"Meat is meat, but sausage carries the culture"

Here's an interesting article from the Smithsonian magazine called "For German Butchers, a Wurst Case Scenario" which chronicles the decline of the German butcher.

There were 70,000 butchers in Germany in the 1970s; now there are 17,000, with 300 to 400 dropping out or retiring every year.

...these days tradition counts less than appearance. It’s mainly pensioners who continue to buy their sausages from the butcher rather than the supermarket, because they know the difference; younger people never learned the habit. Children today prefer sausages with smiley faces or animal designs, something no German butcher can do by artisanal means.

The author of the piece even visits a German butchers museum near Stuttgart which I will be sure to put on my itinerary when I get over to the Fatherland.

Unfortunately the article doesn't try to explain the ultimate causes behind this. He notes more proximate causes - Germans are eating less meat these days and doing more shopping at large "American-style" grocery stores - but why are they eating less meat and eschewing local butchers in favor of mass-produced crap? No doubt there's a German grad student investigating the issue at this very moment.