Population: farm-direct sellers across NC, VA, GA, SC, FL, TN, NY, MS, PA, NJ, AL, CT, MA, NH, VT and ME — ground beef sellers with a verified, current price on a live product or order page (n=333 as of September 21, 2026). State mix: NC 66, VA 44, GA 30, SC 17, FL 15, TN 10, NY 9, MS 7, PA 7, NJ 4, AL 3, CT 2, MA 2, NH 2, VT 2, ME 1. Grocery chains, warehouse clubs, and national DTC brands are shown as tiles above for reference but excluded from this population — they compete on a different cost and distribution scale than a small farm-direct seller, so blending them in would misrepresent Shipley's actual peer market. Every price was normalized to $/lb from the exact package size stated on its own source page, and no price was estimated: a seller with no discoverable current price was excluded rather than approximated. Every row is validated before it can render — a price outside a $2-$75/lb plausible range, a malformed ratio, a missing source link, or a duplicate entry is automatically rejected and logged, not silently included. FRED/BLS U.S. and South Urban series (above) are the macro benchmark, shown separately. Coverage to date: North Carolina (all four sub-regions) and Tennessee (East-weighted); South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia are the next phase.

We identified 450 in-scope farm-direct sellers and were able to verify a current published price for 333 of them — a 74% price-disclosure rate. The remaining 117 are real competitors that simply do not publish a usable price: they are logged with a reason (below, and in full in data/ground_beef_coverage_log_2026-09-21.csv) rather than dropped silently or filled in with an estimate. That gap is itself a finding — roughly 26% of this market competes without a public price, so the priced population below is a transparent-pricing subset, not a census of every seller.

Shipley sells two retail ground beefs on different product lines, and they sit in materially different places in this market: Proper Meats (PG3600) at $13.60/lb is 77th percentile, +0.38 σ, with 258 of 333 competitors at or below it. Dry-Aged Signature (SG3600) at $17.10/lb is 92nd percentile, +1.10 σ, with 308 of 333 competitors at or below it. Both are drawn on the chart below; the promotional band and the scenario model are anchored to the Proper Meats line. The distribution is right-skewed — a handful of higher-priced farms are pulling the average above the typical price (mean $11.73 vs. median $10.99); the typical (median) 16-state farm-direct price of $10.99 is $2.61 below Shipley's $13.60.

The pooled figures above blend every tracked region into one population. Shipley's realistic day-to-day competitive set is narrower — broken out below, closest to the farm first.

Drag the slider to move a price line across the market distribution above. The model uses a constant-elasticity demand curve, Q/Q₀ = (P/P₀)^ε, anchored on Shipley's current $13.60/lb. Volume and revenue are shown as percentage changes from today, not absolute units — this dataset contains competitor prices only, so relative movement is the honest limit of what it can tell you.

Treat ε as an assumption, not a measurement. The published benchmarks below bracket the plausible range. Which value actually applies to any given operation cannot be read off historical sales records — routine price changes are entangled with channel mix, seasonality and category-wide cost inflation — so it has to be established by a deliberate, time-boxed price test.

Price differences across this population are not random — part of the spread is the market paying for specific advertised attributes. Each seller's own listing and farm pages were read and coded for the claims they state, then regressed against price. The table reports the price effect of advertising a claim, holding the others and pack size constant.

Model: ordinary least squares on log price per pound, n=333 listings, adjusted R² 0.18 — advertised claims and pack size together explain about 18% of the price variation in this market, leaving the rest to brand, locality, and factors no listing states. Standard errors are heteroskedasticity-robust; a claim is reported as having an effect only when its 95% interval excludes zero.

These coefficients measure claims, not practices. A farm that raises cattle on grass but never says so on its product page is coded as not claiming it, because that is what a shopper comparing two listings actually sees. The effect of the underlying practice is not identified here and would need a different study. Attributes held by fewer than five sellers were dropped rather than reported on a sample too small to support them.

Add any price you want to see placed against the market curve — a channel rate, a contract price, a target, a competitor quote. Type a label and a price, and the line is drawn on both the distribution curve above and the histogram below, so you can read it against the smoothed shape and the raw seller counts at the same time.

Nothing you type here is saved or sent anywhere. Reference lines live in this browser tab only: they are not written into the page, not stored on the server, and not kept in the dataset. Close or reload the tab and they are gone. This is deliberate — it lets you put a confidential number on the chart without that number ever existing outside your own screen.

Read the position carefully. The distribution above is built from 333 farm-direct retail prices. A wholesale, distribution or contract rate does not compete in that population, so its percentile is not a competitive standing — a low wholesale rate will land far left and look like aggressive retail pricing when it is simply a different channel. Comparing a non-retail line to this curve tells you the gap between your channels, not where you sit against rivals.

These two rows answer different questions, and the gap between them is the whole pricing question. Category elasticity (−0.70) asks whether a customer eats less beef; brand elasticity (−2.62 average) asks whether they buy someone else's beef. The Proper Meats line sits at the 77th percentile of 333 tracked farm-direct sellers with a median competitor at $10.99, so substitutes are abundant — which argues toward the brand-level end. What pulls the other way is differentiation: dry-aged, local, named-farm, grass-fed products carry switching costs, and strongly differentiated brands sit well below that −2.62 average. Note also that "luxury good" in economics is defined by INCOME elasticity above 1, not price elasticity — that is a statement about recession exposure, not about price insensitivity.

Every seller's exact price, grouped into bins rather than smoothed by a curve — at n=333, narrower bins mostly hold 1-2 sellers each, so this reads as texture more than a clean shape (that's honest: the $1-wide modal band above is the more reliable read on real clustering). Try wider bins for a smoother read. Bar height is count of sellers in that band; the white line marks Shipley's price.