I used to live in Amarillo, Texas, in the late 1980s, and man, did I like to go to Boots and Jeans, the best western wear store in town. I bought lots of shirts and one pair of top-of-the-line Tony Lama boots there in 1989. On my last trip to Amarillo in May, my wife and I decided to make a trip to Boots and Jeans. Boy, was I disappointed. Boots and Jeans, the quality western wear store I remember, has been replaced with a Shepler’s store full of Chinese-made western clothes, and some Chinese-made boots, which Steve Cornett likes, but I despise.
I write this to emphasize that things change. Trends change. Fashion changes. Western wear is not as popular as it once was, and the high-class western wear I like is harder and harder to find.
Trends also change in food consumption. Troy Marshall telephoned me this last Monday, and he and I had a cordial, albeit, somewhat strained, 2-hour conversation about beef, cattle, marketing, and general BS about the beef industry. I told Troy one reason I believed beef consumption was not as good as it could be was due to trends in eating styles. My children are called the X Generation by sociologists. They were born in the late 1970s and 1980s, and do not have the same eating trends as their parents.
When my daughter goes out to eat with her parents, she will not order a 16-ounce T-bone, or a 14-ounce ribeye. She orders a 6 ounce fillet or a shish kabob of 4 to 6 ounces of beef. Yet, we are still offering in our restaurants on most menus, too much beef, too large a serving, at too much cost, acting like we are still in the 1950s as far as beef-eating trends go. That needs to change.
Instead of running all those Checkoff dollars through the NCBA offices in Denver, we should be working as an industry to develop smaller cuts and smaller servings, and you can grind up that strip steak and flat iron steak into hamburger where they belong. We spent all those funds to develop a flat iron steak, which no real beef connoisseur would ever place on the grill, when a good New York Strip was anywhere within shouting distance.
Let’s stop talking about beef demand. We haven’t produced enough beef in the United States to feed our population, which continues to grow, since the late 1970s. We have let the packers reap all the rewards of our hard earned Checkoff dollars promoting their own product, when we should spend those dollars developing smaller cuts of top-end product, and get our cattle genetics in line with today’s eating trends.
IBP revolutionized the beef merchandising sector by coming up with boxed beef. Why can’t retailers now revolutionize the beef retail sector by offering the Generation X something they can really dig into at the dinner table, or the restaurant?
And that is another thing; Generation X eats out as much as they fix dinner at home, and maybe more eating out if the truth were known. Some restaurants are offering only Select meat on the menu. That is a big mistake. As Troy and I discussed, eating pleasure comes from the higher quality grades, and less undesirable eating events result from the higher quality grades. There should never be a time when Choice is the same price to the producer as Select.
Let’s not end up like Boots and Jeans.
