Grilling on Fourth of July? How a Rock Hill area butcher shop fights high costs
On a Saturday morning during grilling season, the hardest item for shoppers to find at a butcher shop off Lancaster Bypass may well be a parking spot. Lancaster locals and out-of-towners roundup and file in, looking for deals on steaks and roasts.
“First of the month, and sometimes when we have crazy deals going on, you’ll pull a crowd in here,” said Brian Everall, who owns The Meat Center at 657 Lancaster Bypass East. “Sometimes we do have to limit people at the door coming in.”
Locals know Everall’s place from its 40 years in business. Folks from Rock Hill, Fort Mill and Indian Land know it from their drive through Lancaster headed to the beach. Social media influencers are learning what shoppers have known for years, that The Meat Center is the place to find a deal.
Customers can find meat there that’s sometimes $2 to $4 per pound less than at other area grocery stores. Weekly bundle deals and specials often include ribeyes, T-bones, porterhouses and filets. The Meat Center also has chicken, pork, seafood, deli cuts and frozen items.
At a time when the price of beef and the gas needed to get there are soaring, a little relief at the cash register keeps people coming to Lancaster.
Ground beef, steaks and chuck roasts are up between 13% and 22% from last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Gas prices in South Carolina top $3.50 a gallon, and spent much of the year above $4 per gallon.
Everall openly shares the secret to his business — it’s focusing on the bottom line for customers, not just the store.
“Do we have to make a profit to keep this place open? Of course,” he said. “But at the same time, we don’t have to be greedy. We don’t have to want to make a killing off of everything.”
Meat Center grows in Lancaster
Ann and Leon Boss opened the store in 1986. Ann’s brother Billy Everall joined them. The Meat Center operated at the end of a strip mall across the highway until 2016, when a move to the current spot quadrupled its size.
Brian Everall, nephew of the past owners, runs it now with his daughter Savannah Burgess.
The store has about 25 employees. They unload 18-wheelers that arrive every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 5 a.m. Summers are busy thanks to the “grilling holidays” of Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day.
“A lot of burger, a lot of steaks, a lot of ribs,” Everall said. “A lot of chicken to throw on the grill.”
This year, though, Everall will take one of his busiest days off. He expects a wild July 3, because he isn’t opening on Saturday.
“It’s July 4th,” he said. “It’s 250 years for this country. And the employees here, they need to be home with their families enjoying what they want to do.”
High food, gas and other household costs tend to bring business at The Meat Center rather than drive it away. Along with the grilling holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas, for instance, other dates have become busier as people look to save on the cost of a night out by cooking at home, Everall said.
“Valentine’s Day, we sell a lot of ribeyes,” he said. “It’s just one of those crazy things, you’d think everybody wants to go out to eat for Valentine’s, take your honey out to eat and let somebody else cook.”
Why is meat cheap at The Meat Center?
Some people hear low prices and wonder what’s different about the meat.
Quality and cleanliness aren’t where The Meat Center finds its margins. The store sells Certified Angus Beef, mainly choice with some prime grading. It also operates under a Clemson University processing program that requires daily inspections.
Lower prices at the Lancaster store are simply an effort to bring more people in, more often.
“We want to give you a fair price for a good product, and you know what?” Everall asked. “If you’re happy, you’ll come back.”
About 65% of customers come from Lancaster, he estimates.
“A lot of Charlotte customers come down,” Everall said. “We have Rock Hill of course, Fort Mill, Columbia. I would say within a 100-mile radius, that’s our crowd.”
Locals may stop by a time or two a week, he said, while other shoppers are easy to spot. They can overflow buggies to make the long drive worth their trip.
“The out-of-towners, it makes sense for them to load up for at least a couple of weeks, or some of them do a month’s shopping at a time,” Everall said.
Certified Angus isn’t the cheapest route, but Everall likes the consistency and quality it provides. Meat comes from farms across the U.S., but only the U.S. Everall doesn’t want to supplement stock with Brazilian or New Zealand beef, even during expensive times for the industry.
“We want to support the United States farmers and help them,” he said. “Without them, we couldn’t do what we do. The country would be in a bad situation without the farmers.”
Everall has a fairly simple test when deciding what products to sell in his store.
“If it’s something I wouldn’t want to take home to my mom, you know what? I don’t want to sell it,” he said.
Starting the next 40 years
About 90% of Everall’s business is the retail side customers see when they shop with him. The rest is restaurant business.
He’s set up to serve any restaurant in South Carolina, and has about 30 customers. Most are within a 30-mile radius.
“Some of them just come in and get French fries and chicken strips,” he said. “But a lot of them we do their hamburger, we do their pork chops, we do their steaks. Sausage, a lot of restaurants do breakfast. We make our own sausage.”
There’s the occasional emergency call that a restaurant an hour or two away needs 100 pounds of hamburger. Everall doesn’t want to expand the restaurant side, since that would take away from the main retail business.
And focusing on those customers, from their family budgets to the meals they want to feed their families, is what Everall sees as the key to the store’s next 40 years in business.
“As long as that crowd keeps coming, we’ll keep on doing what we’re doing,” he said. “With all them people coming in all day long like that and keeping us open, we must be doing something right.”