i hear you on the ground beef-$5.99 a pound for 80/20$5-6/lb for hamburger is crazy. I had $2.99 roast beef ground for me at the supermarket. They are glad to do it and I see exactly what goes into the meat.

i've done this for years-had the butchers turn lower price roasts into ground beef, soup/stew meat. once we got a grinder attachement for our kitchen aide i took to watching good sales on pork and we make sausage (bulk sausage is what i primarily use-we portion up bags and season it for the purpose needed when we defrost it). we are also fans of lamb and i have a few recipies that call for it ground-i can get a whole boneless leg for much less per pound than the 1 pound packages of ground so we set up the kitchen aide and start packaging.
So to post something positive, make sure you browse around Lowes.
Things get marked down there all the time and you just find them randomly. I picked up a $300 Chamberlain garage door open for $67, left 5% for my Lowes credit card - so a bargain. They still sell it for $300 ship to store.
we saw this in action last summer-we were doing a deck remodel and wanted to replace the wooden railing with the cable style. our contractor went to lowes to get supplies and came back to share that it did'nt happen often but he was going to have to LOWER his bid for the job b/c while the website showed one price for the cable kits-lowes had them on the shelves at 60% markdown
