (Town & Country in Seattle), they have non-GMO boneless pork shoulder for $5.99/lb, and, uhh "natural" boneless pork shoulder for $5.29. However, the $5.29 one is currently on sale for $2.99, so excuse me while I run to the store for a second.
It’s super annoying. We live near all three in Ballard, and I have to go to QFC for affordable chicken, Safeway for minced pork and affordable pork in general, and Town Country whenever we need something fancy.
If I go to a massive conglomerate store, Albertson's, Fred Meyer, etc, those are the sort of prices I expect.
When I go to the restaurant supply store, I can get bulk packages for $1-$2 a pound. Granted, these are often big, but not massive.
Prices today:
Tenderloins are a really good deal at $2.59/lb for around 2 pounds and can be easily separated and frozen.
Pork loin(boneless, minimal trimming needed) is $2.25/lb for a 10 lb roast and can be trivially sliced into excellent chops and packed up for later.
If you want to cook up some cochinita pibil, a picnic cushion with bone and skin is $1.69 for a 10lb average pack.
Bone in shoulder butts are $2.05 for ~ 19lb package.
It's bit more work and more trimming, but cutting a beef strip loin or boneless ribeye into steaks nets out really well. I'll buy beef loin, trim it for a yield of 75% steaks with 15% in usable beef cubes and the rest in fat and silverskin. I render the fat and cook the nasty bits for the dog. If I only count the steak as yield, my $8/lb loin gets me NY strip steak at ~$11/lb and a bunch of free stuff. You just have to be willing and able to drop $140 on beef, cut it, pack it, and store it. It's less than two hours of work to make all the steaks and render the fat.
Correct my pig anatomy, but it's shoulder, butt, and then loin, contiguously?
My understanding was that loin (pork chops and tenderloin) price a bit higher than butt, and shoulder somewhere in between the other two, or maybe just ahead of chops.
Where I'm from, chops, bacon and sausage accounted for more than 90% of your pork intake, and I'm including pork products flavoring other dishes like soup and beans.
If you tend to think about it going up the leg and over the back, then sure. Picnic shoulder is under the shoulder, butt is over the shoulder, and loin is the back.
I read that as there's more pork in the McRib than in the chicken or fish, but now assume you mean more pork in the McRib than similar proportions to the chicken/fish products.
Yes, that was my meaning. The McRib is mostly pork, with some binders (typical for mechanically separated/joined meat) and form pressed. The nuggets used to be closer to this, but now a lot more filler and less meat, same for the chicken sandwiches. The fish is pretty good, but a lot of breading as a proportion.
All said, it's not that bad at all. The bun/roll is far worse, but that is true for most modern breads.
Whatever your opinion of the McRib, that was historically the explanation for its use as a limited time promotion, to take advantage of low pork prices when they come around.
> Pork producers expanded farms and processing plants in recent years as overseas demand boomed. Hog herds in China, the world’s top pork consumer, were devastated by an African swine fever outbreak in 2018.
> In 2022, U.S. pork export volumes fell 10% from the year before as China began rebuilding its hog population... With less U.S. pork shipped overseas, more remains at home, where demand has stagnated.
> Wholesale pork values fell below $1.50 a pound in April, according to federal data. Pork officials say the retail value of pork, which has remained around $5 a pound since the start of 2022, has been too high to attract more customers. Officials say they expect retail prices to start ticking down in the coming weeks, and that more consumers may turn to pork as beef prices rise.
How about more R&D into tasty, nutritious, resource-efficient, and cruelty-free food?
I'm reminded by whiffs of neighborhood summer barbecues that vegetarian food alternatives still haven't solved every problem, and the clinging to meat isn't just (no pun) pigheadedness.
Profit motives will always pose a problem for consuming heavily processed foods, which is what you're really advocating for here.
Fruits and vegetables are tasty already, especially when farmed organically in healthy lands. There's zero need to try process it into meat substitutes, and if you require that level of processing you're going to have to accept the negative health outcomes.
I agree. Encouraging more pork consumption when pigs are one of the more resource intensive AND emotionally aware/sentient/social animals seems like a poor decision in the light of climate change and animal cruelty.
Pork isn't considered as lean and healthy as chicken and so it gets a bad rap in online recipes. That's because they seem to be tailored to creating BBQ or pork belly or bacon-wrapped things which are considered unhealthy. But some cuts of pork are lean and can be included in healthier recipes. Pork needs some marketing help in the online recipes dept.
Most meat has a perfectly fine proportion of fat to protein. You, in general should be getting about 1g fat per 2g protein for nutritional levels. Most don't get nearly enough, and what they do get is a very unbalanced ratio from seed oils.
Fat can be used for energy, but is also a primary nutrient source. Carbs are solely for energy and the proteins and fats derived from vegetarian sources are of poor quality and low absorption.
Most excess energy that gets stored as fat comes from carbohydrate sources, which are much easier for the body to break down.
Here's the nutrition information for a 3-ounce serving of skinless chicken thigh, per the USDA: 9 grams fat. 20 g protein. About 1g fat per 2g protein in the chicken thigh. It's far higher than more recent recommendations, but those have been far too low in terms of natural fat intake.
Pork butt is about 20g protein and 16g fat, which isn't in and of itself bad, as it can still be used for energy (like carbs can).
If you look at a lot of western nutrition issues, most are centered around lack of fat soluble nutrients and hormone deficiencies, which are sourced significantly from fatty acids.
Edit: there's also obesity, but fat is far more satiating than carbs and tend not to cause the insulin/carb cycling in terms of hunger response that you get from sugars and simpler carbs. In the end, one should not be specifically avoiding fats from animals in natural proportions. That isn't to say you cannot overeat meat, only that it's less likely than overeating from other sources.
More than half the calories people take in is purely for energy. Excess is excess, it doesn't matter so much that it's fat or carbs. The difference being that if you're downing refined sugar or heavily processed foods there's other negative impacts that you don't see from excess fats.
Unless you're suggesting that getting an extra ounce of natural animal fat is worse than eating something like a cereal bar with lots of refined chemical additives that aren't real food, including refined fats that don't even exist and would never be taken in in nature?
And doing so, will likely cut more than an ideal ratio for nutrition, where overconsumption of calories from fat is less likely than from other sources. That also doesn't consider the fact that the effects of excess sugars/carbs is worse than excess calories from fat.
And my assertion is that most people aren't getting enough fat from a modern Western diet. That they shouldn't be afraid to eat it in natural proportions... You're the one asserting otherwise.
> that most people aren't getting enough fat from a modern Western diet.
yes, my observations are very opposite: fats are popular filling in western diet, you can check contents of muffins, croissant, sausages, not even talking about deep fried food, you will see more than half caloric intake is from fat.
Compared to what? Overeating sugar laden carby snacks? The US has been "avoiding" fats for half a century... it hasn't done any good... maybe a different approach is overdue?
I'd like you to show me someone who is obese because they ate too much fatty meat and had nearly zero sugar/carbs. Because I can show you about 120 million in the US alone where the opposite is true.
Fat is far more satiating which is why keto and paleo diets are relatively easy to adopt. For most people, it’s easier to control overeating within the same calorie amount by reducing carbs and increasing fats.
My wife seems to think that pork is always dry. She'll occasionally go for pulled pork (crockpot cooked). Do you have any other suggestions? Especially if they are potentially kid friendly.
She's not a fan of fatty recipes either, while my daughter is basically a bacontarian ... avoiding most other meats.
Get a heritage breed that hasn't had all the fat removed from the gene pool. Check out the Berkshire/Kurabota pork chops they sell at high-end butcher shops like Niku (when the site comes back up, but you can Google Images for some of their stuff, or their Instagram). [1, 2] It's a perfect almost-red meat.
Cast iron skillet on high heat, start with a high smoke point oil, 1 inch thick salt and pepper'd heritage chop, 10 minutes total (3-3-2-2) add butter (and optionally sage, and whole garlic clove - just watch they don't burn†) after the first 6 minutes and baste continuously to finish.
Melts like butter.
† if I see them starting to burn, I place them on top of the chop and pour the fat from the pan over it. Seems to stop the cook while continuing to impart the flavor.
Pork chops have a bad reputation because people buy very thin chops and cook them to 165 degrees. They are delicious and juicy if you buy 1" thick chops, and cook them to the USDA-recommended 145 degrees. Treat them like you would a steak, and be vigilant about taking their temperature as they cook, and they won't be dry at all.
My wife grew up eating overcooked pork chops, and not liking them, but a pork chop at 145 feels uncooked to her. Academically she says she knows it is safe, but that still won't allow her to eat it.
It can be pretty inconsistent. Pork chops with almost no fat can be easy to overcook (PSA: you can cook pork rare now), to pork belly which leaves half an inch of rendered fat in the pan.
I try and split the difference by keeping the fat and cooking the chops in it. It works OK.
You can, but be careful. While they don't have trichinosis anymore, they're still prone to all sorts of diseases that can be passed to humans. For instance a lot of industrial pork is contaminated with Hepatitis E and salmonella. [1, 2, 3]
You should only consider eating undercooked pork if you really trust the supply chain. I'm not about to chow down on a rare-cooked Walmart chop is all I'm saying, but from a proper butcher is likely ok.
> Sampling evidence shows that Salmonella prevalence varies substantially across the pork industries. On average, 30.3 percent of comminuted pork samples were Salmonella-positive. For pork cuts samples, an average of 9.3 percent were Salmonella-positive.
Wow. I followed the link assuming you were grossly exaggerating, but it really is rampant.
There are some high-end restaurants that serve rare or even sashimi pork, and personally I'd eat it there because I assume they'd rather not get shut down. At home though I'd want it to at least spend some time in the pan.
Lean cuts of meat dry out much more easily then fatty ones, pork in particular. I often serve correctly made pork to people and they don't believe it's pork since they have only ever had dry, tough, poorly prepared food.
Get a nice lean cut of pork and reverse sear it. You will be shocked how juicy and tender it is.
Brining for 24 is a huge help keeping the lean cuts juicy.
I smoke almost all pork I make though and that depends on the melted fat to keep it moist. My kids eat it and they would not just eat a chunk of fat like I would.
Several other folks have chimed in, but wet-brining and not overcooking chops are good solutions. I also like to cut a slit in some thick chops and stuff in a mixture of spinach and cream cheese that I've cooked on the side. Just be careful on how much salt you add.
Not a fan of fatty recipes but doesn't like dry pork? Have you pointed out the paradox yet? :)
In my experience, there is no such thing as lean pork that tastes good. Pork meat is rather gamy, so its only redeeming quality is that the fat makes it delicious. Domesticated pigs were essentially bred for a higher fat content, to make them taste better.
One of our family staples is carnitas. Basically you just grab a cheap hunk of pork shoulder butt (often just labled "pork butt" in the store), cut it up into 2" cubes, and throw it into a slow cooker or cast iron pot. For seasonings, toss in any or all of: LOTS of chili powder (hot or not), a little bit of cumin, salt, pepper, onion powder, maybe a bit of lime juice. Cook covered over medium heat for about 4 hours, stirring at least every 45 minutes. It's done when you can easily shred it with a fork. It's okay to remove some fat from the pot before shredding if there is really too much but if you try to drain it all, you are going to be left with a pile of bland meat. Shred it, serve on tacos, nachos, in a salad, or whatever.
The great thing about this recipe is that it's simple and easy. You can get creative with the seasonings, the only two important ones are the chili and salt. If the shredded pork tastes bland or so-so, you need more of one or the other, and it's generally more than you think.
Pork loin (the stuff boneless chops are made from) is really lean and is pretty inexpensive, cooked properly, it can be delicious. But it can really easily dry out.
* Brine your meat before cooking to help it retain moisture
* Cook the minimum amount possible
* Try low and slow methods like
* Sous vide
* reverse searing
* Butterfly the roast and make a roulade or bake chops on a bed of seasoned rice or stuffing
* Cut into chops and pound until thin, bread and fry to make scallopini, schnitzel or katsu
* cut into thin strips and use the Chinese "velveting" method to prepare for use in various stir-fry type dishes
I remember when the egg shortage was going on a few months ago NPR said that we shouldn't expect the retail price of eggs to drop more than about 15% from their then-current highs. Then 2 months later eggs were 50% cheaper at my grocery store.
If the wholesale price is down, and the retail price has yet to fall, someone in the middle must be making a profit. The article seems to imply that nobody is, but the margin must be going somewhere.
Nah, its pretty obvious big sellers and middlemen are milking populations like there is no tomorrow. I dont understand why is there no lawsuit anywhere, cartel behavior out in plain sight, affecting literally everybody.
Ie Tesco in Europe had record income for past year or two, as did most other mega chains. It a mystery why...
I hope this doesn't turn into a situation where the USDA ends up spending a bunch of money on shoring up meat prices for pork markets instead of allowing prices to naturally decline until demand is filled or otherwise allowing markets to do what they do best: find some kind of equilibrium
Whole sale prices are where the magic is at. I have to check what Sam's and Costco are selling at these days. I rarely buy meat at regular retailers because their mark up is insane.
Around here, Sam's has been gouging for beef. If you go out into the sticks, you can find grocery stores and farms that sell cheaper. Especially if you're buying in bulk.
Maybe it's different where you are but I have had both Sam's and Costco memberships (not at the same time) for the last couple of decades and my experience is that their food prices simply do not touch regular grocery store prices around here.
The only advantage the membership clubs seem to have is that they are usually going to have what you need if you need if you need to buy like $500 worth of meat for a party or something.
I go to Cash and Carry (well, they've renamed it about 15 times in the past few years, so it's actually US Chef's Store or something dumb like that) for wholesale pricing on meats.
Costco near me is pretty much the same price per unit category as grocery stores unless I go to their special wholesale outlets. Costco has better quality and variety that the standard grocery options though.
I never liked straight pork (as in like a steak) until my wife made some via sous vide. It instantly shot up high into my favorite dish list. No hyperbole, that’s a life changing way of cooking lol
Livestock production is one of the most environment unfriendly industries yet one of the most subsidized. Sorry kids you’ll have to figure out how to fix the climate.
Pork shoulders were 99 cents a pound for Cinco de Mayo where I'm at in California. Almost every grocery chain here had that sale. I saw one store that made you jump through some hoops selling them for 80 cents a pound.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] thread$5/lb where? Boneless pork butt, the objectively best cut, is about $2.50/lb here in my major US city through instacart, which notoriously marks up prices. I'm sure that if I went to the store instead of having someone bring it to me it would be even cheaper.
Inflation sucks but groceries have gotten disproportionately expensive, especially meat. The good deals are out there but it requires a lot more legwork and shopping around than before. People who go to the store and just load up the grocery basket without looking at prices, I don't know how they are even affording to live these days.
I used to buy the bone-in pork shoulder to cut up and use in pressure cooker soups but even those have doubled in price since 2021. I've had to cut back and use more beans and legumes and more bouillon and less meat since then.
When I go to the restaurant supply store, I can get bulk packages for $1-$2 a pound. Granted, these are often big, but not massive.
Prices today: Tenderloins are a really good deal at $2.59/lb for around 2 pounds and can be easily separated and frozen. Pork loin(boneless, minimal trimming needed) is $2.25/lb for a 10 lb roast and can be trivially sliced into excellent chops and packed up for later. If you want to cook up some cochinita pibil, a picnic cushion with bone and skin is $1.69 for a 10lb average pack. Bone in shoulder butts are $2.05 for ~ 19lb package.
It's bit more work and more trimming, but cutting a beef strip loin or boneless ribeye into steaks nets out really well. I'll buy beef loin, trim it for a yield of 75% steaks with 15% in usable beef cubes and the rest in fat and silverskin. I render the fat and cook the nasty bits for the dog. If I only count the steak as yield, my $8/lb loin gets me NY strip steak at ~$11/lb and a bunch of free stuff. You just have to be willing and able to drop $140 on beef, cut it, pack it, and store it. It's less than two hours of work to make all the steaks and render the fat.
My understanding was that loin (pork chops and tenderloin) price a bit higher than butt, and shoulder somewhere in between the other two, or maybe just ahead of chops.
Where I'm from, chops, bacon and sausage accounted for more than 90% of your pork intake, and I'm including pork products flavoring other dishes like soup and beans.
If you tend to think about it going up the leg and over the back, then sure. Picnic shoulder is under the shoulder, butt is over the shoulder, and loin is the back.
Seems to include things like bacon and deli ham in the average which are obviously much more than $5/lb. Also things like deli-cooked ribs.
But it seems to be a meticulously calculated average of actual retail prices.
All said, it's not that bad at all. The bun/roll is far worse, but that is true for most modern breads.
Do these "breads" qualify as bread in the EU? Subway's bread had issues, so I'd assume any US based fast food company would fall the same way.
> Pork producers expanded farms and processing plants in recent years as overseas demand boomed. Hog herds in China, the world’s top pork consumer, were devastated by an African swine fever outbreak in 2018.
> In 2022, U.S. pork export volumes fell 10% from the year before as China began rebuilding its hog population... With less U.S. pork shipped overseas, more remains at home, where demand has stagnated.
> Wholesale pork values fell below $1.50 a pound in April, according to federal data. Pork officials say the retail value of pork, which has remained around $5 a pound since the start of 2022, has been too high to attract more customers. Officials say they expect retail prices to start ticking down in the coming weeks, and that more consumers may turn to pork as beef prices rise.
I'm reminded by whiffs of neighborhood summer barbecues that vegetarian food alternatives still haven't solved every problem, and the clinging to meat isn't just (no pun) pigheadedness.
Fruits and vegetables are tasty already, especially when farmed organically in healthy lands. There's zero need to try process it into meat substitutes, and if you require that level of processing you're going to have to accept the negative health outcomes.
From fat soluble nutrients to poor hormone production. Combined with industrial food it's definitely taken a toll on society.
edit: s/decade/century/
the question is how much extra fat average consumer gets from meat.
Fat can be used for energy, but is also a primary nutrient source. Carbs are solely for energy and the proteins and fats derived from vegetarian sources are of poor quality and low absorption.
Most excess energy that gets stored as fat comes from carbohydrate sources, which are much easier for the body to break down.
I think popular cuts (pork butt, chicken thighs) have worse proportion than that.
Pork butt is about 20g protein and 16g fat, which isn't in and of itself bad, as it can still be used for energy (like carbs can).
If you look at a lot of western nutrition issues, most are centered around lack of fat soluble nutrients and hormone deficiencies, which are sourced significantly from fatty acids.
Edit: there's also obesity, but fat is far more satiating than carbs and tend not to cause the insulin/carb cycling in terms of hunger response that you get from sugars and simpler carbs. In the end, one should not be specifically avoiding fats from animals in natural proportions. That isn't to say you cannot overeat meat, only that it's less likely than overeating from other sources.
skinless is obviously not popular cut.
> tend not to cause the insulin/carb cycling in terms of hunger response
they contribute to extra calories.
Unless you're suggesting that getting an extra ounce of natural animal fat is worse than eating something like a cereal bar with lots of refined chemical additives that aren't real food, including refined fats that don't even exist and would never be taken in in nature?
Fat is 2.5 more dense in calories, and switching to lean meat can cut calories intake significantly.
or likely will not
> That also doesn't consider the fact that the effects of excess sugars/carbs is worse than excess calories from fat.
this is offtopic, I never stated that excess cabrs/sugars better than fat
yes, my observations are very opposite: fats are popular filling in western diet, you can check contents of muffins, croissant, sausages, not even talking about deep fried food, you will see more than half caloric intake is from fat.
But even if you don't eat processed fat, with sedentary office life one may still overconsume calories even from eating fatty meat.
I'd like you to show me someone who is obese because they ate too much fatty meat and had nearly zero sugar/carbs. Because I can show you about 120 million in the US alone where the opposite is true.
that's my personal experience, I already cut sugar/raw carbs, but still need to watch on fatty meat to maintain neutral caloric intake.
On the bright side, it seems like fewer and fewer people take it seriously.
She's not a fan of fatty recipes either, while my daughter is basically a bacontarian ... avoiding most other meats.
Cast iron skillet on high heat, start with a high smoke point oil, 1 inch thick salt and pepper'd heritage chop, 10 minutes total (3-3-2-2) add butter (and optionally sage, and whole garlic clove - just watch they don't burn†) after the first 6 minutes and baste continuously to finish.
Melts like butter.
† if I see them starting to burn, I place them on top of the chop and pour the fat from the pan over it. Seems to stop the cook while continuing to impart the flavor.
[1] https://www.nikubutchershop.com/
[2] https://www.instagram.com/p/B9Faga-DCL8/
I try and split the difference by keeping the fat and cooking the chops in it. It works OK.
You can, but be careful. While they don't have trichinosis anymore, they're still prone to all sorts of diseases that can be passed to humans. For instance a lot of industrial pork is contaminated with Hepatitis E and salmonella. [1, 2, 3]
You should only consider eating undercooked pork if you really trust the supply chain. I'm not about to chow down on a rare-cooked Walmart chop is all I'm saying, but from a proper butcher is likely ok.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4214317/
[2] https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2019/10/undercooked-pork-a-fa...
[3] https://www.fsis.usda.gov/news-events/publications/pork-salm...
Wow. I followed the link assuming you were grossly exaggerating, but it really is rampant.
Get a nice lean cut of pork and reverse sear it. You will be shocked how juicy and tender it is.
https://www.seriouseats.com/rack-of-pork-loin-roast-recipe
https://www.seriouseats.com/perfect-pan-seared-pork-chop-rec...
I smoke almost all pork I make though and that depends on the melted fat to keep it moist. My kids eat it and they would not just eat a chunk of fat like I would.
In my experience, there is no such thing as lean pork that tastes good. Pork meat is rather gamy, so its only redeeming quality is that the fat makes it delicious. Domesticated pigs were essentially bred for a higher fat content, to make them taste better.
One of our family staples is carnitas. Basically you just grab a cheap hunk of pork shoulder butt (often just labled "pork butt" in the store), cut it up into 2" cubes, and throw it into a slow cooker or cast iron pot. For seasonings, toss in any or all of: LOTS of chili powder (hot or not), a little bit of cumin, salt, pepper, onion powder, maybe a bit of lime juice. Cook covered over medium heat for about 4 hours, stirring at least every 45 minutes. It's done when you can easily shred it with a fork. It's okay to remove some fat from the pot before shredding if there is really too much but if you try to drain it all, you are going to be left with a pile of bland meat. Shred it, serve on tacos, nachos, in a salad, or whatever.
The great thing about this recipe is that it's simple and easy. You can get creative with the seasonings, the only two important ones are the chili and salt. If the shredded pork tastes bland or so-so, you need more of one or the other, and it's generally more than you think.
* Brine your meat before cooking to help it retain moisture
* Cook the minimum amount possible
* Try low and slow methods like
* Butterfly the roast and make a roulade or bake chops on a bed of seasoned rice or stuffing* Cut into chops and pound until thin, bread and fry to make scallopini, schnitzel or katsu
* cut into thin strips and use the Chinese "velveting" method to prepare for use in various stir-fry type dishes
Example:
* I buy inventory for $5, sell it for $10.
* I buy more inventory, but it's gone up to $9. I'm selling for $13, but still have some $10 on hand.
* Wholesale plummets to $2.
Until I've sold my on-hand inventory, bought more at $2 and sold that, I'm not making any margin, regardless of how low wholesale drops.
I imagine the shelf-life for some stuff is short, but maybe longer for others.
Ie Tesco in Europe had record income for past year or two, as did most other mega chains. It a mystery why...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel
The only advantage the membership clubs seem to have is that they are usually going to have what you need if you need if you need to buy like $500 worth of meat for a party or something.
Costco near me is pretty much the same price per unit category as grocery stores unless I go to their special wholesale outlets. Costco has better quality and variety that the standard grocery options though.