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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

You helped me move on with my day, much appreciated

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.

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