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Re:Poultry Workers in Diapers as Bathroom Breaks Denied, Oxf... by DKnoll on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @07:43PM (#11680307)
They can be treated as a commodity as they are graded on value. How would a commodity market work if each instance of the commodity had a different value? Both live steers, and their resulting leather, beef and other byproducts are sold based upon weight and/or grade.

For example, 'a cow' is not a commodity... but a grade 3 live steer is.

Movie theatres do not price films based upon quality, but the distributors certainly do (I managed a movie theatre). You cannot commoditise a movie ticket, each theatre provides different facility and presentation quality.

Re:Poultry Workers in Diapers as Bathroom Breaks Denied, Oxf... by Retric on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @07:48PM (#11680333)
Sure, cattle auctions sell the animal for an individual price based on health, weight, body size etc. At the extreme end animals can sell for 150,000+ if they seem to have good DNA for breeding. http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/03/bovine_beauty... Even if there just being butchered people make bids based on expected yields. This gets back to meat grades etc.

However, animals are also sold in bulk without individual prices.