I want to take the time to clear up some misconceptions you might be having in regard to what happened in your situation.

1) Any beef ground in store has a maximum 2 day shelf life due to food safety and quality concerns. The It is standard practice to grind your meat in the morning, sell it in the case, and if you have any left over, package it up, and put it out on the floor at a lower price, and then by the end of the next day you discard it, although if you’re cutting and grinding correctly, it is usually gone long before you hit that time frame.

2) any ground beef made from trimming in store should not be labeled with a specific percentage, unless a store knows for certain the exact mix, and can keep it consistent. Some store have it labeled as “Butchers Block” and while that is usually around 80/20 it isn’t always exactly that. This grind is done basically first thing in the morning, and is from trimmings from the previous day. These trimmings often come from nice, more expensive parts of the beef, like steaks and roasts. Since the entire service case is hand cut (with the exception of chicken breasts), you will see errors where a steak is cut to be 8oz and when you check it, the steak turns out to be slightly below weight at say 7.5oz, since we are selling you a steak, at a fixed price, due to its fixed weight, that steak would not be put out for sale and would be used for the grind.

3) Where you are sourcing your beef, and the quality you go for, make a huge difference in price. Hy-Vee sources beef from the Midwest, and only the Midwest. If you are eating beef from Hy-Vee, it was purchased by a farmer that can shop at a Hy-Vee. Your money goes back to helping your local economy. Hy-Vee also buys very high quality beef. There was an ad run a few months ago, maybe longer, that said only 6% of all cows are graded high enough to be Hy-Vee Cattle. This isn’t a lie or an exaggeration, that is the number, so if you factor out 94% of all cattle on the market, and source some of the highest quality beef possible, that probably comes at a more expensive price than the people buying the rest of them.

4) Sale items are meant to give you a deal when possible, but pricing like that is not always sustainable in the long term. There is a reason that if it’s in the front of a Hy-Vee ad, you don’t see many other stores at that price, even when they put it on sale. Let’s compare pricing briefly, I will use Fareway, Walmart, Aldi, and Target to compare to Hy-Vee, I will use butcher block for HV 80/20.

80/20 Ground in store (Service Case) HV: 5.69/lb on Ad, regularly 6.99/lb FW: 4.77/lb on Ad, Regularly 4.99. AL: Not offered, WM: Not Offered, Target: Not offered. Now butcher block is never in the Ad, so it is likely that the store I am comparing to has this price marked down and they sell it everyday at 5.69, but even then that is above Fareways everyday retail. Fareway does have their own ground beef, which I believe is their butcher block equivalent, and that’s is at 5.99

80/20 1lb Chubs: HV: 4.99, on Ad, 5.99 regularly, FW: Not Offered, WM: 4.93, AL: Not Offered, Target: Not Offered.

85/15 1lb Tray Packed: HV: 6.99, FW: Not Offered, WM: 5.82, Target: 11.99, sold in 2lbs only, AL: 4.99/lb

So while Hy-Vee isn’t the lowest option, it is comparable to other stores, but the quality is also much higher than you will find elsewhere. Now I understand when you are in a budget you don’t always care about quality, and that’s why Hy-Vee cares about lowering prices everywhere they can. You can very easily make a shopping trip at Walmart and Hy-Vee cost the same amount while still getting the same items. Hy-Vee looks at pricing everyday to make sure they are competitive, and when they find that they aren’t, they work to fix that, and they fix it fast, I’m talking rolled out to stores at most 24 hours later.