Department Store New Year’s Gift Set Ranked 110th Clean Item is Park Dong-hui’s Consumer Report

The results of sales of gift sets this year’s New Year’s gift set announced by Hyundai Department Store were more interesting. As the item with the most sales increase compared to last year was Hanwoo, I thought,’The price of Korean beef, which is the highest since Dangun, will continue in the future.’

It is said that the sales of Korean beef at Hyundai Department Store increased by 55.8%, and all the gift sets of Korean beef in the top 1-10 sales were swept away. At Lotte Department Store, the 1.7 million won Korean beef set, which was only available for 100 sets, went out quickly. Shinsegae and Lotte Department Store also saw a 51.8% and 39% increase in meat sales including Korean beef, respectively.

Where does the love of Korean cattle, which is unusual enough to be called the’Korean cattle people’, originates from? You can think first of all that beef has traditionally been treated as a valuable dish. Until modernization, Korea’s industry was virtually all about agriculture. In order to maintain intellect, we had to cultivate the land well, and cattle were the only means of production that made this possible. It’s like grabbing a valuable means of production and using it as food, so the value placed on beef must have been tremendous.

It seems to be compelling to mention the effect of the novel coronavirus infection (Corona 19) that the consumption of Korean beef has increased these days. If you don’t have to face to face, you have to have a holiday, so there is a psychology that you should give a good gift. In addition, this year, the government raised the upper limit of the gift price under the Anti-Solicitation Act to 200,000 won to boost consumer sentiment. The increase in disposable income by household due to the boom in real estate and stock markets is also analyzed as the reason for the boom in Korean beef consumption.

Another characteristic of the consumption of Korean beef these days is that it has a lot of unbalanced diet for roasting. In the past, I looked for a variety of parts such as short ribs and soup, but nowadays, most of them say that they are looking for grilled meat. Whether YouTube’s’Mokbangers’ mainly grilling Korean beef and boasting enormous eating qualities affected it, or anyway, the reason is unknown, but it is clear that the recent generation is enthusiastic about Korean beef for grilling including steak.

The preference for specific parts is also a factor that fuels the high march of Korean beef prices. For simplicity, let’s assume that the producers receive 100 benefits from slaughtering a cow. This means that if the price of the unfavorable part falls, you have no choice but to raise the price of the preferred part to reach 100.

In order to lower the price of Korean beef, the only way to reduce the price of Korean cattle is to significantly increase the supply by fostering livestock farmers in a corporate style, like in the United States and South American countries. But even this is not easy. If large-scale retailers like Lotte, E-Mart, and Hyundai Department Store enter the livestock industry, there will be a backlash, saying that they are trying to kill livestock farmers beyond the infringement of the alley commercial area. For one reason or another, the price of Korean beef has risen if it goes up, but it doesn’t seem like it will fall.

Reporter Park Donghui [email protected]

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