Where’s the beef – Fun with statistics

by Dram_man on January 9, 2009

I usually get a good responce on these posts, so this in the Joongang caught my eye:

“…46,000 beef gift sets prepared for the Lunar New Year holidays…” said Na Geun-tae, a manager at local discount store chain Lotte Mart.

Lotte Mart’s U.S. beef gift set is (2.4 kilograms)… Its Mount Jiri hanwoo set is (3.6 kilograms)… Also, both E-Mart and Homeplus will be selling U.S. beef gift sets at a fraction of the price of their hanwoo counterparts. Homeplus’ LA galbi set (2.5 kilograms) will go for 50,000 won.

Let’s add up that beef. Let’s assume that the 46,000 sets are an average for any of these big-box stores. Further take the averages of the weights above for the average set weight, so each set is on average about 2.8 Kg. According to my quick count on their websites Emart has 126 stores. Lotte Mart 64 stores, and Homeplus 97 stores. So that’s 287 stores, each with 46,000 sets, and each set weighing 2.8Kg. That works out to 36 million kilograms for just these outlets alone.

Now this brochure from the Kansas Beef Board (PDF link), states that from an average steer you get 40.8lbs of good rib meat, which I think makes up most, if not all, of these sets. To put it into metric terms, that’s 18.5kg of meat. So then we find that for just these holiday beef sets alone close to two million cows were slaughtered.

Moo.

UPDATE

A comment by Pytor below got me thinking I may have misconstrued the quote from the Lotte Mart manager. Insofar as the 46,000 sets were for the whole chain, not for the store. If one were to use that figure to get an average sets per store and then run with the above math, you get just over 31,000 head. This makes a little more sense to me, however that is a lot of cattle.

{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Alex January 9, 2009 at 12:16 pm: This story reminds me of one of my favorite “welcome to Korea” moments, waaaay back in 2005. Some friends of mine had taken me to Kim’s club and I saw this neat looking wooden music box sort of thing on display. I opened it up to take a peek, and inside was SPAM! The box played music too. I wonder if these beef gift sets are anything like those.

Also, first.
2 Seth Gecko January 9, 2009 at 12:25 pm: “Where’s the beef – Fun with statistics”

I’m guessing that you read the Korea Herald today, and saw that today is the 25th anniversary of Clara Peller saying “Where’s the beef?” in the famous Wendy’s commercial.
3 YeOldeToaste January 9, 2009 at 2:10 pm: I usually get a good responce on these posts, so this in the Joongang caught my eye:

You mean, “Response to”, I’m sure.

Might I ask your occupation Dram Man? I’m curious.
4 The Goat January 9, 2009 at 3:21 pm: Oh boy…another post about Dram_man’s spelling/grammar.

woo.

or is that

moo.
5 The Goat January 9, 2009 at 3:25 pm: Might I ask your occupation Dram Man? I’m curious.

The information is two clicks away.
6 red sparrow January 9, 2009 at 3:32 pm: The info is two clicks away but I call bullshit.

Either way, I now firmly believe dram_man intentionally screws with grammar and spelling just to get a rise out of people. It’s a pretty innocuous troll, really.
7 Alex January 9, 2009 at 5:33 pm: Maybe Dram_man just types very quickly and thinks that proofreading is for nerds. I still want to know if this beef is presented in beautiful music boxes.
8 Pyotr January 9, 2009 at 8:02 pm: Either way, I now firmly believe dram_man intentionally screws with grammar and spelling just to get a rise out of people. It’s a pretty innocuous troll, really.

Being drunk or retarded might be borderline acceptable for this kind of behaviour, but deliberately misspelling to provoke and posting illogical, misleading rants (each shop having 129 tonnes of beef?) surely indicates a kind of focussed, puerile contempt for this site and its readers.

It’s not innocuous trolling. It’s more like inviting a colleague over for dinner and then see him drink too much, piss in your fish-tank, show your children his “elephant”, and smack your wife in the mouth.
9 huey222 January 9, 2009 at 8:37 pm: I think it was Twain who said, figure don’t lie, but liars can figure.
10 CactusMcHarris January 10, 2009 at 3:54 am: #8,

That’s a great last sentence – I’ll have to try it the next time I’m out.

I beleive ‘tonnes’ is an acceptable, if slightly obsolete, form of the plural.

He might work in intellectual property law, and his spelling mistakes might make some get their knickers in a knot, and whatever his motive, I like his articles, warts and all. Sure, better syntax and spelling in them would be appreciated, but I’m not going to kick him out of bed (my reading bed, that is) for eating crackers, if you get my drift.
11 seouldout January 10, 2009 at 4:39 am: The canucki sums it up well.

Happy New Year, Dram_man. Look forward to reading more of your posts. Perhaps one about beautiful musical boxes full of spam.
12 Sonagi January 10, 2009 at 11:01 am: @Cactus:

“Tonnes” is the plural of “tonne,” a metric ton as distinguished from “ton,” the imperial unit. The US uses the same spelling, “ton,” for both while some other English-speaking countries use the two different spellings for the metric and imperial units.
13 Canuckygreg January 11, 2009 at 2:35 pm: How many tonnes of spork are in a SPAM gift set?