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Comment by bigtex | Hacker News Reader

My wife has a cottage baking business and would buy 15 dozen eggs from Costco Business Center. Already high, a few months back in cost about $45 for the box. Just last week it was $110. She doesn't recall but it fairly certain the box was between $20-30 before inflation hit.

However she said they had chicken legs that were .49/lb which is a great price but hard to reconcile with the narrative that avian flu is the cause for the price increases. Why are broiler chicken cheap but eggs from layer hens not?

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Broilers take a fraction of the time to grow compared to the five months it takes before a hen lays the first egg.

12 weeks for most chickens we eat. It’s honestly crazy lol

8 weeks max, probably more like 6. disclosure - I raise meat chickens at a small scale

I don’t know whether to be amazed at this agricultural feat that brings cheap, tasty, high-protein meals to the masses of humanity, or sickened by an abomination of nature that turns a living thing into a bio-engineered fast-growing blob. I guess both?

Do you consider plants to be living things?

Yes but it’s a fuzzy term, what I meant was more in the “animal” realm of living.

Just to give an example, I (and I think most humans) feel negatively about deforestation or destruction of plant life because it is destroying or profaning something beautiful. It’s like burning art.

Same with the chickens. I’m not sure I consider factory farming immoral, and I definitely don’t consider killing animals for food immoral. I grew up raising chickens (laying hens, it was a family hobby and not a business)and don’t feel any moral or aesthetic issue with killing them. I also hunt and fish a lot, my freezers are full of wild game whose lives I personally ended.

Still, certain kinds of factory farming, like the raising of chicken-blobs, disturb me because they take something I find beautiful and make it ugly. Not sure what to make of the disturbed feeling tho, it’s not a moral condemnation or political position.

That’s the best way I can put it on the internet.

The line Peter Singer draws, which I found quite elegant, is "things that can suffer". You can have aesthetic opinions about what we do to plants, but a major difference with what we do to chickens is that the plants don't suffer.

I’m not convinced the elegance here doesn’t derive from imprecision. I have some opinions about which sorts of life forms can suffer, but I don’t really have a justification for them, and there are people out there who honestly seem to believe that (for example) bugs don’t suffer, or lobsters don’t suffer. This seems like a fairly ridiculous proposition to me, but hey, it just depends on how we’ve anthropomorphized lobster thoughts, I guess.

Oh there is certainly imprecision, but I don't think that's where the elegance comes from. Especially given that most actual moral quandaries you might find yourself in are clearly not in the grey areas, and so the few that you do encounter can relatively easily be dealt with via either "better safe than sorry" or "worth the risk", depending on your personal inclination.

> I definitely don’t consider killing animals for food immoral.

This is a highly interesting standpoint-- would you consider it morally problematic to kill more intelligent animals for food, like dogs?

What about human children (younger than a year? younger than 6?).

Is there a line for you somewhere? Where approximately and why?

This is drastically different from myself and most meateaters I know which concede moral problems with killing animals for food in general but ignore them in favor of enjoyment of food, so I'm very curious about how your framework looks like.

For me at least: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/bc/c5/8c/bcc58ccca47e6e8faa9a...

I.e. the line is drawn where it is convenient and requires no change (sacrifice).

Sure, but how do you justify that?

Why would it be moral to farm cows but not horses, and pigs but not hares?

> crazy

horrific. they breed frankenstein bodied animals, that this is even allowed makes me sick.

Are you also horrified at humans eating a wild Turkey?

I do a good deal of baking, and I buy a lot of my supplies from Costco. I also have spent a fair amount of time very diligently tracking my family's grocery expenses. (I have a spreadsheet of almost 3 years of just about all groceries we bought.)

In 2019, I picked up 15 dozen eggs for $8.69, and the 5 dozen was $8.99 at that time. (There were times when they didn't stock the 15 dozen, so I had to opt for 5 -- a much more expensive $1.80/dozen but still reasonable.)

Since you have done this, are you convinced inflation is what they say it is?

After three years ending ~EOY'19, I stopped tracking all these data. (It turns out combing every grocery store receipt and manually typing, categorizing, and calculating the data takes a lot of time.)

I can't say how my experience tracked or would have tracked inflation, but I can say that even before the pandemic, I did see wildly varying prices on things. Costco's large vanilla extract was once around $10 (though this was before my spreadsheet, so I don't have dates/exact prices). It was up to $35 in '18, then down to $30 a year later, and just a few days ago, I noticed it for a little over $20. But 25# of flour used to be around $6-7, and I bought a bunch the other day for ~$12. So some things up, others down.

> I picked up 15 dozen eggs for $8.69, and the 5 dozen was $8.99 at that time.

Is there a typo?

No, those numbers are correct.

So in 2019 15 dozen eggs were 30c cheaper than 5 dozen eggs?

Costco is also a special kind of store, where you pay an annual membership to get wholesale-like pricing.

Costco is a bulk grocer. You pay a yearly fee to shop at Costco, and in return you can get extremely good deals on bulk food and items.

Yeah I understand that, I do shop there often. It took me a few re-reads to understand how relatively similar pricing for 15 dozen and 5 dozen eggs in 2019 at the same store helps to compare inflation measurements.

Summer of 2017 in small-ish town Iowa I was buying eggs at Aldi for $0.37/dozen. When I moved to a "large" Iowa town the price was suddenly around $0.55.

I recently went to buy eggs at a higher end store and the only eggs available were cage free, but would have been less expensive than generic eggs.

> 15 dozen eggs from Costco Business Center. [...] Just last week it was $110.

Might I suggest buying eggs from a normal grocery store or other alternative source? That's $7.33 per dozen and unless you have some very unusual situation, a dozen eggs can be had for less than half that price at a grocery store.

Possibly availabilty, in our Denver Suburb, Kroeger and Walmart shelves are nearly always bare. We've had to resort to buying 5 dozen at a time at our Costco...which I don't like, because it takes awhile to get through them.

not sure what 'awhile' is for you, but you can freeze them if needed. just beat the eggs in a container, and stash away in the freezer.

Where? I live in a poor rural area and every grocery store in town (and we ain’t talkin Whole Foods here) has even generic eggs for more than $5/dozen. Thank goodness I have my own chickens.

Time to get your own chickens if you're in a rural area.

Chicken feed is also more expensive.

$5/dozen is still a lot less than the $7.33/doz at Costco that OP was mentioning.

Canada, under $4 cad per dozen which is about $3.20 USD. Saw about $4.39 when I was in San Francisco last month, I (perhaps wrongly) made the assumption that similar would be available elsewhere.

>The USDA shows the current price of a dozen large eggs in California cost about $6.72, which is double what it cost in July.

https://abc7.com/egg-prices-in-california-avian-flu-bird-cag...

I am in California. Yesterday I bought the organic cage free vegetarian fed brown eggs at Safeway, they were $5.99 I could have spent less for the plain white eggs, and this is at Safeway which is not known for their low prices.

I’m just not seeing these quoted prices anywhere.

We have lots of chicken farms in California, so our supply is somewhat isolated from the rest of the U.S.

It's almost exactly the same price as July...

...2015.

And that's without factoring in inflation.

I just paid 7$ for a dozen eggs at a grocery store, and they were not organic or special in any way.

That's about the price for a dozen eggs at all of the grocery stores around me right now.

She did not buy it at that price, but follows a Facebook Costco group that shared the information.

I buy a dozen eggs for $3-5 in the middle of San Francisco. If your wife is paying double that, that too for bulk orders, then she is definitely doing something wrong. She can literally shop at Whole Foods and save money.

I've seen egg prices all over the place in my area. Ironically, the high end stores seem to have lower egg prices right now. I'm guessing the huge industrial type farms are getting hit hardest while the smaller farms, offering true free-range and other marketing gimmicks are largely business as usual.

Could it be that broiler chickens are being slaughtered ahead of time to prevent forced losses from avian flu? No clue about this industry.

That's insane. I can get 2 dozen organic eggs for $6.50 at my regular local Costco. She's paying more than double that at a business center.

Prices vary by state and municipality

https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/pybshellegg.pdf

My Costco didn't have a single egg in stock at any price last week. They've been limiting egg purchases for months.

If the chickens are dying from avian flu, they can still be consumed as food assuming they live long enough to develop but you will miss out on the ongoing egg production of the laying hens.

Healthy or not, a chicken can only give it's two wings once. Laying hens produce eggs repeatedly for as long as their bodies allow.

Longer business cycles? Broilers would be last years layers

Broilers actually only live to be 9 weeks old, so their business cycle is very short. The old layers are labeled stew hens when you can find them at the store.

Only if you live on a farm! Broilers are purpose-bred on a ridiculously fast timeline.

Broilers are different breeds than layers and “spent hens” tend to only get eaten by farmers, etc, because of the raised risk of deboning error and undesirably tough meat

I've heard they make excellent slow cook recipes like stew, soup, braise though :)

They apsolutely make excellent stock. I'm Hungarian and spent hen stock is quite commonky eaten in Hungary. Unfortunately spent hen is quite hard to source in the UK, where I am now.

Isn't it convenient that we discuss inflation like it only affects us 1 year at a time? All these articles shouldn't be saying 60% they should be saying 5 to 6 times more expensive from before the pandemic.

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