The Cost of Living in Australia: The Price of Meat.

No!

Well, I doubt it. But it is certainly the biggest butcher’s shop I’ve ever been into.

A couple of weeks ago we were making our way to Eagle Farm Racecourse for another day at the races. But as can happen here in Australia, and often does, the weather turned very quickly. When we woke up, it was hot, sunny with clear blue skies. Default weather.

When we were ready to get into our car, the weather looked as though it was about to take a nasty turn. But we were going to be driving about 40 minutes in a northerly direction, would we be driving into the bad weather or away from it?

The answer was into it. So when we were just about five minutes away from the race track, we decided against our horsey day. But while we were in the area, we decided to check out this butcher’s shop that we’d heard a lot about.

Well, as you can see from the picture, the clouds were looking gloomy but you will also notice that “Super Butcher” is about the size of a large electrical store on a retail park. And the entire interior of this store was refrigerated…..

But for those who prefer to shop without having to listen to their own teeth chatter, the store does provide free yellow hoodies but surprisingly no mittens. No worries, I put my hands in my pockets. So was it cheap? Well, there were some bargains, for sure…..

Yes, it was cheap. But the only meat we bought were two dollar cooked sausages in bread from the charity stall that had been set up outside the front of the store. Because despite the savings that we could have made, the downside is that you are buying in bulk.

For example, the first offer, buy grain fed rump for $12.99 per kilo, you can see the rumps all shrink wrapped below. Probably the cheapest, so smallest cut was about $65, or around 5 kilos. That’s about 20 rump steaks.

Super Butchers will cut it up for you but then you will need to freeze most of the meat. And in the end we decided that sometimes, especially with steak, it’s best to buy fresh even if it does cost a couple of dollars more.

But for us there was also a bigger reason. One of the things we love about Australia is that they still do have local butchers. I don’t know where you live, but where I used to live in England the local butcher was a dying breed. Supermarkets have taken over that domain.

But here in Australia, we still have a local butcher just down the road in our shopping Plaza, and he’s great. We’d like to keep him. So we are going to continue to buy our meat locally, even if it does cost a little more.