I miss when a pound of ground beef was under two bucks

Was digging through some old receipts from 2019 the other day and saw I paid $1.89 for a pound of 80/20 at the local Kroger here in Columbus. Now it's like $4.50 on sale if I'm lucky. Three years and that's more than double. What do you guys even use now to stretch meals? I've been doing half lentils half beef in tacos and it works okay but not the same.

2 comments

2 Comments

the_kelly1d ago

Sure, but I'm gonna push back here. I just grabbed a pound of 80/20 at the Walmart in Dayton for $3.89 and it wasn't even on sale. That's not double what you paid in 2019. Inflation is real but people love to exaggerate and blame everything on the pandemic. And honestly, ground beef was way too cheap before. We got used to paying basically nothing for meat that came from animals raised on grain subsidies and cheap labor. Maybe the real price of beef should be higher if we actually paid for what it costs to produce it without all those government handouts. Also, half lentils half beef sounds pretty solid to me. You still get the fat and flavor from the meat and the lentils add fiber. Not sure why that's a complaint.

alexlewis1d ago

You hit the nail on the head. I picked up two pounds of 80/20 at the Kroger in Columbus last week and it was $7.10 total. That's barely more than what I remember paying in 2019 after you account for everything.