Eggspensive | Hacker News Reader

Eggspensive

eggspensive.net

242 pointsvoisin290 comments

I think there's something a bit misleading about these prices.

This is reporting prices of $2.76 per dozen at a Wallmart near me. I happened to visit that store yesterday and I know damn well there were no eggs being sold at even remotely close to that low price.

The Eggspensive site seems to be picking up on this dozen eggs, which happens to be not available at this or any other store in the region. They also are not available to purchase online. The site says they can be shipped in 3 days but it doesn't give me an add-to-cart button.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Large-White-Eggs-12-C...

I don't know how it's scraping prices, but it should discriminate as to whether eggs at a price are even available.

EDIT: Actually, those exact eggs seem responsible for making most of Southern California appear to have insanely cheap eggs. Outside of getting lucky, this is almost certainly not the case. Go to any grocery store in SoCal and you'll primarily see eggs between $5 and $8, if not exclusively.

Nicely made site, though! Keep up the good work.

What we really need is a digital copy of all our purchasing receipts via the following:

An app which scans a QR code printed on receipts which leads to a direct json/table of the items purchased, location purchased, date, price paid.

NO PERSONAL DATA - just the item, store name & location, price, date, tax %.

People can CHOOSE to scan their receipt and have that data slurped into the app and uploaded to a national DB for price index.

sans QR system integrated to the sales we just need an OCR capable AI APP that you take a pic of the receipt and it parses it and tracks the prices.

An additional feature is just snapping pics of price tags into the app and it parses them, their barcodes, prices, location, etc...

Same as the Gas Price app-ish, but for any receipt as the header of every receipt has all the business information and a line item of price for purchases.

It would be great if we could require all sales to provide a QR code of every receipt which provides a json/table of the above (anon) data...

because I keep a running tally in my head for things that I buy and their prices.

At the beginning of the pandemic, juice from MINUTE MAID in half gallon was $1.34 -- currently it is $1.68 11.25% inflation increase for this sugar water alone.

I think most people would be fine if we had a national DB for prices.

Most people would not be fine if we had 3+ competing private db's with price info used to profit off of others lack of price knowledge.

agree... I originally wrote this in my comment but pulled it out as I figured the thought of a national DB some people might scoff at -- but I have wanted this for decades

>>"POS's would need to be able to report each receipt with a QR code to a central (ideally government) FDA site and that information should be API accessible for the public."

this exists basically at very large scales with companies like nielseniq and to some degree Catalina marketing. If there was a way to make money off it, they could easily produce a lot of useful aggregate item pricing dbs by region over time.

It requires handing over quite some data, but here in Germany, I can get a digital PDF receipt from my main supermarket. There’s a parser on Github [0] that I contributed to (found it when I searched before writing it myself :D), and I use it to track price changes of items I buy. The situation could be a lot better, but at least it gives me some fun graphs.

[0]: https://github.com/bietiekay/REWE-eBon-Parser

That's pretty common in the US well. Kroger stores do it, I imagine any store with a membership program is similar. Home Depot does it too, without a membership program, if you give them your email address at POS the first time you use a new card. I'm sure they love the data.

The data also comes with a 10% discount, so I feel fairly paid for it.

Meta also loves the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34551367

Membership programs: https://xkcd.com/2006/

>At the beginning of the pandemic, juice from MINUTE MAID in half gallon was $1.34 -- currently it is $1.68 11.25% inflation increase for this sugar water alone.

That sounds like a lot until you realize that "beginning of pandemic" (February 2020?) was almost 3 years ago, and the CPI itself has gone up 15.8% in the meantime.

I bet the government's inflation tracker is also connected to walmart links. No wonder the gov things we're at negative inflation.

lol, they have armies of statisticians working on this stuff. its probably better than this person's side project website scraper.

I wish I could go back in time about 40 years, where I had the same faith in government that you have currently. (I'm age 43 at the moment)

The government is definitely full of shit, but historical inflation matches their published numbers pretty well over time. I compared the Big Mac index over the last couple decades, and it fit pretty well

I think most of the extra inflation is going into stocks and housing, and the government's cherry picking hides those factors. The end result is that people can't retire and can't comfortably afford houses, which is why everything sucks now

No you dont, you obviously like not trusting the government. it makes you feel smarter and better than a big organization. But your internet research isnt as good as 1000 econ grads working at the BLS and it will never be.

The US government has extremely strong incentives to report inflation as low as possible, so it's likely less about "thinking" we're at negative and more that they pick and choose data to show it intentionally.

They have very specific baskets of goods and methodologies that they publish details on when changed. And it is done by an independent groups of government employees with lots of eyes, both public and private looking at every detail of what they do. I don't think they are simply cherry picking data.

There are a ton of issues with the official CPI numbers that none of this accounts for and even the BLS admits to in a limited extent. It doesn't account for people buying less expensive substitutes when items get expensive, it only includes "staples" despite consumers potentially spend a ton on newer items, it doesn't account for quality changes of items, it has an undue weight on urban areas, doesn't account for shrinkflation or other hidden forms of inflation, and lots of others.

The BLS isn't independent. The commissioner is hand picked by the senate, and it's currently someone who's very deeply rooted in establishment politics and has close connections to the Koch family, the fossil fuel industry, and Trump.

Shrinkflation is captured: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-12/measuring-shrinkflati...

> It doesn't account for people buying less expensive substitutes when items get expensive

as mentioned in the chained CPI FAQ, "The C-CPI-U employs a formula that reflects the effect of substitution that consumers make across item categories in response to changes in relative prices."

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/chained-cpi-que...

Do you have any evidence that the methods to calculate inflation have changed at any point in the Biden administration to show negative inflation right now or are you just heavily implying that it's probably happening without any such evidence?

In September of last year, the frequency of goods selection for calculating CPI changed from every 2 years to every year. The change came into effect in January 2023.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/notices/2022/methodology-changes-202...

That is not evidence of what GP is talking about.

How is it not?

Major employers can manipulate govt's in lots of ways like laying off staff to push up the unemployment figures, so if you get a Govt which wants to raise standards for the populations, major employers can make that difficult.

The prime objective of a business is to make profit, everything else is secondary.

I agree with your second paragraph, but I'm failing to understand why a company would want to manipulate government unemployment figures (and indeed, surely if they actually lay off staff then they're not manipulating the reporting/figures, they're changing the reality which is then reflected in the figures)?

I saw a stock market company in the UK do this in the 90's, mostly through natural wastage and not replacing the position, a total ban on recruitment except essential jobs, whilst blaming the new govt.

Businesses need ways to control govt for their own means, just look at the legislation, regulations and business practices that exists and does not exist in one country and not another.

The US Supreme Court case Gonzalez v. Google, even some of the US Judges have said congress need to be addressing this, but these politicians are all bought and paid for, except perhaps Bernie Sanders. Perhaps this is also why US tech stock is laying off big, they know the game is up and changes are a foot.

Look at parts of the German Autobahn where its got no speed limit, do you think the German Car manufacturers had a little bit of a say in keeping things unchanged since 1934?

This reads like it was written by a Markov chain.

>The prime objective of a business is to make profit, everything else is secondary.

can·cer /ˈkansər/ Learn to pronounce noun 1. a disease caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body. "he's got cancer" 2. a practice or phenomenon perceived to be evil or destructive and hard to contain or eradicate. "gambling is a cancer sweeping across the nation"

this is not true

whole foods in LA shows $3.29 for a dozen eggs https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/product/365-by-whole-foods-...

Did you see them with your eyeballs at the store? You miss the point of the parent completely.

Just adding a data point, I checked Whole Food's online ordering system and I can order these eggs for delivery later today for $3.79: https://www.amazon.com/365-Everyday-Value-Brown-Non-Gmo/dp/B...

Depends on where you are. Shows "Currently unavailable." for me.

Also, +$9.95 for delivery. Who knows if Amazon is willing to deliver to you because of that and empty the store shelves instead? So again, unless you see them with your eyeballs or get them at $3.79 all in in your hands, I am not sure what this means.

I go to Whole Foods all the time, and yes their own brand of eggs really is that price.

The egg inflation scare is being largely exaggerated. IMO what is different now vs a few years ago is there's a lot more high end organic pasture raised options. These are $6-$10, but that's not the price of standard conventional eggs.

Talk to people who raise chickens. Costs for everything from baby chicks to egg-laying hens have tripled pretty much country-wide.

H5N1 has hit the US and Europe extremely hard this year and there seems to be no end in sight to this current outbreak.

Ok sure but eggs are still $3 something at whole foods

Whole Foods is a very large grocer with contractual obligations to buy a certain quantity of eggs. They also have declining foot traffic and price-sensitive customers.

At the moment, eggs are probably a loss-leader for them and they're encouraged to still move on volume.

If you look at the data in this app as a whole, the stores with the highest egg prices are small chains with low buying-power.

Whole Foods does not have price sensitive customers.

Yes, they do, that's why their foot traffic has been declining.

Not really. They are targeting upper middle class people. Price sensitive customers haven’t been going there since it opened.

I was every bit as skeptical (and agree there's nothing particularly meaningful about a bargain on a product that's unavailable), half expecting the available eggs to cost $6-7 or more as they do just about everywhere I shop in California. (Which is not at high-end markets like Whole Foods, either — we're talking places like Grocery Outlet, Smart 'n Final, etc., that are just barely a step up from a 99¢ store.) On the rare occasion that there's a shelf advertising eggs under five bucks, they're gone, of course. Folks are buying chickens left and right. At my local Costco there've been actual fistfights within 2-3 minutes of the doors opening as people scramble (ha) over giant palettes of eggs. It's absolutely crazy.

So color me shocked that I could buy these dudes for a mere $3.29 from Amazon Fresh and have them delivered this afternoon, if I want:

https://www.amazon.com/365-Whole-Foods-Market-Brown/dp/B074H...

Sure, there's the delivery fee which at $10 isn't cheep (last egg pun, I swear). But to see Whole Foods selling 'em for less than half of what a bargain reseller is charging down the street is surprising to say the least.

So are eggs replacing flat-screen TVs the new doorbuster? Sell 'em at wholesale prices just to get people in the door, where they're sure find plenty of questionable "deals" to more than make up for the paltry ~$3 opportunity cost of charging less than market price? The $10 delivery fee practically guarantees people will be filling up their online carts with plenty of other stuff besides eggs.

My Hill Country Fare Grade A Large Eggs (36 ct) from HEB cost $11.59 on Sunday. But that's from Instacart; maybe they tack on extra to each item? Same item on July 16 was $11.18, but that was 2x18ct at $5.59 each.

Amazon Fresh heavily utilizes dynamic pricing, so that price is subject to change at any time. You can definitely get good deals there though. I once got like 10 16oz containers of deli meat there for just $2/each

Those eggs are available for me at the same price on Amazon Fresh. I live in Los Angeles.

Indeed, it shows $3.29 for the Whole Foods in Pasadena. If that's the case, I guess I'd better start shopping for eggs there again despite having abandoned them for the poor quality food at the hot bar.

Since this comment is at the top of the thread, I’m going to attach a quick reminder that egg prices are high due to a major outbreak of bird flu. I know that won’t keep this thread from degenerating into political rants about inflation, but maybe it will help someone move on with their day.

I believe the context of this post is likely the other one earlier today, which asserts that bird flu is being used as a pretense to gouge prices when the impact is actually minimal. I'm not taking a position one way or the other, but that's probably why this was posted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34898074

My midget of data is that the local cage-free eggs have remained the same price for 3+ years now, but the "regular supermarket eggs" are now more expensive than the local ones.

That's about right. Ever since I stopped raising chickens, I've been buying cage-free eggs. The price doesn't seem to have changed much over the last year and that is probably why they were selling out faster.

I just bought groceries yesterday, and checking the Walmart I went to, this site was accurate at least for that location.

Here in Australia they use the term "free-range" and additionally publish the number of animals per land area (density). There's some pretty vicious things being sold as "free-range". I think "cage-free" is a scam also. You want the hard numbers.

Yeah New Zealand has the same distinction between cage free and free range eggs. The conditions for the "cage-free" ones are not much better than the caged ones - they just tweak the suffering to tick a box, I only buy free range.

Of course free range eggs aren't totally safe either, there's been a few scandals where a company has just lied about the conditions of the chickens entirely and gotten away with it for a worrying amount of time.

In the US "pasture raised" is the key phrase to look for. That means what most people think when they read "free range". Neither "cage free" nor "free range" means much in the US.

Cage free simply means they aren't in individual cages. ISTR that free range means there's an open door to the outdoors. But take any animal with flocking/herding behavior and if the group is inside, no more than one or two individuals will venture out for a few seconds before running back inside to the safety of the group.

I don't know of any large producers of pasture raised eggs. They all seem to be small, regional outfits, but then again, I haven't really looked hard.

> are high due to a major outbreak of bird flu

Maybe at first, but now that providers are following the same path as oil companies and reporting record profits, I'm not buying it.

>and reporting record profits

1. Does that say much? Thanks to inflation, every year is basically guaranteed to have "record profits".

2. If we look at their margins, it has indeed gone up, but we also see that it has gone up in 2015 (when there was also a bird flu), then subsequently dropped back down afterwards. What explains this? Did the CEO get visited by the three ghosts of christmas and got less greedy? Or perhaps it's just the case that companies make record profits when supply is limited?

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CALM/cal-maine-foo...

Sure, but how often do the politicians admit they caused inflation without some similar excuse?

"Bird Flu" is better than the usual "greedy landlords/businessmen". But when we hit record prices in 2023 there is the obvious point to make that the record price is usually in the most recent year. I'm also going to complain about people blaming the war in Ukraine for price rises, which is one of those moments where the cynics roll their eyes as politicians try to pretend that Russia and Ukraine combined represent some sort of economic superpower instead of backwaters.

These events affect the marginal price. Why are these things controlling the marginal price? Because of bad political decisions that stopped the marginal producer being someone with cheap goods to sell.

You helped me move on with my day, much appreciated

Might be grade A twelve count, that's available at the said price here.I checked when I went to get cheese just now. Yours is grade AA.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Large-White-Eggs-12-C...

There's a monopoly on US eggs, and like seemingly every industry right now, they're blaming externalities to cover the fact that price increases are mostly going to shareholders. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep...

> price increases are mostly going to shareholders.

I am confused. how are they going to shareholders, unless shareholders are actually selling the stock? how exactly are price increases coming to me as a shareholder.

Dividends?

Article just says 50% increase in stock value. Doesn't mention dividends or stock buybacks.

Profit can stay as cash, pay down debt, get reinvested by upping costs, or get paid out as dividends to the owners.

Either way, the cash flow statement needs to reflect it, the book value of the company should reflect it, and the market value might reflect it.

I really was hoping this was going to be a chart of egg sales by supplier, not a political screed.

We're almost at 60 Million dead poultry in the US from H5N1 since Jan '22.

Even before that during covid, there were super long periods of unprofitability for raising turkey to the point that you couldn't even buy whole turkeys in most of the southeastern US for over 10 months.

Monopolies are a problem but certainly not the cause of this one.

> We're almost at 60 Million dead poultry in the US from H5N1 since Jan '22.

Wouldn't we see an increase (equal or more) in chicken meat prices as well? If the info is correct...

2020-2023 chicken meat is ~22% higher: https://www.in2013dollars.com/Chicken/price-inflation/2020-t...

2020-2023 eggs are ~91% higher: https://www.in2013dollars.com/Eggs/price-inflation/2020-to-2...

Meat chickens and egg chickens are not the same. Egg chickens take longer to reach productive age, so the market finds it harder to react to supply shocks.

At best, layers take 10 more weeks to produce. The egg price spiked almost a year ago.

Focusing on meat vs egg chickens is beside the point. Cal-Maine’s profit has skyrocketed, even as prices on other things have come back down, so clearly they’re not merely passing their expenses on to the consumer. Read the link at top.

Cory Doctorow is no expert on the US egg/chicken industry. He's writing political opinion pieces here. Occasionally he writes science fiction. He also has big problems with hyperbole in his work.

The egg price spiked almost a year ago because we've been dealing with H5N1 since over a year ago and it has only gotten worse since.

You're just wrong.

https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/record-breaking-eg...

An accusation brought to the FTC by an organization whose founding mission statement is that all of the problems in the farm industry are because of monopolistic corporations. Only a single member of their board/staff even owns a farm.

It's literally their mission to make this claim.

Instead of being a parrot and squawking, read the article. The source for the data is Cal-Maine's own financial statements.

Yes, there are some facts, but you should learn the difference between opinions and conclusions.

I mean, 60 million sounds like a big number, but it seems that the average number of chickens slaughtered per day in the US is somewhere around 24 million birds.

I think you may underestimate the scale of poultry slaughter in the US.

Those are culls, not slaughters. They aren't the same thing. You cannot sell culled chickens for food, they are culled due to disease and are considered biohazard, because they can infect other parts of the flock or other flocks, and in the case of bird flu are also infectious to humans. Generally, the USDA requires a full cull of flocks if any birds are affected. My sister is into urban chickens and bird flu is very much not a joke, and trying to prevent it is hard because humans can carry it and infect chickens and chickens can infect humans.

Also, the chicken you eat and the chicken that lays eggs aren't even the same breed at industrial scale.

Also, I know that many regulations, including USDA regulations, are a bit of a joke in the US, but bird flu is one thing they very much do not fuck around on. The loss of those 60 millions birds is a straight economic loss that's non-recoverable for those egg producers.

None of this disproves the point that the parent poster is making. 60MM = 2.5 daily culls. that's not a lot, in context.

Now, if you had different numbers, that would be a thing worth discussing.

"Also, the chicken you eat and the chicken that lays eggs aren't even the same breed at industrial scale."

That, and the numbers from slaughters are chickens being slaughtered for food. Other cull counts are related to male chicks being culled in prepping for egg laying, which is also not relevant.

These are full adult flocks of active egg-layers being culled. It has SIGNIFICANT impact on egg production.

So there wasn't a monopoly 3 years ago?

I'm from Germany and in New York right now. Damn is everything expensive here. And everyone running around with a 10+$ Starbucks coffee all the time.

Edit: probably not a fair comparison though since I come from the countryside in Germany where everything's generally cheaper than in the cities.

May you please give some price comparisons for fairly similar items youll find in germany vs us (grocery or otherwise) - lets not talk about healthcare and bribing politicians :-)

Since I am "posting too fast (thanks @Dang), Ill post my replies in this edit:

@StuporGlue ;

>>"Yeah, almost all of those prices are lower than in the US....

I think a gallon of milk is about $4.99 or $5.99 (usually ~$1+ higher if we are picking 'organic' (which is a shady subject in-&-of itself)"

@SamHuk ;

>frakenstein of candy-floss, tiramisu, and ice-cream sundae <-- this sounds good except it being a 'morning coffee drink'

---

@QuaffaPint ;

What/where/how can we track "the cost of doing business" based on zipcodes etc. I find it really odd that california had a lot of oil refineries for gas vs mid-country-states, so proximity to gas (thus delivery) was cheaper - yet has the highest prices... because we have 45 million people in the state to grift off, so its not logistics that cause price hikes. But thats what they want you to believe.

-----

In France (but I think german prices are more or or less the same), a coffee at Starbucks is between 3€ to 4,90€. And it’s expensive for what it is. A good coffee at any random place is between 1,50€ to 3€ depending on the size. Those prices are service and all taxes included.

I can provide a data point for Belgium at least. Starbucks specifically is about equally expensive in EUR, it's about 6EUR. But, you don't frequently see people walking around with Starbucks in Belgium and they aren't on every corner (rarely see them, really).

That said, Rent alone is significantly different, where the rent alone in NY can be the entire monthly salary for someone in EU. (Basing myself on data from Toronto, but I gather that NY is more expensive to rent).

Not the person you're asking, but I just moved from Germany having lived in Berlin for two years. I noticed prices seem to vary quite a bit, even within the same supermarket chain and city, depending on the neighbourhood. I assume they run some kind of franchise model for most of the big chains. But you can get a rough idea of pricing below. Edeka would be a fairly standard chain (there are a bunch of supermarkets in Berlin from FrischeParadies on the ultra high end, to Aldi Nord and Netto on low end).

Edeka - https://e-center-knauer.edeka-shops.de/en/all-products/chill...

It’s funny, here the Edeka (actually a co-op, not a franchise) would be the most expensive after the organic store (Landwege), it’s even more expensive than REWE (part franchise, part chain) which a lot of people cry about being expensive.

Where are you located?

Coming from Ireland originally, now back here - I'd put Berlin Rewe on the level of Tesco (actually slightly lower, both in terms of quality and price) which is a mid range supermarket here. Edeka seems slightly lower quality / selection again.

The higher end large chain in Berlin would be Denn's and Bio Company. Which are both ludicrously expensive.

There didn't seem to be a mid-range fancy but affordable supermarket (like SuperValu or Dunnes Stores in Ireland).

Lübeck. Never been to the US, but our Rewes have a very wide range, which is a concept I like a lot, as for some products I'm fine with discounter quality, while I want more for others.

We also have 4 Rewe in our 2km² inner city ;)

Actually really like Rewe! Was a complement comparing it to Tesco. Their sausage and cheese selections, and various unhealthy pre-cooked frozen treats are fantastic.

Not op, but I'm in Berlin and a couple of days ago I went to buy some eggs and it was ten for 2.99EUR - 3.18USD.

I'm in a suburb of Cologne right now. Looking on PicNic, an online grocery delivery service I see:

Medium Eggs: €2.29 for a 10 pack (US$2.92/dozen) Whole HTT: (heat treated) box milk: €1.15/liter (US$4.46/gallon) Gala Apples: €2.35/kilo (US$1.09/pound) Unsalted Butter: €7.96/kg (US$3.69/pound)

I usually save a little bit by going to Aldi or another discount grocery, but this is very close to shelf price for the non-discount grocery stores.

For comparison, at my local (Oregon) non-fancy (Kroger) grocery:

- dozen large eggs, $2.89

- shelf stable box milk, $19.28 [0]

- regular milk, $3.29/gal

- gala apples, $1.99/lb

- unsalted butter, $4.29/lb

[0] Shelf stable milk is more of a specialty item here, not an everyday staple for most people. Evaporated milk is more common, still about $1.50/can (12 oz). I'm not familiar with the term HTT so maybe I'm misunderstanding. All our milk is pasteurized.

Yeah, almost all of those prices are lower than in the US....

I think a gallon of milk is about $4.99 or $5.99 (usually ~$1+ higher if we are picking 'organic' (which is a shady subject in-&-of itself)

> I find it really odd that california had a lot of oil refineries for gas vs mid-country-states, so proximity to gas (thus delivery) was cheaper - yet has the highest prices... because we have 45 million people in the state to grift off, so its not logistics that cause price hikes. But thats what they want you to believe.

California has a specific gasoline formulation that is different than every other state. That’s why gas costs more in CA, in addition to the state gasoline taxes.

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/gasoline

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Cost of living definitely varies in the US. New York being on the higher end.

I've never quite related to the appeal.

My pet (slightly tin-foil hat) theory is that the draws to this kind of behavior is:

A) It's a status symbol of being able to afford a frequent 9.80$ expenditure on something as basic as frappé (or 5 for a normal coffee).

B) The typical sugar content of drinks (that have sugar/syrups in them) from places like Starbucks is addictive, like how fast-food chains add excessive sugar and fat their products (yes, there is a relatively high amount of sugar in their bread).

I really enjoy the occasional nice coffee with a friend or two, but a 9.80$ Starbucks frappé? To me, they often taste and look like some frakenstein of candy-floss, tiramisu, and ice-cream sundae.

One thing I would like to have some data on is what are frequent Starbucks customers drinking? Are the frequent customers predominantly ordering the addictive items, or is there no correlation?

Wasn't there a movie where a coffee exec sardonically talks about plying customers with "legal addictive stimulants"?

Caffeine is addictive. There are a lot of caffeine addicts in the U.S. Starbucks sells a menu full of caffeine. That's why people buy from them.

Let’s think critically for a moment.

Coffee is cheap to brew at home and it’s usually at the office. You can even take caffeine pills if you wanted to liken it to narcotic addiction. You sure as hell don’t need to go to Starbucks to get your fix, which is the most expensive way to get coffee, so that can’t be the reason people buy from them.

Espresso isn't easy to get a home or the office. My pour over home setup makes great coffee, but I have to go to a coffee shop if I want an espresso.

You don't need espresso if you're addicted to caffeine, though.

Maybe you like espresso?

I'm not sure the logic applies. People may be addicted to caffeine, and willing to pay through the nose to get it in a form they like. If they suddenly become poor, they would probably drink instant coffee at home. But they're not.

It's similar to alcohol abuse. Many [0] people addicted to alcohol don't pick the cheapest option possible to get their fix, they go to pubs and bars with their friends if they can afford it.

[0]: I want to say "most people", but I can't find this statistics anywhere, and don't want to present my impressions as facts. So I'll stay on a safe side and just say "many people".

>Many [0] people addicted to alcohol don't pick the cheapest option possible to get their fix, they go to pubs and bars with their friends if they can afford it.

Are they "addicted" to alcohol or just to the social aspect? The way you describe it, it sounds like the latter.

Lacan and subsequently Zizek call it "Surplus Enjoyment"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P18UK5IMRDI

>plying customers with "legal addictive stimulants"?

> Caffeine is addictive. Starbucks sells a menu full of caffeine. That's why people buy from them.

Hey, your quote says "stimulants", plural, but you only mention one, caffeine.

Can someone put some sugar on this list? More addictive than cocaine-infused heroin with a methamphetaine sidecar.

And I hear some Starbucks products may contain sugar. Probably just a rumor.

Sugar is not that addictive. I’ve gone from eating lots of consistent sugar to eating meat and vegetables for weeks before. I was not balled crying from my withdrawals.

Yes the exchange rate is not in your favor right now. I spent time in Germany 12 years ago and it was so expensive for me as it was around $1.50/Euro. Recent trips have been nice and cheap. I'm sure it will swing back eventually.

New York is always expensive though.

A Starbucks coffee is not $10. A large, handmade dessert like a Frappuccino is $10. A basic cup of coffee is about $3.

Sorry to jump on you but people frequently post complaints about Starbucks coffee being super expensive but then using the price of the most expensive item on their menu that is not a normal coffee.

My observation is that far, far less than half of people at starbucks order "normal coffee"

Even if more than half of people are ordering lattes, they're still not $10 a cup.

A Venti (large) flavored latte is $6.15 with tax at my local store in Florida (just checked). Prices in NY are usually a bit higher. Wouldn't be surprised to see it for $7+ there. I agree it's probably not most people with $10 coffees, but given the choices in NY, if it is truly a Starbucks cup, the person is likely not going there for a basic $3 coffee (which is $3.16 with tax here, and probably $4 in NYC).

Apparently a Starbucks Venti is 20 ounces, which is massive. I understand American taste is quite different to the rest of the world, but I struggle to call a 20 fl oz drink "a normal coffee".

And that’s not even mostly coffee. It’s milk and sugar, with a little bit of coffee to flavor it.

FWIW the 16oz ‘grande’ is what most people would consider normal. A 12oz drink is usually viewed as small.

How many people are getting the basic cup of coffee though? Usually when I go the people ahead of me are getting something fancier than a drip coffee. Not necessarily a $10 Frappuccino but a $7 latte with oat milk.

The point is that dinging Starbucks for having $10 coffee is disingenuous. I usually order a 16oz drip coffee and it is about $3. I see other people ordering that. People are free to order massive dessert drinks but you should not be surprised if those are more expensive than a cup of coffee.

I went to the Starbucks Reserve in NYC and got a coffee thinking it’d be a regular drip and it ended up being $8-$9

> Starbucks Reserve

For anyone not familiar, Startbucks Reserve is not the same as standard Starbucks. Instead, it's the company's attempt to compete in the high-end coffee market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks_Reserve

https://www.starbucksreserve.com/

In the late 70s/early 80s - my grandmother (from seattle, prominent family) received a letter asking for an investment in a company for 10%.

She threw the letter away saying "nobody's ever going to drink that much coffee.

The letter was from Starbucks.

Sad investment face.

> A basic cup of coffee is about $3.

Outside the anchor effect of comparing it to a $10 cup of fructose, $3 is an outrageous cost for a cup of coffee.

The anchoring effect is a cognitive bias whereby an individual's decisions are influenced by a particular reference point or 'anchor'. Both numeric and non-numeric anchoring have been reported in research. In numeric anchoring, once the value of the anchor is set, subsequent arguments, estimates, etc. made by an individual may change from what they would have otherwise been without the anchor. For example, an individual may be more likely to purchase a car if it is placed alongside a more expensive model (the anchor).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)

NYC is full of contrasts. Where I used to work in downtown Manhattan, there were 3 pizza places near the office, with prices ranging from $4-5 per slice in an upscale place with fancy pizza, to $0.99 for a reasonably tasty slice half a block away.

Same applies to most goods. You can get pretty cheap offerings if you know where to look; you can have expensive and fancy stuff if you are ready to afford it.

This is one of the unique and great things about NYC that is far less true in Paris, London, and other global cities: a variety of cheap, good food that is available nearly everywhere. The only other place I've been with similar options was Tokyo.

We raise chickens on non-GMO feed and collect over a dozen eggs per day. The eggs available at Walmart are utter garbage compared to those raised locally on good feed and pasture. There's no comparison.

Farm fresh egg yolks are the same orange color as the HN banner, while Walmart's eggs are pale imitations that were raised with copious antibiotics and literal shit in their feed. I would go so far as to say that their eggs help define the absolute bottom of this particular barrel.

I would be ashamed to be a producer for them, and it is upsetting to see their prices held up as some kind of standard. We could do better, but our metrics for success have been boiled down to little more than current clearance sale prices.

I started buying the really expensive pasture raised chicken eggs for ethical reasons and can't go back to normal eggs anymore. They taste so much better. I'm sure yours are even better.

Though the ethical choice is better in your case, I came to realize that chickens (as they exist for agriculture) are kind of strange abominations of what they came from, and they really do live bizarre lives of eating and pumping out eggs. As soon as they're spent they get turned into dog food or similar. Ethically it's better if they aren't trucked around and crammed in cages, but the end result is still servitude in which your body is used until it stops working the way people want it to, at which point you're disposed of like garbage.

In my mind I thought "If I care enough to reduce suffering to an arbitrary point, why not just eliminate it from my diet entirely? Why do I get to decide at which point the chickens suffer the correct amount?". Especially when the more ethical choice still involves the exploitation of the chicken, it seemed like the right choice to stop eating the food they make.

I don't miss eating eggs so it wasn't a hard choice to follow through on. I know some people depend on them far more than I did, or fewer foods are available to them. It's an interesting quandary though and I don't think my decision was the objectively perfect conclusion or anything – it's just worth considering over time.

If you get some backyard chickens you'll realize that 1. they don't need to suffer to produce an egg and 2. they can live a long damn time.

Certainly, I had backyard chickens for most of my childhood. I'm not sure the relationship makes sense for me is all. Within a strictly ethical context, it seems to me that abstinence from eating chickens or eggs is the only answer yielding the most completely satisfying results.

It's a very subjective thing though. I've had people argue that simply having the chickens offers them a chance to live whereas if everyone thought like I did, all the chickens would die. I don't agree with the "benevolent master" kind of rhetoric and it shifts the analysis of the problem, but it demonstrates the breadth of perspective on the matter quite well.

At that lengths would there be any reason to have a pet? A cat, perhaps?

Now imagine said cat lays eggs ...

Haha, it's a great question. My conclusion at this point is that caring for a rescue makes sense. I wouldn't buy an animal from a breeder. I don't have pets, but I do like the idea of a rescue in which the benefits are more evidently mutual, and the relationship isn't initiated like a purchase.

You're comparing a good life with bad death.

I don't see why you think so, but I'm interested in understanding better. I might explained myself poorly and infer the meaning of my words differently than you do without prior understanding. Or you're right and I'm not realizing how I'm doing this. I don't mean to make a comparison between a good life and a bad death, though.

I am fine with a chicken living in a servitude that involves walking around in nature, getting fed as much as they want, having shelter and warmth at night, having plenty of social interactions, having human caretakers watching them every day, and getting a quick painless death after a few years.

I agree, ideally we wouldn't kill animals for the convenience and satisfaction of our diet. However, I fully recognize the selfishness and lack of empathy I am demonstrating. I think the limited amount of energy and effort I have in my life is much better placed on things I care about more than a chicken getting killed after a few years when its natural life span would be closer to 10 or 20 years. Said in another way, I think my time spent thinking about other endeavors in my life is more valuable than another 7-17 years of several chickens' life.

If I believed chickens had a greater sense of sentience, self awareness, and experienced life much at all beyond mindless eating and shitting, I wouldn't eat them. This is why I don't eat beef/pork/mammals.

> I think my time spent thinking about other endeavors in my life is more valuable than another 7-17 years of several chickens' life.

I suppose I could argue that you don't even need to spend time thinking about it; you can just stop eating chickens. You aren't faced with a challenge here because the solution is clear and freely available.

> If I believed chickens had a greater sense of sentience, self awareness, and experienced life much at all beyond...

The more I learn about birds the more I think they're far more sentient and aware than we give them credit. Some certainly seem to possess more mental acuity than others, but I no longer believe chickens are vacant little meat vehicles.

One thing to consider is that the chickens you're familiar with have been raised in conditions which are conducive to them appearing fairly stupid. They're trained to expect very regular conditions, and are never given a chance to exercise their brains in order to become sharper or display more awareness.

If you met humans who lived a similarly deprived life, I suspect they would also appear useless and stupid.

We've also bred chickens to be a certain way, and that aspect of it is a bit unsettling to me. If we've in fact created a creature which is that stupid and vacant so we can consume it without feeling bad, there's something disturbing about that picture. It's like removing the soul from something so you can abuse it freely. In order to spare our conscience we effectively had to "kill" an entire lineage of living things. We know that the bird chickens originated from is not a grain-pecking zombie, so... What have we really done, and why? Is that something we should perpetuate? I find it quite a disturbing concept if it were to be true, though I do doubt that chickens truly are so mentally dull that their living or dying is irrelevant.

> I am fine with a chicken living in a servitude that involves walking around in nature, getting fed as much as they want, having shelter and warmth at night, having plenty of social interactions, having human caretakers watching them every day, and getting a quick painless death after a few years.

One interesting thing to me here is: If you think it's okay to kill the chicken eventually, why does it matter if its life prior was good or not? Where do you draw these lines and why? If you care about the chicken a _bit_, why do you, and why don't you _more_? What qualities would a chicken need to possess in order for you to decide it's not okay to eat it?

Upon asking myself this I realized I didn't have good answers. I prefer witnessing chickens being alive over having them on my plate to enjoy for a fleeting moment.

I'm not arguing at all; most people disagree, so I realize I'm probably wrong. It's very much a "feels"-based discussion.

I read somewhere that you can manipulate the yolk color through different types of feed, but I'm not sure if that's true or not. I used to raise a bunch of hens and yeah... nothing beats eggs from healthy ones. I "did" however get sick of eggs for a while... they're almost too productive! I finally built a network of neighbors who were gladly willing to take them off my hands.

That is 100% the determining factor in yolk color. It comes down to carotenoid content of feed.

Also, in reference to the original comment, there is no difference between GMO and non-GMO feed either.

Some may claim that high carotenoid feed results in more nutritious eggs. That's debatable. Even super-cheap eggs are packed with nutrients. It's an egg, after all. However, the nutritional difference in conventional eggs vs backyard eggs is practically irrelevant. The differential nutrient contents are not significant and come in higher quantities in other foods that we all have cheap access to.

The differential nutrient contents are not significant and come in higher quantities in other foods that we all have cheap access to.

That's a fact that gets so often overlooked. Some food you eat just because you want a particular nutrient.

Anyway, there's a huge difference in taste. We had chickens when I was a child and later we bought from others that also fed weed to the chickens.

Yep -- You can change the feed to change the yolk. These are the "standard" colors: https://www.dsm.com/anh/products-and-services/tools/yolkfan....

Serious Eats did a taste test between home grown and store bought eggs. They found that if they added food coloring to the store bought eggs to make the color more orange like the home grown eggs, that taste testers were just as likely to prefer the store bought.

It's not just about the taste is it? I'd eat junk all day, if I only cared for the taste. Different color (without food coloring) signals different nutrients: https://www.justchartit.com/egg-yolk-color-chart/

Is there any macronutrient differences, though? And i'll be honest every egg I've every tasted has just tasted like egg.

The main differences that I noticed was the thickness (strength) of the shell, and that you can change the taste somewhat by modifying the feed.

Do you scramble the eggs mostly? I find I notice the most specific things about eggs when I leave the white and yolk separate. Scrambled eggs can be different too but it's harder to notice IMO.

What happens to the chicken system when you go on vacation?

Edit: @voakbasda: thank you for the prompt and courteous reply, good info :)

I have not taken a vacation away from my farm in over ten years. I have had no interest in doing so, because I have everything that I want here.

But chickens? You can load up a feeder and provide ample water that would last for many days without supervision.

Isn't yolk color mostly related to the amount of carotenoids in it? I regularly see yolks of all colors in grocery store eggs, and they don't taste any different.

Now you've given me something to ponder on the entire day -- why do the Walmarts within 10 miles of me have different prices? Some at $3.23 and others at $2.42. A 28% difference. Do other products have this same price difference? Are some stores consistently priced lower and should I shop at those instead of the one I go to?

Definitely other products at Walmart vary this way, I notice it as a frequent traveler across the US, I think practically all SKUs are fair game. Dehydrated camping meals are one thing I frequently take advantage of when I'm traveling and can grab them for lower price, sometimes up to 50% lower than my 'home' Walmarts.

Interesting to ponder where Bentonville area stores fall on this continuum. (Headquarters of Walmart in a small town in Arkansas) Anyone have anecdata?

I don't think it's specific to walmart, I've noticed that prices in supermarkets (Target, Walmart, etc.) located in lower priced neighborhoods tend to be lower than those in higher priced neighborhoods. The same item, same brand, same everything, but price difference can be from 10-30% different, sometimes more.

Yeah, I think it's tied to the costs of running a particular store, and maybe other factors, like local competition. Higher property taxes will generally mean more markup.

Stores have to make their money to survive, and a grocery store (the side of Walmart we're interested in here) has to deal with nationally advertised prices on a huge portion of their product base, so they adjust prices on the other side to compensate.

What has been pissing me off of late is that Walmart and Target will have shelf prices that are higher than online-for-in-store-pickup. You can get them to price match it but @#$@# annoying.

You can also do this with fast food restaurants. A great example near me is a Taco Bell that doesn't have a drive through but is surrounded by a bunch of apartments where the nearby locations that do have drive up windows are cheaper.

I would be curious to know the wealth gap between those two areas, but my gut would assume the more expensive eggs are at the poorer Walmart. Captive audience with less options. It's expensive to be poor. (Like that Taco Bell example)

With the obsession over egg prices you’d think everyone is eating two dozen per day or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index

Lots of things have eggs as an ingredient, from breakfasts, to breads, pastries, ramens and pastas.

I doubt this is the main explanation, because liquid egg product prices don't necessarily track whole egg prices. I don't know where to look up the current prices for "breaker eggs", but the supply chains are remarkably bifurcated, and even if e.g. the same bird flu outbreak affected both, the effects might evolve differently across time and location.

30 pound pail of eggs is $82. https://www.webstaurantstore.com/frozen-whole-liquid-eggs-30...

But no idea what they used to be - maybe somewhere someone has printed catalogs.

According to the Wayback Machine[0] in 2022-10-09, the price was $126.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221009125424/https://www.webst...

I go through ~18 eggs/week. I already bought better eggs though, so the price increases have not been as noticeable.

Something I will notice is when my local grocery stops selling chicken breasts for $1.99/pound. I'm surprised they haven't upped the price every time I'm in there.

I assume the price is low because they are culling herds

It's been $1.99 for years. It's my bellweather for price increases.

You cannot sell culled chickens as food.

Yea seriously. The price increase is inconvenient, but hardly relevant in terms of calories/$.

I eat 5-6 eggs each morning with some potatoes (my blood work is great btw, so take it easy armchair dietitians). Dietary cholesterol isn't what most people think. I digress.

But that means my at-home breakfast went from:

(5 eggs * $0.2) + (1 red potato * $0.20) = $1.20

(5 eggs * $0.5) + (1 red potato * $0.20 = $2.70

I'll survive.

Your strange breakfast has increased in price by 150%. If this were happening across meals, that would mean that a family who formerly spent $400 a month on groceries is now spending $1000 a month on groceries.

edit: assuming a total 20% tax rate and a $15 minimum wage, that $600 represents 50 additional hours of work a month.

It's a very normal breakfast for athletes. But your example isn't our current reality so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

To borrow a saying from the investment world - It's easy to double a small number.

I'm not defending the price hike. I'm just pointing out that it's a silly thing to get hung up on and most are not considering that eggs have been, and still are, a caloric and protein dense staple of healthy diets. We take that for granted.

Eggs aren't the only grocery item that has risen in price. The reason I used your breakfast as an example is because you used it as an example. I assume that you were using it as an example of an extremely egg-heavy breakfast, and pointing out that the price difference is insignificant to you.

I responded by pointing out that if (ideal, fantasy) minimum-wage families ate like you, they would have to work 50 more hours a month in order to deal with the price increase. My implication is that 50 hours of work a month is significant. Salary calculations are usually made with an assumption of 2000 hours a year, and that increase in egg prices of families who had your diet would represent 600 of those hours.

I'm disagreeing that the doubling or tripling of the prices of basic foodstuffs such as eggs, flour, milk etc. is a silly thing to get hung up on. Your argument seems to be that eggs are so good, they'd be a bargain at any price?

> If this were happening across meals,

Yeah, it would be different if the situation was different.

I was replying to a comment about a 6-egg breakfast. You're welcome to reduce my 600 hour/year calculation to a 200 hour/year calculation (assuming a three-meal day of an entirely normal family of runners), because I explained exactly what I was doing in a way that you completely understood.

> I was replying to a comment about a 6-egg breakfast.

And that person is already in the upper extreme of most affected.

For you to make a scenario where that is multiplied even further goes beyond anything realistic.

It was clear what you were doing, but that doesn't make it reasonable.

Your other comment says "I'm disagreeing that the doubling or tripling of the prices of basic foodstuffs such as eggs, flour, milk etc. is a silly thing to get hung up on." but you're really going about arguing that in a bad way.

If 5% of your diet triples in price, that's a notable setback, but building up the 5% into a much bigger percent for the sake of argument doesn't make a very convincing one.

There is a huge difference between one foodstuff going up at a time versus all of them, especially if it's temporary. I'm much more worried about the price of every food that isn't eggs. If you gave me a choice between cutting eggs 3x or cutting everything else 10%, I think I'd do the latter.

How do you cook the potato ? Always interested in alternative (for me) breakfasts !

Dice ~1lb of red potatoes (for potassium)

Coat in olive oil. Season with salt, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika.

Spread on oven pan. Bake at 420F for 20-22min until edges brown (I'm at >5000' elevation btw)

Place in container and store in fridge.

In the morning in sautee to heat them before adding scrambled egg. You can top with cheese and scallions but I don't.

Amount of potatoes is determined by past 24hrs and next 24hrs of energy expenditure. Rest days are ~50g, training days between 100-150g

cheers ! I make this spice mixture for fries and eggs, it might interest you:

  2 parts salt
  1 part sweet paprika
  1 part garlic powder
  dash of pepper or mustard powder
  dash of citric acid powder for the extra kick

That sounds good, I'll try it out. Thanks!

Potato prices have gone up substantially as well. Grocery stores are advertising $1 a pound as a sale price

You’re spending $500/year more on breakfast. That’s nothing to sneeze at, especially for people on tight budgets

Are you not? When I was a lad I ate four dozen eggs every morning to help me get large. And now that I'm grown I eat five dozen eggs (so I'm roughly the size of a barn).

A barn? Should be a barge.

If you have a family then there's a good chance you go through them really fast. Imagine making 2-egg omelets for a family of 4. That's 8 eggs right there. Then you bake something with the kids in the afternoon and that's 8 eggs. Then you decide to make pasta for a change and that's 8 more eggs. It's not that difficult to go through a lot of eggs and why places like Costco sell eggs in 2-dozen quantities as well.

It's not difficult to go through 4 dozen a week and at $5 more per dozen that's $20/week and $80/month more for eggs. That starts to hit a lot of people's budgets.

I've literally just not purchased a single egg since this started. I'll live. Turns out one can go a substantially long time without eating a very specific single food item.

Companies that bulk buy eggs to put into their own products don't seem to be getting as gouged as the normal consumer, so it hasn't affected my grocery shopping much.

In fact I've benefited quite a bit from this. Chicken is pretty cheap right now.

As a protein they are a unique combination of nutritious, consistent, versatile, easy to cook, and a long refrigerated shelf life.

The fact that you replaced them in your diet doesn't make them easy to replace in all diets.

I also have stopped buying eggs, but everything you said is correct. Maybe they are still underpriced? I wonder how high the price will go before the average American will buy fewer of them.

I don't live in the US and my procrastination muscle hasn't developed enough yet to pretend to care about this instead of wrapping up my work.

But, Bickle Knob n. Elkins, a.k.a. ♫The House of the Cheapest Egg in America♫ is such a beautiful area. Just check it on DDG images on Google. It reminds me of the mountains in southern Poland where I grew up.

I highly recommend using the map as an excuse to spend some time on virtual tourism, akin to hitting "random" on Wikipedia.

I guess I am procrastinating after all.

Nice site!

It might be good to note that these are probably the absolute worst eggs you can buy, so this represents the bottom of the barrel in terms of prices.

I suspect some of the data may be incorrect. Hard to believe that a Walmart in southern Oregon is selling those eggs for $5/dozen when you can easily get good eggs for that price elsewhere.

I'm happy to pay twice as much for eggs that I know are from healthy chickens humanely raised (pasture raised).

Like I said to my family members when this topic came up the other day. "Egg prices are barely a blip compared to paying an extra 2 months rent per year for no reason"

If investigating collusion...I suggest starting with real estate.

Everything has gone up in price. Egg alone may be barely a blip, but people don't buy one dozen eggs per week to sustain themselves on. They buy a few bags of groceries, which have doubled (or more) in price in the last year where I live - that might be a few hundred per month extra.

>They buy a few bags of groceries, which have doubled (or more) in price in the last year where I live - that might be a few hundred per month extra.

That's entirely inconsistent with government data[1], which only report a 22% rise since pre-pandemic.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUFDSL

We have pet chickens and get a half dozen a day even now in the dead of winter. We got eggs coming out our ears. We give them freely to friends and neighbors, but there's no way for us to share our bounty any further, really. We can go to a flea market or sit beside the road with a sign "Eggs $3/dz" but few people want to buy eggs in such a context.

There's a local Farmer's Co-Op, in theory they could pay people for eggs brought in and sell them to the public and that might make economic sense; but i can't imagine the liabilities and legal hurdles actually making something likethat happen would incur. Significant im sure.

I mostly buy my eggs from local farms at the farmers market for ~$10. I'm in the Bay area so nothing is cheap. Price have gone up lately as many of the farmers have had to cull based on bird flu.

This is a bit more than I'd like to pay, but its not going to break the bank. I'm happy to have some eggs that taste good and I know come from birds that aren't tortured.

Its odd to me that people are totally willing to spend $60k on a car but whine about eggs that costs more than $0.50. To each their own.

If you’re buying 1dozen eggs per week (totally normal for many people), going from $2/dozen to $6/dozen is $200 a year you just lost on just one staple

This is cool! Whenever I see these kinds of apps though, I wonder where do you get the data? Is there a public API for all the grocery products in the US or something?

It is for Walmarts only per the info page. There must be a way to scrape that from their online grocery shopping website even without an api.

Naive as I am (& not living in the US), I've always thought these supermarket chains have uniform pricing and that's one reason why they're so popular.

Anything produce related is going to fluctuate based on location. This is because most produce is bought within some distance of the store (ex: 100 miles).

> This is because most produce is bought within some distance of the store (ex: 100 miles).

Living in Canada, this is rarely the case (probably because it's too cold here to grow... most things.) Here in Vancouver, our strawberries comes up the coast from California; our lettuce tends to come all the way from Mexico; etc.

You might be surprised how many things are actually local; vegetables and fruits are the most likely to be shipped long distances (and other things that keep well like potatoes, etc).

But milk and dairy and eggs are often packaged relatively close; but you might not know it unless you know how to read the packaging codes.

I think this is not accurate for walmart specifically. My local hannaford will buy potatoes from my home town up north, but Walmart doesn't, and neither does Five Guys, the bastards!

Why would uniform pricing make a difference to anyone? Most people go to one or two stores.

I would be shocked if Walmart hasn't done the research to determine how high they can raise prices in a given area before people venture further out or to competitors. I'd be willing to bet affluence of area and distance to alternatives are significant factors in the pricing algorithm.

This is just one brand of eggs from one store (see info pop out). Since that store has local online ordering that matches store price, you could probably scrape it as a good practice exercise in building scrapers.

Are people eating so many eggs that a few dollars difference per dozen is breaking the bank? If you eat 2 eggs a day, an extra $3 per dozen is $15/mo

Maybe it's possible to extrapolate the price difference to the entire store? I know it's a single data point, but maybe it reveals cheaper stores nearby than the ones you're currently shopping.

The variability here inside of single cities (look at Norfolk, VA for example - and remember this is just Walmart, not Walmart vs high-end grocery etc) is really highlighting to me that we need something to upset grocery delivery to either a) make it easier to order specific items from different locations with the best price or b) induce more perfect price competition between neighboring grocery retailers

Alternately: some neighborhoods are less price sensitive and there’s not really a problem.

The positive flip side is that the “low” prices in a given region are probably lower than they would be if the stores had more efficient competition, and that’s to the benefit of people who are price sensitive.

Eggs in my neighborhood went from $2.50/dozen to $4/dozen. I didn't even notice because that is still insanely cheap for how much food is in a dozen eggs, and I don't actually use them very often.

Finding out that a different grocery story has them for a little less money would not change my shopping habits.

Perhaps not, but if you ordered your groceries online and all it took was a single click to get your eggs for $2.50 instead of $4.00, I wager you would.

Ideally you don't even have to click, there is just the option of a click, which in and of itself would create the competitive environment needed to equilibrate the prices

Maybe, but I don't really like grocery delivery.

It's expensive, and it will only get worse as all these gig economy companies transition from growing their user base to making a profit.

It's already been happening with services like Grubhub. The delivery fees haven't changed much, but most restaurants by me charge 20-30% extra when you order through one of these apps instead of in store. This is to make up for the huge cut Grubhub takes. Consequently I order a lot less delivery than I did 2 years ago.

Yeah I'm thinking two or three steps ahead so you have to have a little vision here. There are other intermediate problems to solve as you point out. On your dislike of grocery delivery, think about what you might have said about touchscreens back in the 90s - and don't come at me with some predictable contrarian "but I hate touchscreens in cars" please :)

The problem with touchscreens in the '90s is that the technology wasn't good enough yet.

"Gig economy" technology is plenty mature at this point. The quality of the technical implementation is not my concern. It is the amount of cost it adds, and the fact that I think most current business models are not sustainable.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Right now I'm weary of growing overly attached to any deal that seems "too good to be true" without a good understanding of how it will become sustainable once they stop lighting VC money on fire. The long-term impact of these things can be bad even if they are cheaper or more convenient in the short term (i.e. Walmart running new stores at a loss to drive out local competitors)

This is a good take. I take it you understand that there is deadweight loss in the system you describe, though

My wife and I started a vegan diet 6mo ago and while there was a transition period, it wasn't nearly as difficult as I expected.

If you're feeling the egg prices I'd encourage you to find ways to limit or remove eggs from your diet. It's easier than you think! Egg replacers work wonders in baked goods and a tofu scramble is similar to scrambled eggs.

If you think eggs are expensive, tofu scramble is easily 5x the cost per gram of scrambled eggs!

Tofu scramble might be a little more expensive than egg-based version but 5x seems an exaggerated figure to me.

A 14oz package of tofu is probably the equivalent of 4 eggs and costs $2-3. So maybe 1.5x the cost of egg-based version. (Here's a great basic recipe https://www.budgetbytes.com/vegetable-tofu-scramble/)

Also, if you examine your diet you will probably find that you don't need to replace eggs with tofu 1:1. There are plenty of other ways to get protein (e.g. lentils, nutritional yeast, even whole wheat bread has protein).

> A 14oz package of tofu is probably the equivalent of 4 eggs and costs $2-3. So maybe 1.5x the cost of egg-based version.

I'm paying $2.89 for a dozen eggs, and from what I can tell that's pretty typical across the US. So it's more like 4x.

But, I'm in no danger of going vegan, so that's about all I have to say :).

Thanks for the tip! I've never heard of this vegan thing before. Will have to check it out.

Related ongoing thread:

Record-Breaking Egg Profits Prompt Accusation of Price Gouging - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34898074 - Feb 2023 (104 comments)

If this site made sure to include store addresses, it might actually drive egg prices down. I buy my coffee and popcorn at a different store from where I buy the rest of my groceries, I could certainly do that for eggs when they're at $4/doz.

In my area, they look to be only using Walmart stores. There are so many better options around here, I never shop for groceries at Walmart unless I only need one or two things and I'm already there for something else.

From the info popup: "This website tracks the price of "12 Great Value Large White Eggs" at Walmart locations across the U.S."

The cheapest eggs on vons.com are $5.99 in Los Angeles. This is a cool data visualization but the closest data point it has for LA is Rosemead and it says they're $2.76.

Vons is generally one if the higher end grocery stores. It's not all that surprising to me that Walmart would have eggs at half the price. I don't live in SoCal, so I can't say whether it's accurate, but the number of people I hear complaining about egg prices around me while I can still get eggs at $2.89/dozen at my local Safeway has left me deeply confused about this whole event.

Portions of the country had REALLY cheap eggs. Before Covid hit, the local stores around here got into a fight with one of the convenience stores and kept dropping prices; it bottomed out somewhere around 29 cents a dozen (limit 5 dozen).

Now they're $4 minimum; normal "not insane sale" price before was $1.

But the thought process and critical thinking on such subjects is important, but agreed.

This is neat

Go figure the cheapest eggs in the country are in Ohio though lol

Yes, $1.82 in the three Ohio Walmarts surrounding East Palestine

Sad to say but understandable.

This data is wildly inaccurate. Spot checking actual prices in the Walmart app in my neighborhood shows 130% swings in price between locations with the cheaper location prices just plain wrong. The actual prices are roughly the same for a dozen Great Value eggs of varying sizes (large, jumbo, etc) and the cheaper prices on Eggspensive don’t exist. In fact they’re lower than the price for 6 eggs at all the stores I checked.

OT: quite a few mentions of Walmart in the comments, so, speaking of Walmart, is search in purchase history working for any of you?

For me for at least the last month or two it reports no items found, unless I search for something that I purchased the one time I used delivery, which was in November 2020.

For purchases done in store with checkout via the app those still show up in purchase history, but search can't find anything in them.

Looks like Washington, DC, St. Louis, and the area to the east of San Francisco are "red zones" for high egg prices for some reason.

I wonder if those regions have some kind of regulations that limit supply

It’s a really neat visualization, but you can’t take the data to mean much. It’s only showing the price of store brand eggs at Wal-mart, and each store/region would have a pricing strategy that accounts for a ton of factors beyond supply cost (with or without regulation).

To know if eggs in general are more or less expensive in any region, or if people spend more/less on them, etc you’d need much more sophisticated data than one might compile for a hobby project like this.

California has a new law about humane conditions for chickens that has closed many egg producers.

Are you sure?

I'm reminded of the headlines a few years ago about how bacon would be harder to come by and more expensive in California due to new regulations. That didn't happen. When I looked into it, it seemed like meat producers were the sole source of the news articles, which reported it as indisputable fact.

What's interesting is that the red zone is literally a line following the south of the San Pablo and Suisun Bays. There are not high prices in the part of the bay area around San Jose or in in Southern California. If it was really about statewide regulations you'd expect the whole state to be a red zone and it isn't. Instead I'd be looking for some bottleneck which affects that area, which I must admit I don't have a good mental picture of.

> There are not high prices in the part of the bay area around San Jose or in in Southern California

I haven't been paying close attention but I haven't seen big price fluctuations in San Francisco. Several weeks ago there were "limit 1 per customer" signs on egg cartons but that's about it. I volunteer at a food pantry in SF and we were giving out free eggs in that peak shortage time, which I think has passed; we often had extras when finished, though they are normally a popular item.

If you're talking about the ban on battery cages my understanding is that the major producers had already implemented that before the law was passed.

From what I hear (WSJ editorial), some of the smaller producers closed down instead.

Either way, it's more expensive to produce this way.

Really interesting how different Walmarts nearby by in Kansas vary by 2x, from some of the lowest prices in the country to some of the highest.

The low prices likely are not real

At my local Safeway, low-end eggs have gone up proportionally less than high quality eggs. Cheapest went from $1.50 to $2.50. Pasture raised hen eggs went from $4/dozen to $8.50/dozen in the last year.

Bummer, because the low-quality ones taste... not great, and they have weak yolks.

I find it kind of strange that $5 for a dozen eggs is considered expensive. I'm from Austria and more used to 2.90€ for half a dozen freerange eggs.

How is it possible to pay less than $2 for a dozen eggs without treating the chicken like absolute shit?

it would depend on how you feed and handle them, but you can throw some chickens in your backyard and have them eat food scraps for nearly nothing at all

> without treating the chicken like absolute shit?

I think you answered your own question. These are not organic, free range. They are kept in shoebox size pens and have horrible lives.

it makes me a little sad that the dots on the map are not egg shaped.

Eggspensive ... nice, after ChatGPT, now they made eggs think. But grammar not eggsactly right, adjective should be before noun.

Weird, it looks like Massachusetts is the only state where every store has the same price. I wonder why MA is special in this regard.

An eggcitedly quick eggxamination of this eggemplary eggxample of web design made me, no eggaggeration, eggtremely egghausted.

Puns are truly your oeuvre.

Cons always frustrated about gas prices and who to blame for them, now libs also have some metric to obsess about!

That’s crazy. Just across the border in Canada, we are currently paying $2.21/dozen (converted to USD).

Don't you think this whole thing is a bit eggsaggerative? Couldn't resist...

I'll have you know in Mexico my eggs are still $1.50 or less a dozen

I'm starting to feel like the cartel is more competent that our (US) gov.

Decouple from the geographical component and buy them on the internet.

Are we allowed to ask about the fires destroying egg farms?

Funny how near east palestine, eggs are the cheapest

100% of people who confuse correlation and causation die. Just sayin’

This is great. As a European, I would have thought the Southern USA would be the poorest states, so the cheapest. But it looks like the Midwest actually has the cheapest eggs?

Due to its size, the US has less centralization than most European countries so the proximity of production could affect prices. If you look at this image of US egg production in 2016, it seems to roughly match up with the image on the Eggspensive site: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hans-Windhorst/publicat...

That could be because the Midwest has one of the biggest agriculture industries in the world, so eggs have less distance to travel

It's more likely to be related to proximity to the source (farms), which in my estimation are generally located in the areas with the most green on that map.

A visualization that seems like a Walmart ad.

I wish it were more colorblind friendly. ~8% of males are colorblind. I’m one of them. The colors in the middle of the scale are hard to make out.

would love to see maps like this for T item

love it, would love to see this for T item

Apparently, there are no egg retailers other than Walmart.

So many puns...

Eggcellent!

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