Answer: Bird flu and inflation (less so).
Although I suspect in short time we'll find out that the price hikes due to "bird flu" and "inflation" become... permanent.
Although I suspect in short time we'll find out that the price hikes due to "bird flu" and "inflation" become... permanent.
Or: the only reason I was buying generic eggs in the first place was that they were half the price of your Pasture Raised Organic eggs. Once they are almost the same price, I might as well buy Pasture Raised Organic eggs.
To be a "free-range" or "pasture-raised" chicken you simply need access to the outdoors. So, these animals are kept in the same cramped, feces-filled hothouses that the "budget chickens" are, but there's a tiny hole in the side of the barn where they can access a tiny bit of grass. That's it.
There is no incentive for these companies to do anything above the bare minimum; you will never find a large-scale egg supplier that raises chickens in the idyllic environment you may picture in your head.
Organic/Free range labeling is almost an outright scam. Very few operations (almost guaranteed to not be one you see in your grocery store) are what people imagine when they see this marketing. Most operations you could not tell the difference between chickens raised for that label vs. the "factory farm" operation across the street.
Source: family is organic market garden farmers, sells free range eggs. Organic labeling is one of the biggest scams I've ever personally witnessed.
If you actually care about this (almost no one does, they just say they do), you need to buy eggs direct from the source. Period. There is no other way to get what you are imagining.
Normally Pasture Raised means
- at least 1.8 square feet of indoor floor space each
- continuous access to a vegetation-covered outdoor area in which to roam and forage
- at least 4 square feet of outdoor space each
- access to perching and nesting boxes
I buy from Small Farms also...
As bare as these requirements are, they only exist because without them there is literally no reason to try. And even with them, there is only the incentive to legally meet the requirements, nothing else. The labels are for us, not the chickens.
But then we went back the next day and they had a few dozen eggs.
Someone who has disposable income but doesn't care would buy normal eggs before, lowering the demand for regulation-compliant eggs.
Now, the store only stocks regulation compliant eggs, so that's what the person buys, increasing demand.
Why would a seller sell them for any less than they can get? Farms tend to be incredibly low margin businesses, so selling below market is just utterly silly.
Prices are set at the margin, they are not set by cost of production other than to act as a floor where companies outright go out of business.
I think there are normally ~400 million egg laying hens in the US and they've had to kill at least 44 million (filtered by 'table egg' and summed) [2]
[1] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000708111
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/data-map-commercial.html
This strong flu will not be gone in a while and it speaks for the position that current large scale farming is not sustainable.
Of course inflation is permanent. The mechanics of money would break down otherwise. When money can deflate, money becomes an investment vehicle like crypto did and we know how bad that is.
When there is a threat of inflation, it forces people to transfer money instead of hoarding it. That is the entire purpose of money.
Now, about the price hike… is it permanent? Probably not when there are 160,000 competing poultry farms.
Not exactly the strongest counterexample I've ever seen, though (barely) technically correct.
And the last deflationary "period" (a single year) before that was ... drumroll... 1949, following 3 years of >8% inflation.
0. https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-bracke...
1. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/effective-income-tax-...
On average, aka the vast majority of tax revenue, it's stayed constant according to your own source.
Food, electricity, heating, all went up from minimum 30% to nearly doubled. Luckily my rent and doctor's bills went up only 10% so thank God about that.