Lifestyle

She Stocked Up on Meat at Costco on a Very Low Income. Then She Saw the Ground Beef Price: “That Seems Outrageous to Me”

By Erica Coleman · November 9, 2026

The woman behind the small YouTube channel bridgetofftherails drives a little over an hour to reach her closest Costco. In a May video, she unpacks what she brought home on her kitchen counter and walks through the price of each item.

Her channel is aimed at women over 50, and she says she eats on a very low income. Over time, she explains, the more beef has gone up, the more chicken and pork she has worked into her meals.

Her biggest buy that day was a whole chuck roll, about 15 and a half pounds. By cutting it into steaks and roasts herself at home, she says, she pays $5.99 a pound for her steaks, which she puts at least $3 a pound below the steak prices at her store that morning. Pork chops were $2.99 a pound. “See? You can still afford to eat,” she says.

Then she holds up the ground beef. You can see the moment in her video on YouTube.

The package was a little over 8 pounds, at $5.99 a pound. She points out that she paid as much for ground beef as for the steaks she cuts herself. “That seems outrageous to me, and I almost didn’t buy it,” she says.

A package of pork belly a moment later raised the same question for her. “Okay, so when did bacon and hamburger get more expensive than steak and roast?”

Her prices come from one store on one day, and she is buying in bulk. But her frustration with ground beef matches what federal price data shows. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks an average retail price for 100% ground beef across U.S. cities, published through the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database. That average was $6.745 a pound in May 2026, the month she posted her video. It reached $6.923 in August, the highest monthly figure in the series, which runs back to 1984. In September it was $6.792, up from $6.323 a year earlier.

By that measure, her $5.99 bulk price was below the national average. Her point was not that ground beef was unusually expensive at her store. It was that a cheaper cut had caught up with the steaks.

BLS notes that these average prices are best used to show the price level in a given month, and that its Consumer Price Index is the better tool for tracking change over time.

Her approach has a few parts other shoppers can weigh against their own situation:

Buy larger cuts and portion them. She cuts the chuck roll into steak and roast sizes and says the only difference between a steak and a roast is how it is cut. If you try this, keep raw meat cold and freeze portions you will not use soon.

Watch for markdowns. She says she often buys packages with yellow markdown labels and freezes them right away.

Mix in other proteins. Chicken and pork have taken a bigger share of her meals as beef climbed. She bought two whole chickens at 99 cents a pound and says whole birds are often cheaper than parts.

Count the trip. Her nearest Costco is more than an hour away, so a stock-up run has to cover a lot of meals, and bulk buying only pays if you have freezer space and use what you buy.

Her video is one shopper’s receipt, not a national price check. But her question about bacon and hamburger costing more than steak is one plenty of shoppers have been asking at the meat case this year.

This article is for general information. Prices vary by store, region and date. This article was produced with the assistance of AI and fact-checked against the sources cited by LightWave Reports.