09/02/2026
Sorry in advance for the long, slightly rant-style post, but stick with me. There's some truth in all of this, plus a little behind-the-scenes look at how Saucy Beard BBQ actually operates and what growth could eventually mean for us and our customers.
Everyone wants to know why everything is so damn expensive.
Usually the conversation turns to Washington, Republicans, Democrats, oil companies, wars, interest rates or corporate greed. And yes, all of those things play a role.
But there's another part nobody really wants to talk about:
We've built an incredibly expensive version of "normal."
We're constantly being sold the next thing we supposedly need. New phones, trending products, gadgets, expensive vehicles, the newest smoker or griddle, Amazon purchases we didn't know existed until an influencer showed us one.
Social media basically turned keeping up with the Joneses into keeping up with millions of Joneses.
At the same time, we've normalized financing everyday purchases. Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna can turn something we can't afford today into "4 easy payments." One small payment doesn't seem like much until you have six of them.
Then there are vehicles. Plenty of people used to drive a $3,000 to $5,000 be**er because that's what they could afford. It wasn't pretty, but it was paid for. Now a $50,000+ vehicle can feel affordable because the conversation becomes, "Can you handle $700 a month for 72 months?" Add insurance, interest, maintenance and fuel and that payment becomes a serious chunk of the household budget.
Then pile on streaming services, apps, cloud storage, delivery memberships, premium subscriptions, convenience fees and service fees. None of them individually break the bank, but together they're a constant drip out of the checking account.
Meanwhile, businesses aren't immune to any of this.
We've understandably pushed for better wages, but businesses are also paying more for insurance, utilities, equipment, ingredients, materials, credit-card fees, theft and shrinkage, vandalism and supply-chain costs.
Those costs eventually show up in the price of whatever we're buying.
That doesn't mean every price increase is justified or that businesses never take advantage of consumers. It just means there's usually a lot more behind a price tag than we see.
Here's where I can give you a real example from Saucy Beard BBQ.
Someone sees a $15 BBQ plate and might think, "$15 for that?"
What they don't see is everything surrounding that meal.
The meat, trimming, seasoning, hours of smoking, fuel, sides, packaging, insurance, food-safety supplies, cleaning, loading, delivery, credit-card fees and then cleaning everything again afterward.
Take brisket. We pay for the entire raw brisket, including pounds of fat that get trimmed away. Then we lose considerably more weight during cooking through rendered fat and moisture loss. What we can actually sell is far less than the weight we originally paid for.
Factor in all the other expenses and the hours invested, and there are plenty of times a small food business owner is effectively working for less than minimum wage.
But here's the important part:
Volume changes the equation.
If we're already firing a smoker and driving a delivery route, adding more orders doesn't multiply every one of those costs equally.
The same applies to our sauces, seasonings, marinades and other products. More volume creates opportunities for larger production runs, better purchasing power and eventually better distribution.
That's where we'd love to see Saucy Beard go.
Maybe someday getting your favorite Saucy Beard sauce or seasoning is as simple as adding it to your normal grocery order.
Growth can also give us more room for better pricing and specials, more delivery opportunities, better equipment, more products and an overall better experience for our customers.
And helping us get there doesn't always require spending money.
Tell your friends or family about us. Leave a review if you've had a good experience. Share a post. Recommend us when someone is looking for BBQ or a good sauce.
Those little things matter.
Awareness creates demand. Demand creates volume. Volume creates efficiency.
Growth shouldn't just make a business bigger. Done right, it should make the business better and easier for its customers to access.
Now, before someone points out the obvious contradiction here, I'm not saying people should stop eating out, buying BBQ, owning a nice truck, subscribing to Netflix or spending money on things they enjoy.
That would be a pretty ridiculous argument for someone who sells BBQ and BBQ products to make.
The point isn't to stop spending money. It's to recognize the difference between the cost of living and the cost of the lifestyle we've chosen to live.
If you can afford the new truck and it makes you happy, buy it. If you love eating out every Friday, do it. If you've got six streaming services and use every one of them, great.
But those are still choices.
And when enough optional expenses become normalized, financed and eventually viewed as necessities, our perception of what it costs just to "get by" changes with them.
That doesn't erase the very real increases in housing, groceries, healthcare, utilities or other necessities. Government policy, energy, interest rates, corporate behavior, wages and business operating costs absolutely matter too.
It's not one or the other.
Maybe part of the uncomfortable truth is simply that the actual cost of necessities has gone up while our definition of a normal lifestyle has gotten more expensive at the same time.
And those two things hitting household budgets together hurt.
So what do you think? How much of today's cost-of-living problem is actual inflation, and how much is lifestyle inflation?
Where do you draw the line between things genuinely becoming unaffordable and our definition of "normal" becoming too expensive?
