Where our numbers come from
No mystery meat, and no mystery math. Every shelf comparison on this site traces back to a public feed, a date, and a cut of the formula you can check yourself.
The short version
Public feed
USDA or BLS publishes a price.
We store it
Kept with source, region, and observed date.
We apply the rule
Base price is the benchmark minus our set margin.
You see both
The shelf number and ours, side by side.
The three feeds
All three are free, public, and require no account or key.
Weekly Grocery Store Beef Feature Activity
Advertised per-pound prices at major grocery outlets, collected store by store and published weekly as report ams_3228.
Kentucky is read from the MIDWEST region block. Only advertised feature prices are used; budget “value” store brands are skipped so the comparison stays against USDA Choice product.
Per lb, advertised
Summary of Retail Prices and Price Spreads
Monthly national retail values for beef, plus the spread between what the farmer gets, the wholesaler, and the grocery shelf.
Used for the big-picture series (all-fresh beef, Choice beef, ground beef, round roast, sirloin steak) and for the price-spread figures cited on the market page.
Summary of Retail Prices and Price Spreads (CSV) →
Per lb, national average
Average Price Data, Ground Beef (CPI)
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' public API, which carries the monthly average price shoppers actually pay for ground beef.
Three ground-beef series are tracked: ground chuck, ground beef, and lean/extra-lean ground beef. Together they anchor the ground-beef cuts in the shop.
api.bls.gov series APU0000703112 →
Per lb, national average
The pricing rule, in plain text
Our base price for a cut is the latest published benchmark for that cut, less a fixed margin. The default margin is set in the shop admin, and it applies to the base cut price only.
- Benchmark. The newest observation for the cut's series, whatever its source.
- Base price. Benchmark × (1 − margin), then floored to the nearest cent ending in 9. The default margin is 20%, and that last step can add a few tenths of a point to the discount, never take any away.
- Savings badge. Benchmark − base price. It describes the cut before packing options, never after.
Packing, wrapping, and gift options are priced on their own line. They are not folded into the comparison, because a grocery shelf price does not include them either.
How fresh, and how honest
- Every figure carries its date. The shop shows the day the price was observed, not the day we fetched it.
- Stale is labeled stale. Anything older than 21 days is marked as such. We would rather show an old number with a warning than quietly quote it as current.
- Feeds fail quietly. If a source is unreachable, the last good value stays live with its original date. No number is invented or interpolated.
- Orders snapshot the market. The receipt stores the figures you saw at checkout, so a later refresh cannot rewrite a past order.
What we never do
- No scraping chain-store websites or delivery apps.
- No paid price aggregators, and no prices behind a login.
- No “market price” without a source and a date.
- No invented local prices. Hand-entered store prices carry the store name, the date, and a note.
- No blending two sources into one number and calling it USDA.
- No changing a published figure to make a comparison look better.
Every series we track
This is the whole list. Each row is a feed we read and store.
| Source | Series | Region | Series key |
|---|---|---|---|
| USDA ERS | Consumer price index, beef and veal | National | ers:beef_cpi |
| USDA ERS | Price spread: Farmers' share of retail beef dollar, percent | National | ers:farmers_share |
| USDA ERS | Price spread: beef farm to wholesale | National | ers:farm_wholesale |
| USDA ERS | Price spread: beef wholesale to retail | National | ers:wholesale_retail |
| USDA ERS | Retail prices or values: Choice beef retail value | National | ers:choice_beef_retail |
| USDA ERS | Retail prices or values: all-fresh beef retail value | National | ers:all_fresh_beef |
| USDA ERS | Retail prices or values: ground beef | National | ers:ground_beef |
| USDA ERS | Retail prices or values: round roast, USDA Choice boneless | National | ers:round_roast |
| USDA ERS | Retail prices or values: sirloin steak, USDA Choice boneless | National | ers:sirloin_steak |
What is ours, not the market's
Plenty of what you see here does not come from a federal feed at all. It is ours, and it lives in this shop's own database:
- Herd, cut sheet, and availability — what we actually have.
- Orders, packing choices, pickup and delivery windows.
- Price changes made in the admin console, each with an audit trail and the ability to revert.
- Hand-entered local store prices, kept separate from the federal figures.
The shop database is a local SQLite file. Order receipts keep their own copy of the market snapshot they were priced against.
Spot something wrong?
If a number looks off, tell us which page and which row. We will re-pull the feed, and if the figure was wrong we will correct it and say so in the price audit log.
The raw public reports are linked above. You are welcome to check our arithmetic against them. That is the point.
Last verified against the upstream reports by the shop's daily fetch job. See also the live market table.