PBS’s Market to Market program has an interesting story this week about traditional butcher shops making a comeback. There are a couple of points that have stuck in my mind. In the middle of the story several “meat lockers” are discussed and that brought to mind the meat locker we had in my hometown growing up. We raised our own meat animals but didn’t do our own butchering. We’d take the fattened calf or hog to the butcher and he would take care of the animal for us.
For a long time we didn’t have a large deep freeze in the house so after the animal was butchered most of it stayed in the “meat locker” in town until we had room for a few more packages in the small freezer in our fridge. Later we got a large deep freeze and we could store a whole butchered animal. Eventually everybody had freezers at home and the “meat locker” became simply a butcher. The people who were employed running the locker had to find new jobs but life for us on the farm was improved since we no longer had to deal every couple of days with getting meat in town from the meat locker.
The other interesting point in the story has to do with marketing lingo, as the presenter calls it. The term “artisan” is very popular today as a way of marketing products produced by small businesses. One of the butchers in the story said he didn’t know what an “artisan butcher” was. He was just a butcher. Yet, he’d been dressing beef, pork and other animals all of his adult life using traditional tools and methods. I think it’s a good idea to always pay attention to the words being used to sell to us. Remember that the whole idea of marketing is to differentiate the product from the mass market. Often these differences are not substantive. They are merely marketing lingo intended to increase the consumer’s willingness to pay for the good.
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