Book excerpt: When grocery stores began using electronic scanners to capture prices paid for meat, it was assumed that the livestock industry could capitalize on having these point-of-sale data available as a measure of the value of its products. This report compares scanner price data (SPD) with publicly available data collected. Of the two data types, SPD provide more info. about retail meat markets, including a wider variety of meat-cut prices, multiple measures of an average price, the volume of sales, and the relative importance of discounted prices. The SPD sample, however, is not statistically drawn, and complicated processing requirements delay its release, which makes SPD less useful than other data for analyzing current market conditions. Illus.