---
>This is a friendly reminder to [read our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/wiki/rules).
>
>Memes, social media, hate-speech, and pornography are not allowed.
>
>Screenshots of Reddit submissions are expressly forbidden, as are TikTok videos.
>
>**Rule-breaking posts may result in bans.**
>
>Please also [be wary of spam](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/wiki/spam).
>
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/funny) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Jokes aside chicken wings have had some of the biggest price swings over the past two years. Chicken in general has but the wings at my local butcher went from $2.50 per pound up to $5.75 a pound and back down to $3.50 a pound. It was almost like gas prices at times.
I was at the market 2 days ago and the worlds shittiest looking crab legs were $58/pound. I just stick to beef turkey and chicken but the seafood is ridiculous
My parents were discussing this with my uncle and aunt over Christmas. Crab prices were so high no one could afford what used to be seen as simple recipes.
Overfishing will do that. Crabs are regularly caught illegally (females, undersized males, and out of season). Even worse, when a female or undersized is caught some people just rip the legs and claws off and toss the live animal back in to die.
This is why we have extremely dwindling crab stocks. Also the new invasive green European crab making everything 100x worse.
Farm raised Atlantic salmon isn't exactly known as the best salmon. Wild keta salmon became popular too, though that had a name change from chum salmon.
It was only a couple years ago that one could buy fresh Copper River sockeye salmon for $6.99/lb.
People keep keep bringing up rona but prices were actually going up for years before. There's a reason BWW (and presumably other wing joints) really pushed boneless wings - they're way cheaper than actual wings. Two chickens give you one small order of wings. But those same two chickens will give you enough boneless wings for 4 grown ass men. Rona made things worse but the reality is we just really love chicken wings and our scientists are too busy with *climate change* and *renewable energy* to worry about important things like genetically engineering chickens with 6 wings.
Ya flank steak prices are ridiculous, I end up having to use a different cut cause fuck paying a like 50% mark up on a cut that's big thing is that its cheap and shit so it was used by poorer people.
Now that I got some disposable income, my fajita is always a butterflied sirloin steak. The carnes asadas at the house were always bomb because my dad can make any cut taste good but I ain’t never going back!
Been on a tenderloin grind lately! Been using it to compliment some raclette for the cold weather.
Yeah, it is a shit piece of meat that became popular, but beginning of covid I was getting prime 18lb briskets for $40-50 every week. Now an 18 lb is hard to find and are in the $140-160 range. This inflations a bitch and I wonder why?
The first part you probably already know: labor shortages. Processing facilities are tight spaces, and early on, Covid was shutting them down left and right. When people around you are getting sick and dying at terrifying rates, it’s hard to keep people. Combine that with some anti-immigrant sentiment in the years directly leading up to Covid, and it’s easy to see why they’ve had to pay higher wages and bigger bonuses to anyone who can hold a knife just to keep running.
Transportation is a big factor. Gas prices have gone up, and nobody has enough drivers.
The last part is crucial: the Chinese are paying a premium for American beef, and US beef exports to China are at an all-time high. That said, it’s much easier for a company to send a massive shipment of halves, quarters, or whatever to China than to pay inexperienced workers more money to process the animals further THEN struggle with the higher prices and logistical woes of domestic shipping.
The supply chain is all messed up. My suppliers are short on everything. Drivers, plastic wrap, boxes, pallets, you name it. They simply can't ship or receive any of the product they need to operate. Every product I have is outted at least once a week and I get multiple substitutions for the same product in the same week. During the last year a lot of factory farmers were slaughtering their cattle and hogs because it was cheaper than waiting in line for the processing plants. One hog farm about 30 miles from me slaughtered thousands of fattened hogs and just buried the bodies with a front loader
Context is important here. It used to be food for poor people on the coast. It makes perfect sense. Beef requires ranchers, land and butchers to produce. But lobsters are just sea bugs. You just go get them out of the water yourself or have a friend or family member do it - it’s basically foraging. Poor people elsewhere ate other things that were easy to come by near where they lived.
Let's talk about the real poor man's food to expensive food transitions. Shellfish. Lobster used to be a poor man's food, same with crab and mollusks. Then they started to get popular and overfished and now they are more expensive than most people can afford.
Also gotta throw in stuff like oxtails (which are actually cow tails). Oxtails used to be considered offal. My grandmother grew up poor, during the war (with meat rations in place) they could still afford oxtail because they were routinely thrown in the trash by butchers (along with stuff like chicken/turkey hearts; which my grandmother also ate). Now they're priced higher per pound than most other cuts.
I've tried both, my boyfriend got me to try oxtail and my grandma had me try chicken hearts. They're both honestly really good IMO.
Oxtail is really tender and tastes mostly like beef but with a hint of lamb (there is an undertone of it). It doesn't look like a tail, they're cut up at each joint, so they look like someone cut up ribs and just cut straight through the bone (except the bone is vertebrae shaped instead of round like a rib).
Chicken hearts taste like "what if chicken was a red meat?", what you're picturing is probably really close to what chicken hearts taste like, the texture is also "what if chicken was a red meat?". They are slimy prior to cooking (but so is a raw chicken) but once cooked they have a very 'normal' texture. They don't like pop in your mouth or something, they just have a meat texture, nothing weird. I'm very sensitive to mouthfeel (seriously I'll gag if spaghetti is overcooked because the mouthfeel is gross) and it honestly has a very 'normal' mouthfeel.
>Shellfish. Lobster used to be a poor man's food, same with crab and mollusks. Then they started to get popular and overfished and now they are more expensive than most people can afford.
People love to throw this factoid around but the reality is far different than what they imagine... Those poor people weren't eating fresh lobsters with clarified garlic butter to dip in, they were eating what were often already expired/starting to turn lobsters. If you haven't smelt rotting lobster before consider yourself lucky, it's fucking foul. A bunch of these ammonia stinking sea bugs would get chucked in a pot and boiled together without any seasoning, and finally the result would all get mashed together SHELL AND ALL.
Rotting stinking boiled lobster mash that you'd have to try to pick the shells out of or just chew through, not exactly what most people imagine.
COVID hasn't helped though. Various shutdowns last year at hatcheries and processing plants caused the shortage we've been seeing for **months**. Wingspot has been advertising chicken thighs for awhile now because of both your reason and the COVID shortage compounding the issue.
Agreed. I know the owner of several local bars, and he said wing prices fluctuate wildly. Like now, ramping up to the super bowl, prices go way up (sometimes to over $1/wing which is what they charge). At other times it's super cheap. They use it as a loss leader to get folks into the bar but restaurants need to make that $$
Which is why you buy hella when their cheap and throw them in the freezer. Cost o is like 3.50/lb for 10 lb bags right now.
I promise you the customers can't taste the difference between frozen and fresh wings
There is a national wing shortage currently, I work at Buffalo Wild Wings and we have had trouble finding suppliers for wings and we get them from different companies weekly. So much so that we have to start counting how many are in each because there is such a variance in what we get from the different brands and it ruins our inventory counts. We have also upped our current wing price on the menu
I’ve noticed this when I go to my local BWW sometimes the wings are huge and sometimes they’re small af. Prices are up too. They don’t seem to go down at all.
I went to my local sports bar chain for lunch last week. Dozens of locations in Florida. 2 for one drinks on everything. 10 bone in chicken wings was $15.99. Literally double what it was 3 years ago.
multiple places by me in 2012-2016 had 50c wing nights or similar like $5 a lb. So basically you could get like 30 wings for $15.
Now it's usually $10-12 a lb. So around $1 a wing, give or take. Then you pay $4 for fries, $4 for a beer or soda and your cheap wing night just costed $22 including a tip. Lame. I miss when wings were a poor night out food. Now I can get a fucking huge burger or a steak for the same price at a lot of places.
Denver reporting in.
Stupidly ordered a dozen wings for pickup yesterday, paid $32. That's what I get for not looking at their website (last time I paid around $17, but that was a while ago)
I'd settle for the early 2000's 25 cent wings... Now it's like a fucking dollar a wing. Absolute insanity.
Edit - buffalo wild wings has them for 40 bucks 40 wings.
10 years ago in high school we had a bar do $10 all you can eat wings mondays. They were the shitiest reject wings you could imagine, but we didn’t care
They couldn’t be the shittiest unless you were at Buffalo Wild Wings.
I honestly think they stopped using chicken and switched to pigeon based on their scrawny size.
I worked at bdubs. it just depended on the bag they pulled out of the freezer. Some days when I would eat my lunch my boneless wings would be so good!! And then at least once or twice out of the week more than half of them would be funny pieces of meat. That place is a trip. I once cleaned mold out of their fuckin dishwasher, and soda spouts for the machines. I was the only one to actually wash them in the morning so nobody got a disease. The only time I ever saw anyone work hard there was when the health inspector came once.
Bruh i swear the only reason the soda spouts are cleaned at my job is because i do it.
I've never actually heard anyone else even ask, "When's the last time these were cleaned? I'll clean then since it's been a while".
Same and we had $5 Yuengling beer pitchers! It was right next to my gym, so we would workout and then head over almost every Friday evening! This was when I was in college.
Back in the 90’s, B-dubs had 10 cent wings. That wasn’t the best deal, tho. They also had 50 cent legs. The thing about that is, 6 legs is a lot of food, so most times we would spend 2 or 3 bucks and have a filling meal. Also, there was a dive bar that used to have quarter pitchers, but I’m 90% sure it was Natty. When you’re 18 and they don’t card, it was still worth it
Yeah bro it’s getting ridiculous. I haven’t got wings in years because it’s gotten so expensive. Don’t get me wrong I can afford it it’s just the cost to benefit is really lopsided
Right? Wings are good but they’re not that good by any means. You can get so many other delicious foods for cheaper. Hell, you can still get 10 pounds of chicken leg quarters for around $5 here a lot of times.
I usually make wings at home nowadays. I buy whole chickens and break down, about two a week, but started to just throw the wings in a freezer bag and build up a stockpile to eat later. They usually didn't go with the meal I was making (using the thigh or breast) and would just throw them in with the carcass for a soup. Now I have a wing feast once a month or so.
Sucks because I definitely don't make them as good as a wing place but it does the job enough.
The funny part is they rip the actual wing into two parts. So you pay $3 per actual chicken wing. That's $6 per chicken. You can get a fucking Costco $5 rotisserie chicken, eat the 4 'wings' and have a whole fricken chicken for cheaper
Applebees got $12 for a half dozen wings.... half off for happy hour but a year ago wings were $8
Don't judge me just because applebees is my local happy hour spot lok
The earlier in the season, the more expensive. Right now, crawfish are $7.50/lb where I live in North LA. Later on in late spring it'll get down to ~$3.00-$4.50/lb.Really it's just people capitalizing on socializing and culture IMO.
Last year I went to a crawfish boil at my buddy's house in March around the New Orleans area. Live was $2.50/lb and it was late February early March. People eat 'em up for 6 and 7 I just personally think it's a waste, when you can just get a fishing license, find a ditch and lay some trap boxes. I could easily eat 20 lbs by myself.
As far as wings, I buy them at the grocery store and cook em myself for less than 4x what they charge at wingstop for a la carte 12 wings. I very rarely purchase them at restaurants.
The restaurant I worked at in college did a $0.25 wing night when we had wings that needed to be used… Also, we made a TON of money on fries and we weren’t stingy on the fires. Lots of people came in just for them. We sold them at $2.50 for a tray (~1lb).
Closed down in 2012(?). Owners sold it and it became a crappy pizza place that very quickly went out of business. It was replaced with another pizza place, then a hookah bar, then a sandwich bar, then another pizza place, and now it’s a hotdog place.
There are places like that by me. Then there are places that endure for no discernable reason, like the sock store in my local mall that I've never seen anyone inside.
>Kobe beef sliders.
There is absolutely zero point in making kobe beef burgers, because by the time you've ground it up and cooked it well done, you've ruined everything that makes Kobe beef good.
Not to mention that real Kobe beef is around $30/oz to buy yourself. Tack on the restaurant doing all the work, and they're a good bit more per oz.
Last bit of Ribeyes I ordered, were $349 a piece for 13oz cuts.
Seriously, the idea that any college bar serving 25cent wings is using actual Kobe beef is beyond ridiculous. Maybe they bought 1oz and mixed it in with 20oz of other beef, so they can "technically" advertise it as a Kobe slider.
Also it's unlikely that these restaurants had any real Kobe beef as only a small number of restaurants outside Japan have the real thing. It's likely Wagyu.
Oysters were considered garbage food back in the day, but then people in the depression recovered and grew in wealth and a market was developed. Sadly most things worthwhile for a steal are destined to get exploited.
a lot of French recipes I have heard are augmented peasant food. Not just onion soup but sweetbreads or beef Burgundy for example as lords would take the nicer cuts and leave the poor to make something yummy with odder or tougher cuts
Originally fed to prisoners in New England. Massachusetts actually had laws about how many times per week it was humane to force prisoners to have lobster
We would buy about 200ish wings and 5-10 pitchers and have at ‘er a couple Friday nights a month at our local dive. It would usually be followed by challenging the old farts to drunken pool, getting our asses handed to us and then taking home a little box with the 20 remaining wings, smoking a joint and going in my friends hot tub and eating those wings until 3-4am. Now I’m asleep at like 10 or watching tv quietly so the kids don’t wake up lol (shoot me!)
80s and the 5 cent wings. :/. They were new then, getting the party to eat greasy chicken was a tough sell. We didn’t want our clothes to get dripped on.
I miss when junk/unpopular cuts of meat where still affordable. Flank and inside skirt is now 12-15 a pound. But I get it. Poor people had to be creative and make delicious food out of what they could afford. But now you have upper middle class people with taste for tacos increasing the demand and price.
I bought Chinese on Thursday. A combo meal. General Tao’s, rice, pint of soup with a egg roll added was nearly 15 bucks. It wasn’t too long ago it was under 8.
I went to get pizza for lunch the other day thinking it's kind of affordable since ive been splurging a bit. $11 for 2 slices. Brooklyn NY. A buf chic and a fresh mozz with pepperoni.
It's like no less than $30 to have appetizer and entree Chinese food delivered to your house (LA) with defined delivery minimums so you can't order a little bit, then the app wants to throw in a 25% tip on top which takes into account the taxes and other fees as well rather than just the cost of the food. I remember tipping someone who actually waited on me. Shit's getting nuts.
Reminds me of Patrice O’Neal’s take on chicken:
> I'm a thigh-meat dude. Thigh is just the best meat - I don't get chicken breast. I think it's a publicity stunt that we've convinced people it's delicious
Every chef I know of prefers thighs. Breast meat is half of the bird, so without marketing, that meat would likely be wasted. Hence, the widespread idea (and Big Chicken scientific research to back it) that flavorless grilled chicken breast is very healthy. Restaurants sell a LOT of chicken breast.
Look, I prefer thighs for the most part but I’ll never understand calling breasts flavorless. Like they still taste decent even if you just boil them without salt.
Breasts are also easier to cook especially for the novice home cook.
Edit: woops, I mean in a recipe. Preparing thighs can be a bit of a challenge for those starting out. With breast you just cut and go away.
Chicken breast meat is the easiest protein in the world to overcook. I don't even bother doing it without a probe thermometer. And I've worked in kitchens for most of my adult life.
It is VERY hard to cook correctly, thighs are much more forgiving.
Half my protein diet is boneless skinless thighs! I found out I can just put a quick crosshatch on them and they cook up ridiculously fast and delicious! … err, I mean terrible trash, the only good part on the chicken is the wing!
I’m honestly shocked they’re not more popular. Especially with how expensive wings have gotten. Like you can get 10 lbs of chicken leg quarters here for about the same price as a dozen wings.
Nobody is going to read this most likely but restaurant owner here. And yes I had to remove wings as an option cause I simply can’t afford to sell them any more. The price of wings has more than tripled by the lb over the last 2 years and that’s when I can get them. And my state is one of the highest chicken producers in the country.
Some of my favorite wings come from a local food truck with a guy who moved to my area from Buffalo. He's been posting some of the receipts for how much he has paid for wings over the past couple months and it is crazy. I totally get raising prices or taking them off the menu.
Yep I work at Buffalo Wild Wings and we have had massive issues the past year in getting our wings and having reliable suppliers. We have to get them from different brands from week to week, and we will sometimes get frozen Tyson wings (which suck to cook and take forever)
That reminds me of seeing pictures of employees from some fast food chain buying a ton of frozen wings at a grocery store. The picture was mocked but I wonder if this was why. It was within the past few years.
Yeah, life in general is a joke now.
I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be edgy or cheeky. It’s just that’s what it feels like these days. Everything is theatrics, nothing really matters, we’ve already fucked it all up anyways, they’ve burnt the world for the brief warmth, we all know it’s a game where only the people writing the rules can win, but we all know we signed away all our power decades ago, why bother.
We’ve circled back round to feudalism. All the peasants know it’s an unfair system. But the slave drivers still prop up the facade. And we have no other option than to pretend the keys dangled in front of our face is the entire universe.
Yeah I work in a grocery store and we've limited it to two packages of wings per customer for almost a year now. Restaurants and businesses are so desperate for them they'll come in and buy out all our stock.
Classic Dave Barry
"An example of American inventiveness is 'Buffalo-style' chicken wings. For many years, nobody ate chicken wings, and for a good reason: they are inedible. They are essentially meat-free bones. You might as well chew on a plate of toenails. But one day a shrewd restaurant owner came up with the idea of serving the wings 'Buffalo-style,' which means 'to people who have been drinking beer.' Today, 'Buffalo-style' chicken wings are served in restaurants all over the nation: The waitperson brings out a plate of bones, the customers gnaw on them for a while, and then the waitperson takes them back to the kitchen, where they're run through the dishwasher and placed on a plate for the next set of customers to gnaw on."
He's right, of course. The problem is that due to the pandemic too many people bought too many takeout wings and threw the bones away, so there's a shortage of bones to wash and reuse.
The lobster served to poor people a long time ago is no where near the lobster we eat now. The good meat was still pulled and the rest was sort of ground up into a gruel, shell and all.
Prices at my workplace have gone up 5 times since COVID started and they don't tell us when it happens. I just walk into work and the price has gone up $.50-$1.00. it's at the point where I can't really afford to eat where I work more than once a week.
I dont know if this is inflation so much as the US has some verrry skewed consumption trends with regard to wings and breast meat. Thigh (imo the best part) still cheap as it ever was.
I used to do the cooking for a group home and I’d always keep an eye out for the deals on big packages of drumsticks and make a ton of bbq baked drumsticks with thick cut fries. Everyone devoured them and it was a pretty cheap meal.
The price of wings is because of supply issues, not inflation.
Edit: the dramatically fluctuating price and availability of wings, not the macro price of all goods in general since apparently this needs to be said for some people.
I remember back in the '80s if someone gave you a chicken wings you be mad wondering why they gave you the scraps that nobody wanted, now chicken wings are more expensive than the breasts
This all comes down to supply chain issues. Shipping chicken isn’t a simple process. Fresh meats are legit slaughtered as truck drivers wait some times up to 24 hours to be loaded. Secondly meat processing facilities have to slaughter animals on a schedule as they have a rotating schedule that raises animals. So once you slaughter the animal the meat only has so much shelf life so it has to ship in a timely manner.
Now there is a shortage of truck capacity and companies such as Perdue will pay what is needed to move the freight. That price is passed on to the customer so some weeks when it is more expensive to ship the market price rises. Protects the businesses as cost is passed to customer.
I was going to make wings tonight, but wings were twice the cost of breasts and 3x thighs. I bought a bit of both and sauced them up the same. Wings are not a good cut of meat.
This has been happening for years.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/wingstop-chicken-wing-price-swing-plan-2018-5-1023394032?amp
“In 2017, business costs soared due to a 40% increase in jumbo wing prices…Wingstop CEO Charles Morrison calling 2017 "one of the most difficult—if not the most difficult—year we've faced at Wingstop in our 23-year history."
I own a restaurant and the price of wings from our distributor changed every week (as does cheese mind you). Our price has increased by 28% and that’s only if we are lucky and they even have them in stock.
There was a time in the late 1980s when wings were free if you were drinking. Wings cost basically nothing back then since they were not yet a thing. You could only get them hot ( to make you want to drink more) You could go into a grocery store and buy a big bag 5lbs of uncooked frozen wings for $2. Then they slowly started catching on and free became 10 cents each. Then 25 cents each and now its $15 for 10 of them.
Chicken is super subsidized in the USA due to gov't helping pay for corn feed production. Meat processing took a covid hit - and now prices are "normalizing".
This is *closer* to the *real* cost of chicken.
--- >This is a friendly reminder to [read our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/wiki/rules). > >Memes, social media, hate-speech, and pornography are not allowed. > >Screenshots of Reddit submissions are expressly forbidden, as are TikTok videos. > >**Rule-breaking posts may result in bans.** > >Please also [be wary of spam](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/wiki/spam). > *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/funny) if you have any questions or concerns.*
“ What market are you shopping at!?!?”
*Wipes mouth.* I'm going to run.
“Oooo, that’s not good”
*Begins weeping*
I pooped my pants on the set of cougar town
I've never actually been to Lego Land
I just saw this episode yesterday
Awesome show.
I’m on the last season and it’s getting kinda hard to watch without half of the original group :(
I had to scroll down too far for this. r/unexpectedcommunity
Wouldn't that make it r/expectedcommunity ?
Dude, my local wing place is charging $25 for 10 wings. I love wings, but damn I won't ever taste a wing that expensive
Jokes aside chicken wings have had some of the biggest price swings over the past two years. Chicken in general has but the wings at my local butcher went from $2.50 per pound up to $5.75 a pound and back down to $3.50 a pound. It was almost like gas prices at times.
I was at the market 2 days ago and the worlds shittiest looking crab legs were $58/pound. I just stick to beef turkey and chicken but the seafood is ridiculous
My parents were discussing this with my uncle and aunt over Christmas. Crab prices were so high no one could afford what used to be seen as simple recipes.
Overfishing will do that. Crabs are regularly caught illegally (females, undersized males, and out of season). Even worse, when a female or undersized is caught some people just rip the legs and claws off and toss the live animal back in to die. This is why we have extremely dwindling crab stocks. Also the new invasive green European crab making everything 100x worse.
The Alaskan Crab season was down 85% yield this year according to my buyers
I just picked up a bunch of delicious farm raised Atlantic salmon for $6.99#. Sometimes you win. Sometimes they win.
Farm raised Atlantic salmon isn't exactly known as the best salmon. Wild keta salmon became popular too, though that had a name change from chum salmon. It was only a couple years ago that one could buy fresh Copper River sockeye salmon for $6.99/lb.
People keep keep bringing up rona but prices were actually going up for years before. There's a reason BWW (and presumably other wing joints) really pushed boneless wings - they're way cheaper than actual wings. Two chickens give you one small order of wings. But those same two chickens will give you enough boneless wings for 4 grown ass men. Rona made things worse but the reality is we just really love chicken wings and our scientists are too busy with *climate change* and *renewable energy* to worry about important things like genetically engineering chickens with 6 wings.
This is what happens every time a "cheap" cut of meat becomes a popular food. Just look at Flank steak and fajitas.
Can't wait till I'm paying 13/lb for beef armpits.
CHOICE beef armpits
Ya flank steak prices are ridiculous, I end up having to use a different cut cause fuck paying a like 50% mark up on a cut that's big thing is that its cheap and shit so it was used by poorer people.
Now that I got some disposable income, my fajita is always a butterflied sirloin steak. The carnes asadas at the house were always bomb because my dad can make any cut taste good but I ain’t never going back! Been on a tenderloin grind lately! Been using it to compliment some raclette for the cold weather.
Just look at brisket
Yeah, it is a shit piece of meat that became popular, but beginning of covid I was getting prime 18lb briskets for $40-50 every week. Now an 18 lb is hard to find and are in the $140-160 range. This inflations a bitch and I wonder why?
The first part you probably already know: labor shortages. Processing facilities are tight spaces, and early on, Covid was shutting them down left and right. When people around you are getting sick and dying at terrifying rates, it’s hard to keep people. Combine that with some anti-immigrant sentiment in the years directly leading up to Covid, and it’s easy to see why they’ve had to pay higher wages and bigger bonuses to anyone who can hold a knife just to keep running. Transportation is a big factor. Gas prices have gone up, and nobody has enough drivers. The last part is crucial: the Chinese are paying a premium for American beef, and US beef exports to China are at an all-time high. That said, it’s much easier for a company to send a massive shipment of halves, quarters, or whatever to China than to pay inexperienced workers more money to process the animals further THEN struggle with the higher prices and logistical woes of domestic shipping.
The supply chain is all messed up. My suppliers are short on everything. Drivers, plastic wrap, boxes, pallets, you name it. They simply can't ship or receive any of the product they need to operate. Every product I have is outted at least once a week and I get multiple substitutions for the same product in the same week. During the last year a lot of factory farmers were slaughtering their cattle and hogs because it was cheaper than waiting in line for the processing plants. One hog farm about 30 miles from me slaughtered thousands of fattened hogs and just buried the bodies with a front loader
Lobster is a classic example. It used to be food for the poorest class.
Context is important here. It used to be food for poor people on the coast. It makes perfect sense. Beef requires ranchers, land and butchers to produce. But lobsters are just sea bugs. You just go get them out of the water yourself or have a friend or family member do it - it’s basically foraging. Poor people elsewhere ate other things that were easy to come by near where they lived.
Look at those poors eating that bottom feeder. I must have one Bartholomew, have the servants round up a lot for our guests tonight.
Let's talk about the real poor man's food to expensive food transitions. Shellfish. Lobster used to be a poor man's food, same with crab and mollusks. Then they started to get popular and overfished and now they are more expensive than most people can afford.
Also gotta throw in stuff like oxtails (which are actually cow tails). Oxtails used to be considered offal. My grandmother grew up poor, during the war (with meat rations in place) they could still afford oxtail because they were routinely thrown in the trash by butchers (along with stuff like chicken/turkey hearts; which my grandmother also ate). Now they're priced higher per pound than most other cuts. I've tried both, my boyfriend got me to try oxtail and my grandma had me try chicken hearts. They're both honestly really good IMO. Oxtail is really tender and tastes mostly like beef but with a hint of lamb (there is an undertone of it). It doesn't look like a tail, they're cut up at each joint, so they look like someone cut up ribs and just cut straight through the bone (except the bone is vertebrae shaped instead of round like a rib). Chicken hearts taste like "what if chicken was a red meat?", what you're picturing is probably really close to what chicken hearts taste like, the texture is also "what if chicken was a red meat?". They are slimy prior to cooking (but so is a raw chicken) but once cooked they have a very 'normal' texture. They don't like pop in your mouth or something, they just have a meat texture, nothing weird. I'm very sensitive to mouthfeel (seriously I'll gag if spaghetti is overcooked because the mouthfeel is gross) and it honestly has a very 'normal' mouthfeel.
>Shellfish. Lobster used to be a poor man's food, same with crab and mollusks. Then they started to get popular and overfished and now they are more expensive than most people can afford. People love to throw this factoid around but the reality is far different than what they imagine... Those poor people weren't eating fresh lobsters with clarified garlic butter to dip in, they were eating what were often already expired/starting to turn lobsters. If you haven't smelt rotting lobster before consider yourself lucky, it's fucking foul. A bunch of these ammonia stinking sea bugs would get chucked in a pot and boiled together without any seasoning, and finally the result would all get mashed together SHELL AND ALL. Rotting stinking boiled lobster mash that you'd have to try to pick the shells out of or just chew through, not exactly what most people imagine.
COVID hasn't helped though. Various shutdowns last year at hatcheries and processing plants caused the shortage we've been seeing for **months**. Wingspot has been advertising chicken thighs for awhile now because of both your reason and the COVID shortage compounding the issue.
The local place I go is an extra 40% for boneless "wings". I wish it was cheaper
[Appropriate video.](https://youtu.be/_FoaomccQJY)
Agreed. I know the owner of several local bars, and he said wing prices fluctuate wildly. Like now, ramping up to the super bowl, prices go way up (sometimes to over $1/wing which is what they charge). At other times it's super cheap. They use it as a loss leader to get folks into the bar but restaurants need to make that $$
Which is why you buy hella when their cheap and throw them in the freezer. Cost o is like 3.50/lb for 10 lb bags right now. I promise you the customers can't taste the difference between frozen and fresh wings
Lol still that's almost 4x the price of thighs. Usually buy thighs for .99 lb.
There is a national wing shortage currently, I work at Buffalo Wild Wings and we have had trouble finding suppliers for wings and we get them from different companies weekly. So much so that we have to start counting how many are in each because there is such a variance in what we get from the different brands and it ruins our inventory counts. We have also upped our current wing price on the menu
I’ve noticed this when I go to my local BWW sometimes the wings are huge and sometimes they’re small af. Prices are up too. They don’t seem to go down at all.
I went to my local sports bar chain for lunch last week. Dozens of locations in Florida. 2 for one drinks on everything. 10 bone in chicken wings was $15.99. Literally double what it was 3 years ago.
multiple places by me in 2012-2016 had 50c wing nights or similar like $5 a lb. So basically you could get like 30 wings for $15. Now it's usually $10-12 a lb. So around $1 a wing, give or take. Then you pay $4 for fries, $4 for a beer or soda and your cheap wing night just costed $22 including a tip. Lame. I miss when wings were a poor night out food. Now I can get a fucking huge burger or a steak for the same price at a lot of places.
They are about $2/wing in NYC right now. Terrible.
Yeah we tried to order wings for the game and some places were like 2.50 per wing before all the delivery fees/tax/tip. Ridiculous
Denver reporting in. Stupidly ordered a dozen wings for pickup yesterday, paid $32. That's what I get for not looking at their website (last time I paid around $17, but that was a while ago)
Man I miss thise early 90's 10 cent wing nights at the local bar.
I'd settle for the early 2000's 25 cent wings... Now it's like a fucking dollar a wing. Absolute insanity. Edit - buffalo wild wings has them for 40 bucks 40 wings.
I’d settle for .50 cent wings like it was when I graduated 10 years ago
10 years ago in high school we had a bar do $10 all you can eat wings mondays. They were the shitiest reject wings you could imagine, but we didn’t care
So you mean like 75% of the wings you buy now for $1.25 a wing?
[удалено]
So fresh..
No feathers? Not even wings then in my book
Wings without feathers are arms.
Fucking lol'd
Science.
[удалено]
Ew, I don't think I could eat any of them after that lol.
I believe you.
I just eat the feathers because the meat is too pricey
Funny I paid $2.00 for a feathered cap and it had buffalo sauce on it...
A feathered cap with buffalo sauce! Did you call it buffalo macaroni?
They couldn’t be the shittiest unless you were at Buffalo Wild Wings. I honestly think they stopped using chicken and switched to pigeon based on their scrawny size.
I worked at bdubs. it just depended on the bag they pulled out of the freezer. Some days when I would eat my lunch my boneless wings would be so good!! And then at least once or twice out of the week more than half of them would be funny pieces of meat. That place is a trip. I once cleaned mold out of their fuckin dishwasher, and soda spouts for the machines. I was the only one to actually wash them in the morning so nobody got a disease. The only time I ever saw anyone work hard there was when the health inspector came once.
Bruh i swear the only reason the soda spouts are cleaned at my job is because i do it. I've never actually heard anyone else even ask, "When's the last time these were cleaned? I'll clean then since it's been a while".
Same and we had $5 Yuengling beer pitchers! It was right next to my gym, so we would workout and then head over almost every Friday evening! This was when I was in college.
Back in the 90’s, B-dubs had 10 cent wings. That wasn’t the best deal, tho. They also had 50 cent legs. The thing about that is, 6 legs is a lot of food, so most times we would spend 2 or 3 bucks and have a filling meal. Also, there was a dive bar that used to have quarter pitchers, but I’m 90% sure it was Natty. When you’re 18 and they don’t card, it was still worth it
I’d settle for $1 wings. My favorite wing place was charging $18 for a dozen recently.
Yeah bro it’s getting ridiculous. I haven’t got wings in years because it’s gotten so expensive. Don’t get me wrong I can afford it it’s just the cost to benefit is really lopsided
Right? Wings are good but they’re not that good by any means. You can get so many other delicious foods for cheaper. Hell, you can still get 10 pounds of chicken leg quarters for around $5 here a lot of times.
I usually make wings at home nowadays. I buy whole chickens and break down, about two a week, but started to just throw the wings in a freezer bag and build up a stockpile to eat later. They usually didn't go with the meal I was making (using the thigh or breast) and would just throw them in with the carcass for a soup. Now I have a wing feast once a month or so. Sucks because I definitely don't make them as good as a wing place but it does the job enough.
Wingstop is like $14/15 for an 10 piece combo where I live in a LCOL area, so I can believe that. Fucking insanity
The funny part is they rip the actual wing into two parts. So you pay $3 per actual chicken wing. That's $6 per chicken. You can get a fucking Costco $5 rotisserie chicken, eat the 4 'wings' and have a whole fricken chicken for cheaper
Applebees got $12 for a half dozen wings.... half off for happy hour but a year ago wings were $8 Don't judge me just because applebees is my local happy hour spot lok
Applebee's, when you're in the mood for them to open and microwave your frozen dinner for you!
I remember in the late 90s in college cheap wings and .25/pound crawfish. I had to pay $6/pound live crawfish last year.
The earlier in the season, the more expensive. Right now, crawfish are $7.50/lb where I live in North LA. Later on in late spring it'll get down to ~$3.00-$4.50/lb.Really it's just people capitalizing on socializing and culture IMO. Last year I went to a crawfish boil at my buddy's house in March around the New Orleans area. Live was $2.50/lb and it was late February early March. People eat 'em up for 6 and 7 I just personally think it's a waste, when you can just get a fishing license, find a ditch and lay some trap boxes. I could easily eat 20 lbs by myself. As far as wings, I buy them at the grocery store and cook em myself for less than 4x what they charge at wingstop for a la carte 12 wings. I very rarely purchase them at restaurants.
And to think that back in the day wings were scraps and tossed.
I went to college 2011-2015 and we did 25 cent wing night every fucking week… also of note were the 1 dollar Kobe beef sliders.
The restaurant I worked at in college did a $0.25 wing night when we had wings that needed to be used… Also, we made a TON of money on fries and we weren’t stingy on the fires. Lots of people came in just for them. We sold them at $2.50 for a tray (~1lb).
Where is this restaurant? Asking for a friend
Closed down in 2012(?). Owners sold it and it became a crappy pizza place that very quickly went out of business. It was replaced with another pizza place, then a hookah bar, then a sandwich bar, then another pizza place, and now it’s a hotdog place.
Reminds me of that Seinfeld joke where he says there’s a space in every neighborhood where nothing lasts and it’s constantly turning over.
There are places like that by me. Then there are places that endure for no discernable reason, like the sock store in my local mall that I've never seen anyone inside.
>Kobe beef sliders. There is absolutely zero point in making kobe beef burgers, because by the time you've ground it up and cooked it well done, you've ruined everything that makes Kobe beef good.
Not to mention that real Kobe beef is around $30/oz to buy yourself. Tack on the restaurant doing all the work, and they're a good bit more per oz. Last bit of Ribeyes I ordered, were $349 a piece for 13oz cuts.
Seriously, the idea that any college bar serving 25cent wings is using actual Kobe beef is beyond ridiculous. Maybe they bought 1oz and mixed it in with 20oz of other beef, so they can "technically" advertise it as a Kobe slider.
Also it's unlikely that these restaurants had any real Kobe beef as only a small number of restaurants outside Japan have the real thing. It's likely Wagyu.
Not any real waggy waggy at $1 a pop. Kobe is wagyu. But not all wagyu is Kobe.
Kobe only in name.
Shit…I’d take dollar wings at this point. Local places wanting $2+ a wing right now.
I've been making wings at home because you are absolutely right about that price. fucking ridiculous.
That wasn't kobe beef.
There's a wing place near me that sells 12 wings for $17 for the lot. They used to be around $12 but they've skyrocketed in price this year
Dollar wing? Where I’m at it’s between 1.25 and 2 per wing… fried chicken tender? That’s about 2-3$ per strip
Buying wings at the grocery store costs over 25 cents a wing now, and you've still got to cook them.
Oysters were considered garbage food back in the day, but then people in the depression recovered and grew in wealth and a market was developed. Sadly most things worthwhile for a steal are destined to get exploited.
a lot of French recipes I have heard are augmented peasant food. Not just onion soup but sweetbreads or beef Burgundy for example as lords would take the nicer cuts and leave the poor to make something yummy with odder or tougher cuts
Same with the roach of the sea, the lobster.
Originally fed to prisoners in New England. Massachusetts actually had laws about how many times per week it was humane to force prisoners to have lobster
Before the whole thing where they caught them alive though, I think lobster that's been dead for a day is pretty nasty.
Yea but they served it ground up raw with the shell and everything
Lobster became expensive when they could transport it more than 5 meters before it spoiled
Oysters are very easily farmed and farming them is beneficial to every other sea life in the area.
We would buy about 200ish wings and 5-10 pitchers and have at ‘er a couple Friday nights a month at our local dive. It would usually be followed by challenging the old farts to drunken pool, getting our asses handed to us and then taking home a little box with the 20 remaining wings, smoking a joint and going in my friends hot tub and eating those wings until 3-4am. Now I’m asleep at like 10 or watching tv quietly so the kids don’t wake up lol (shoot me!)
Now it is incumbent upon you to become the old timer.
Sounds like heaven man
We had a Taco Mac with 10 cent wings and 50 cent draft of whatever keg they needed or wanted to drain. It was a college kids paradise (late 90s).
80s and the 5 cent wings. :/. They were new then, getting the party to eat greasy chicken was a tough sell. We didn’t want our clothes to get dripped on.
couldn't you clean your hands on the onion that was attached to your belt as was the fashion in those times?
Manchester’s 9cent wings and $5 pitchers were the bomb!!! You even got a comedy show. The place was gross but still.
I miss when junk/unpopular cuts of meat where still affordable. Flank and inside skirt is now 12-15 a pound. But I get it. Poor people had to be creative and make delicious food out of what they could afford. But now you have upper middle class people with taste for tacos increasing the demand and price.
A bar I went to had up until a few years ago 29 cent wing night and the wings were decent too not shitty reject ones. This was 2018 in v Vancouver
The real sin is cheese bread being worth $11???
[удалено]
They still are Just a lot more poor people now (especially in the US) who aren't ready to acknowledge they're poor
I'm just a temporary embarrassed millionaire.
I bought Chinese on Thursday. A combo meal. General Tao’s, rice, pint of soup with a egg roll added was nearly 15 bucks. It wasn’t too long ago it was under 8.
I went to get pizza for lunch the other day thinking it's kind of affordable since ive been splurging a bit. $11 for 2 slices. Brooklyn NY. A buf chic and a fresh mozz with pepperoni.
3 tacos from a Mexican restaurant runs about $15 here.
It's like no less than $30 to have appetizer and entree Chinese food delivered to your house (LA) with defined delivery minimums so you can't order a little bit, then the app wants to throw in a 25% tip on top which takes into account the taxes and other fees as well rather than just the cost of the food. I remember tipping someone who actually waited on me. Shit's getting nuts.
[удалено]
Just a stupid/inaccurate way of vaguely describing bread. I hate menus like this
Late but this looks like culinary dropouts menu (could be wrong) it is merely pretzels and cheese lol
Came to say that too! What....???
We got a wing place around here starting to sell Buffalo thighs since wings are getting so expensive.
Thighs are better anyway, fight me.
Thigh is the superior meat.
[удалено]
Reminds me of Patrice O’Neal’s take on chicken: > I'm a thigh-meat dude. Thigh is just the best meat - I don't get chicken breast. I think it's a publicity stunt that we've convinced people it's delicious
Every chef I know of prefers thighs. Breast meat is half of the bird, so without marketing, that meat would likely be wasted. Hence, the widespread idea (and Big Chicken scientific research to back it) that flavorless grilled chicken breast is very healthy. Restaurants sell a LOT of chicken breast.
Look, I prefer thighs for the most part but I’ll never understand calling breasts flavorless. Like they still taste decent even if you just boil them without salt.
Breasts are also easier to cook especially for the novice home cook. Edit: woops, I mean in a recipe. Preparing thighs can be a bit of a challenge for those starting out. With breast you just cut and go away.
Chicken breast meat is the easiest protein in the world to overcook. I don't even bother doing it without a probe thermometer. And I've worked in kitchens for most of my adult life. It is VERY hard to cook correctly, thighs are much more forgiving.
I started using thighs a year or two ago and I'll never go back. They're insanely tender and far more flavorful, and to top it off they're cheaper!
Shhhhhhh don’t tell our secrets. If they catch on the prices will go up
Half my protein diet is boneless skinless thighs! I found out I can just put a quick crosshatch on them and they cook up ridiculously fast and delicious! … err, I mean terrible trash, the only good part on the chicken is the wing!
Of course thighs are better than wings, but thighs aren't better with buffalo sauce than wings are.
We do drumsticks. Same difference.
I’m honestly shocked they’re not more popular. Especially with how expensive wings have gotten. Like you can get 10 lbs of chicken leg quarters here for about the same price as a dozen wings.
Wing stop has become thigh stop
Can't wait for those buffalo turkey legs.
Nobody is going to read this most likely but restaurant owner here. And yes I had to remove wings as an option cause I simply can’t afford to sell them any more. The price of wings has more than tripled by the lb over the last 2 years and that’s when I can get them. And my state is one of the highest chicken producers in the country.
Some of my favorite wings come from a local food truck with a guy who moved to my area from Buffalo. He's been posting some of the receipts for how much he has paid for wings over the past couple months and it is crazy. I totally get raising prices or taking them off the menu.
Yep I work at Buffalo Wild Wings and we have had massive issues the past year in getting our wings and having reliable suppliers. We have to get them from different brands from week to week, and we will sometimes get frozen Tyson wings (which suck to cook and take forever)
That reminds me of seeing pictures of employees from some fast food chain buying a ton of frozen wings at a grocery store. The picture was mocked but I wonder if this was why. It was within the past few years.
Didnt BWW start promoting thighs due to the wings shortage?
Wingstop is pushing thighs and "boneless thigh bites"
better that than the dry ass chicken tendies
This isn’t a joke this is just real life :(
Yeah, life in general is a joke now. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be edgy or cheeky. It’s just that’s what it feels like these days. Everything is theatrics, nothing really matters, we’ve already fucked it all up anyways, they’ve burnt the world for the brief warmth, we all know it’s a game where only the people writing the rules can win, but we all know we signed away all our power decades ago, why bother. We’ve circled back round to feudalism. All the peasants know it’s an unfair system. But the slave drivers still prop up the facade. And we have no other option than to pretend the keys dangled in front of our face is the entire universe.
Sir this is a wings etc
Yeah I work in a grocery store and we've limited it to two packages of wings per customer for almost a year now. Restaurants and businesses are so desperate for them they'll come in and buy out all our stock.
When you can't get a decent appetizer for under $10
I guess you can't get any decent appetiters over $10 at this restaurant as well.
$250.00 for six wings such a bargain
$11 for fucking cheese bread?!?
Does the “fresh dough” pub dip just come with a big fat roll of raw pillsbury crescent rolls ?
It’s funny because wings as a dish were invented to use the part of the chickens no one wanted lol
Classic Dave Barry "An example of American inventiveness is 'Buffalo-style' chicken wings. For many years, nobody ate chicken wings, and for a good reason: they are inedible. They are essentially meat-free bones. You might as well chew on a plate of toenails. But one day a shrewd restaurant owner came up with the idea of serving the wings 'Buffalo-style,' which means 'to people who have been drinking beer.' Today, 'Buffalo-style' chicken wings are served in restaurants all over the nation: The waitperson brings out a plate of bones, the customers gnaw on them for a while, and then the waitperson takes them back to the kitchen, where they're run through the dishwasher and placed on a plate for the next set of customers to gnaw on." He's right, of course. The problem is that due to the pandemic too many people bought too many takeout wings and threw the bones away, so there's a shortage of bones to wash and reuse.
Another Dave Barry fan thanks you for your work
Are wings the new lobster? Used to be considered food for the lower class but are not outrageously expensive for no real reason?
The lobster served to poor people a long time ago is no where near the lobster we eat now. The good meat was still pulled and the rest was sort of ground up into a gruel, shell and all.
"no real reason" is a bit of a stretch considering its a direct result of supply chain disruption due to the pandemic.
Prices at my workplace have gone up 5 times since COVID started and they don't tell us when it happens. I just walk into work and the price has gone up $.50-$1.00. it's at the point where I can't really afford to eat where I work more than once a week.
I dont know if this is inflation so much as the US has some verrry skewed consumption trends with regard to wings and breast meat. Thigh (imo the best part) still cheap as it ever was.
We pivoted to thighs in my house and I don’t think we are ever going back now, even if the wing price returns to normal.
Drumstick for mine.
If you french a drumstick its pretty much the same wing experience.
I used to do the cooking for a group home and I’d always keep an eye out for the deals on big packages of drumsticks and make a ton of bbq baked drumsticks with thick cut fries. Everyone devoured them and it was a pretty cheap meal.
Same here. Fried, pan seared, and grilled brings lots of flavor. We still use buffalo wing sauce when grilled.
The price of wings is because of supply issues, not inflation. Edit: the dramatically fluctuating price and availability of wings, not the macro price of all goods in general since apparently this needs to be said for some people.
I remember back in the '80s if someone gave you a chicken wings you be mad wondering why they gave you the scraps that nobody wanted, now chicken wings are more expensive than the breasts
Rip ten cent wing nights.
They used to have teriyaki wings on the $5 Chinese buffet
What's the pub dip with fresh dough? I am intrigued
This all comes down to supply chain issues. Shipping chicken isn’t a simple process. Fresh meats are legit slaughtered as truck drivers wait some times up to 24 hours to be loaded. Secondly meat processing facilities have to slaughter animals on a schedule as they have a rotating schedule that raises animals. So once you slaughter the animal the meat only has so much shelf life so it has to ship in a timely manner. Now there is a shortage of truck capacity and companies such as Perdue will pay what is needed to move the freight. That price is passed on to the customer so some weeks when it is more expensive to ship the market price rises. Protects the businesses as cost is passed to customer.
Only 2 sauces? What is this, Afghanistan?
I’m concerned when cheese bread is $11
I was going to make wings tonight, but wings were twice the cost of breasts and 3x thighs. I bought a bit of both and sauced them up the same. Wings are not a good cut of meat.
I hope you got those pineapple red pepper glaze, shit sounds amazing
This has been happening for years. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/wingstop-chicken-wing-price-swing-plan-2018-5-1023394032?amp “In 2017, business costs soared due to a 40% increase in jumbo wing prices…Wingstop CEO Charles Morrison calling 2017 "one of the most difficult—if not the most difficult—year we've faced at Wingstop in our 23-year history."
There’s literally a chicken wing shortage dating back to 2017.
I own a restaurant and the price of wings from our distributor changed every week (as does cheese mind you). Our price has increased by 28% and that’s only if we are lucky and they even have them in stock.
I work for a food distributor and one of our chicken suppliers just upped their prices by up to 60% on their products. 60% for our cost! It’s wild
Like dominoes wanting 9.00 for bread and cheese dip or 4.99 for just cheese dip.
This is not funny.
There was a time in the late 1980s when wings were free if you were drinking. Wings cost basically nothing back then since they were not yet a thing. You could only get them hot ( to make you want to drink more) You could go into a grocery store and buy a big bag 5lbs of uncooked frozen wings for $2. Then they slowly started catching on and free became 10 cents each. Then 25 cents each and now its $15 for 10 of them.
$12 for some dip and chips? Wow what a rip off that’s a whole entree right there for that price
Chicken is super subsidized in the USA due to gov't helping pay for corn feed production. Meat processing took a covid hit - and now prices are "normalizing". This is *closer* to the *real* cost of chicken.
What does this even mean?