The Easy Costco Hack For Getting The Best Bang For Your Buck On Steak
When it comes to Costco, it seems like diehard shoppers have come up with as many Costco hacks as there are products. There's a viral shopping cart hack for your mega hauls. There's a hack that made the rounds on Reddit for getting through those checkout lines faster. There are a whole bunch of Costco food court hacks, and even a nifty, albeit controversial, hack for MacGyvering a cup holder in your Costco shopping cart.
There are also hacks when it comes to the actual products themselves, like one trick for extending the life of those giant boxes of croissants. Another hack shows how you can turn a box of muffins into a cake. With around 4,000 products in each Costco store at any given time, you could easily try a new hack every day of the year.
While some of these hacks are more gimmicky than truly useful, there are a few that are designed to help shoppers save some real money. One such hack that's been making the rounds lately comes from TikTok user Tiffany, aka @rootsandknuckles. It's a cost-saving hack for those high-quality steaks Costco sells, especially relevant these days in the face of inflation and rising beef prices.
Go for the whole loin
In the video Tiffany shows viewers a pack of USDA Prime New York Strip steaks. At $19.99 a pound, the package of five steaks rings up to a little over $85. Not a bad price for a steak dinner for five when you think about it.
But Tiffany's got a trick up her sleeve to make that steak dinner even cheaper. She moves just down the meat case and grabs a whole top loin. This is the cut of meat that New York Strip steaks come from, and the giant loin she grabs costs a whopping $174.90, nearly $90 more than the initial package.
Here's where the hack comes in — the per pound price on that loin is $11.89 as opposed to $19.99 for the package of steaks. Tiffany buys the loin, takes it home, and manages to cut 15 individual steaks from that single loin. A quick calculation shows a final per-steak price is $11.66. If she had gone with the package of five steaks she would have paid around $17 per steak. While the initial price of the whole loin might cause a bit of sticker shock, it really does mean some big savings in the long run, not to mention a freezer full of steaks for impromptu steak nights.
The next time you're in the meat department at Costco make sure to check the per-pound price and break out your calculator. You might end up saving some serious cash.