Did you actually look at live cattle price history?
Lets look at Tyson Meats.
Rev: $16000000000/ emp: 41000 is $390,243 sales per employee to get an idea about the employee production scaling factor.
Assuming 40hr * $5(*see note) * 50 weeks * 41000 employees
410000000 / 160000000000 = .025625 or about 2.5% cost increase. (Extremely high since the raise is entry level only but humoring your logic)
That is 25c cost increase on a $10 steak. Not buying it is labor cost, especially with sales that high per employee.
(NOTE: A good rule of thumb: When doing labor estimation in a factory environment double the base pay to cover the benefits and associated overhead. The $2.55 becomes aprox $5 in cost.)
Many moons ago I took a class called linear programming for maximum profitability. The oligopolistic meat industry pricing scheme would have been a case study. Suppress supply by paying farmers to produce the exact qty of meat you need to maximize profits given the price elasticity and demand for meat.
Nothing wrong with that per se, but the conditions that allow that to happen were set up by lobbying congress to pass entry barriers to the industry thus allowing the big 3 + 1 to monopolistically control pricing on both the purchase and sales sides. That is bad. That is corporate malfeasance.
This is Standard Oil.
Thank you for the well informed post. Finally someone who was awake with the intelligence to actually use macroeconomics.
For as bad as the TDS lefties were screaming orange man bad 24/7 the same group think is present here in way to high a prevalence only this time they are screaming pudding pop man bad. The meat monopoly solely rests on Congress and it’s a good thing the executive is going to use antitrust to smash down what as you accurately point out is a standard oil like set-up. People get so blinded by their politics they lose sight of the big picture. Not everything this admin will do is wrong just because they are not your color of red or blue there will be times they do things right. This is the case regardless of red or blue at the helm.