When a retailer buys a carcass, he purchases neck meat as well as loins; chucks as well as rounds. Portions of the carcass have to be sold at or sometimes less than he paid per pound for the carcass. The choice cuts necessarily have to make up for the losses on the less desirable portions. It is not unreasonable, therefore, that the retailer should charge fifty or sixty cents a pound for choice steaks and fifteen cents a pound for boiling beef out of a carcass which he bought at the rate of twenty cents a pound.
Only the aggregate price which the retailer gets for all parts and portions of the carcass will show his margin over the initial cost. It is wholly improper, therefore, to compare sixty-cent steaks with twelve-cent cattle with a view to determining profit.
The same thing is true of hogs and of sheep. A hog is not all meat, nor is the meat all ham. A sheep is not all carcass and only a small part of the carcass cuts up into chops. One must know the aggregate return and something about the costs of doing business before a justifiable conclusion as to price margins can be determined.
THE home managers have in their hands the most important business of the nation. American women realize that to their duties as home makers, mothers, and guiding influences, is added an important economic responsibility. The manner in which the purchasing power of twenty million home managers is used has an inestimable effect upon the production, collection, and distribution of all products in the market.
This second edition of “The Business of Being a Housewife” is respectfully dedicated to the thousands of wise home managers who are determined to understand more fully their relation to the producers of the country and to the great industries, such as that of Armour and Company, who have made possible the providing of perfect food in perfect condition at any distance from the farm.
A study of the national and world situation on food production shows that old-time low food prices may never return. Formerly much of the food was raised by numerous individual families on Government land at nominal cost; today practically all food is raised on expensive land—the plains have been turned into villages and farms by the increasing population. Many men and expensive machinery and equipment are needed to produce our present high standard products.