(It's fair that lobster pricing does fluctuate more than other proteins but "market price" is at least as much about reducing pricing transparency.)
So, the short answer is that lower lobster pricing doesn't seem to have led to widespread lower pricing in most places.
What I was referring to was regular restaurants that routinely don't list a price for dishes that use lobster on their menu and instead just say "market price." Which, in my experience, is more or less a synonym for "expensive."
I'd note that, in addition to lobster pounds, it's far more common for coastal Maine restaurants to have the price for lobster in their menu like they do for every other dish.
> This leaves the Maine (and Canadian) lobster industry with another interesting challenge: how to find enough buyers for all those lobsters so that prices don't collapse. As you can see from the chart below, they've mostly succeeded:
> [price chart]
> Affluent Chinese diners have been one reason. This January, five chartered 747s full of live lobsters flew from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to China to supply Chinese New Year feasts. Maine's lobsters tend to make the voyage less dramatically, in regularly scheduled flights from Boston, but $27 million worth of them were shipped to China in 2016.
> The national and even global spread of the lobster roll has also helped a lot. I came to Maine on a trip organized by Luke's Lobster, a fast-casual restaurant chain that now has 21 "shacks" in the U.S. and eight more scheduled to open this year, along with six licensed locations in Japan. ... Luke's Lobster now has its own plant in Saco, Maine, that processes between 4 and 5 percent of the state's lobster harvest. Processing, in this case, means cooking and picking the meat out of the claws and knuckles for Luke's lobster rolls while cleaning and freezing the raw tails and clawless "bullet" lobsters for sale to restaurants, groceries and such.
> Holden's father, Jeff, says that tails used to sell for much more than claw meat. Now lobster rolls, for which tail meat is generally too chewy, have flipped the price equation.
Since that year, I haven't seen the same offerings where this Bloomberg article would suggest that the amount of harvested lobsters has gone up.
That was a fun summer.
No idea if they are any good, but they are $8.
Lobster rolls are really pretty simple. But they need to be fresh lobster and very little else--which obviously isn't a good match for McDonalds style prep. The good news is that means they're very easy to make at home and many places that sell lobster will even boil them for you.
I tried the McLobster a few years ago, it was pretty mediocre.
Likewise. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.
No. Anecdotally, and also supported by data there was an article at some point about it. The worst part is a lot of restaurants use rock lobster instead of Maine lobster
While the wholesale price has fluctuated, has there been much change in retail/restaurant lobster prices? I certainly don't see restaurants near me lowering the price of a lobster roll. If anything, looks like Old Port Lobster Shack in Redwood City increased theirs judging by what Google shows in their menu listing for a "Maine Lobster Roll" ($18.75) vs. what their website shows ($22.95). But that's just a local price in a market that in general seems to see prices racing upwards due to the influx of cash in the area.