Pricing and Competition on Beef in Los Angeles

Excerpts from the report Preface: Several studies are underway in Government agencies and State colleges and universities which deal in a broad, aggregative way with the changes that have taken place in marketing. Some are primarily concerned with retailing and with the effects on producers and others of changes in retailers' procurement practices. As a part of that broad program of research, a detailed study was made in which marketing conditions for one commodity, beef, were examined intensively at one market. This is a report of that study. Los Angeles was used as an experimental laboratory and, accordingly, some of the findings have wider application. The study covered, among other things, the structure of prices in the market for beef; price relationships among the retail chains, the various types of buyers and sellers, and grades and weights of beef sold; gross margins of packers and retail chains; relationships between variations in quantities of beef purchased by the chains and variations in local slaughter, prices paid, and the incidence of price specialing by the chains; buying and selling practices of packers and retailers; and the nature and effects of competition in the market. Particular marketing problems were delineated and analyzed as to source, relation to other problems, and possible solutions.