Eggs US – Price – Chart | Hacker News Reader

Eggs US – Price – Chart

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643 pointsthrowaway5752769 comments

Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here. While more expensive than eggs from large producers in normal times, they are now often cheaper.

This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.

This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened.

Totally agree with this. After selling my last company (iCracked W12) I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables. I've always wanted to build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture and we decided to start with chickens. I have been raising chickens for 15 years and automating my coops with Arduino's, automatic doors, cameras for computer vision, etc.

We spent 2 years building and designing a AI / smart coop and it's been a fascinating company to be able to build. We've trained our computer vision model on around 25 million videos and have gotten extremely good at doing specific predator detection, egg alerts, remote health monitoring, specific chickens in a coop and behaviors etc. We're at the point now where we can say, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons outside your coop, the automatic door is shut, all 6 chickens are safe, and you have 10 eggs that can be collected". Super fun project and would love y'alls feedback. If you're interested in seeing what we're doing we're at www.TheSmartCoop.com

Actually the inconvenient truth is that it's not.

Free range birds are able to interact and spread the disease more easily than the caged birds which can be quarantined. At least in my location all the cage free inventory is totally wiped out.

Really raises the question - should vital infrastructure, like food production, be built in an attempt to maximize profit or resiliency? Have things swung too far in one direction?

The disease affects wild bird populations heavily and is just as transmissible to disparate flocks as it is larger flocks. Breeders tend to keep their flocks isolated, often for genetic reasons, and because they're their cash cows versus just cattle.

I generally agree with you about centralization and monocultures, just in this case I don't think it's really going to change things.

If all the birds are in a farm, would you have more or less inter species infection than if lots of people lived close to chickens?

What’s worse for the community, eggs from factories going way up in price due to supply shocks, or rapid and pervasive infection in the community?

Profit of course! And only short term profit! Don’t want any of you eggheads trying to constrain profit to the goal of not killing all our customers!

I highly doubt that the farmer down the street from me is testing for avian flu.

Their eggs are fantastic, though!

> This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened.

But muh efficiency!

On top of that, large operations tend to be hell on earth from an animal welfare perspective. The air alone is toxic and hard to breathe because there's so much avian poop everywhere that is constantly decomposing.

Yes. Vital Farm eggs. Been $8 a dozen for a long time. No change in price.

What we're seeing are the consequences of factory farming and not treating animals like the living beings they are.

I've been paying almost $11 for them.

yep. been a long time coming. it's unfortunate that when it favors them this is a talking point for the maga folks... but when it hurts them they are nowhere to be found.

If I avoid name brand stuff, my prices generally aren't bad. Like you said, the local eggs have been stable.

Locally sourced chicken also is reasonably priced and often on sale. There was BOGO (mix and match) last week so I got a whole chicken and a 2lb pack of breasts for $12 total. Both beautiful quality. With a bunch of minor cheap produce, herbs, and pasta..that's chicken soup + a chicken one pot meal that'll last us all week. Sometimes those whole chickens are on sale for 99c/lb!

That is likely to change. Why should they sell a superior product for less?

Are small local farms able to keep producing as normal because the birds aren’t getting bird flu or because they’re not testing/killing them?

Bird flu has 95% lethality in chickens and takes ~48 hours to kill. It's not like they can get away with ignoring it. Testing happens when you wake up and half your birds are already dead.

That said OP is asserting local costs haven't changed without evidence. Even if that were true (and I don't think it is- local farms are also being hit hard eg duck farming in NY) it probably speaks far more to small operations having a harder time changing their prices. Or the cheap eggs are just places who haven't been hit yet.

The local farms here at least are being really cautious about testing and isolation. Many of them sell their eggs to the local grocery stores, so they are bound to the same standards as other eggs.

I don’t see what benefit they would gain by not testing, anyway: if their flock is infected and a significant portion of the birds die, they are going to lose revenue the same way a massive egg producer would. If anything, I’d imagine them to want to be more cautious, since they have fewer eggs in their basket as it were (fewer total chickens).

here is a recent news story about exactly this: https://www.mynbc5.com/article/vt-farm-takes-steps-to-preven...

Depends on where you're at. I mentioned in my last comment that bird flu is killing snow geese nesting near me. It's also infecting crows. The snow geese are not likely to interact with backyard chickens but the crows absolutely will.

Smaller flocks, so the damage of an outbreak is contained

> they are now often cheaper...increase the resilience of the system as a whole

cheaper and resilience are not proportional here. in fact, cheaper is proportional to efficient, which large producers are better at (apart from questions of healthiness, etc). i can't argue against resilience though, although that comes at a cost. speaking as a backyard-chicken-raiser of some years.

"Cheaper" varies by the costs of the various inputs. A local chicken farmer which sells to a local market has, aside from the costs of the land, chickens, feed, and labor, the costs of putting the eggs in a truck and driving the truck to the market. Larger distributors have the cost of collecting the eggs, driving them to a warehouse, storing them, potentially repeating that while optimizing inventory and locality, and then driving them to the market. The cost of gas, labor, electricity, and a variety of other factors can dramatically swing the cost calculations. Combined with the noted lack of resiliency in the system - the multiple additional logistical steps, the multiple points of failure in the system, the larger blast radius of those failures - and the "larger is more efficient is cheaper" calculus isn't quite as cut and dry, as we've seen over the last couple years.

Sorry I’m not sure I follow your point. I’m saying that given the current situation with bird flu, the local eggs are often less expensive at my grocery store.

I’m not saying that they are less expensive to produce or that they will remain less expensive at the store during normal times. However, paying the extra costs during normal times means those farms stay in business, which means I can still get eggs for the same price right now as I can in normal times.

What I find weird is people’s aversion to buying the organic and local eggs. They had them for half the price as the factory farm eggs yet people weren’t touching them.

I think it's largely a matter of routine. People have been buying the same eggs for years; switching is perceived as a risk by our monkey brains.

A lot of local eggs here will have slightly orange yolks and my family just won't do it, not even in cornbread.

I’ve always bought the most expensive pasture raised free range cage free eggs at Whole Foods. If I recall they used to be around $10 per dozen.

Been a while.

Anyone know Is this still the case?

Meanwhile in Ireland, I can get a tray of 30 free range for 8 eur at a vending machine on the dog walk. Or 15 for 4.50.

Lidl is maybe marginally cheaper, prices there have gone up maybe 20% in a year.

its 3-4$ at trader joes - still 8ish in WholeFoods in Michigan

The free range eggs at Aldi in PA are ~$5.30/doz vs ~$6.50/doz for the normal eggs. Might be cheaper than normal.

This. I buy my eggs at the farmers market from a local, actually small, farm. I pay $8/doz. In normal times this is very expensive. But you know what? Tomorrow when I go to the farmers market they'll still cost me $8/doz.

I guess I don't see why local farmers _wouldn't_ raise their prices to maintain their premium above store-bought eggs. They certainly have around here.

Canadian and Mexican egg prices haven’t budged because they vaccinate their chickens [1].

I’m not a fan of factory farming. But this isn’t a story about that. It’s a story about American (a) producers favouring cheap production by avoiding the cost of vaccination and (b) regulators favouring a policy of trade protectionism that keeps our neighbours’ cheap eggs off our grocery-store shelves.

[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-vaccinating-chicke...

I think both causes can be true, and both are relevant to modern food production.

Buried in that story is one more important point: if you vaccinate many countries will not let you sell that chicken to them anymore. US exports a lot of chicken to such countries and if we vaccinate that market dies. (or we can vaccinate some but not others and then deal with the supply chain complexity)

Came to say the same thing. Fortunate to have a store front on my block in brooklyn that sources primarily from area farms. No interruption in supply or change in prices (though I've always been paying in the $7 range).

Besides all the arguments around diverse food supply and economic SPOFs, it just feels so much better to shop this way.

One of the things that's come up in several trade deals Canada has negotiated is how protectionist we (as a country) are when it comes to dairy.

We have not experienced the massive increases in pricing on eggs. The supply management system effectively works to keep farms roughly below a certain size, and seems to have helped avoid large impacts on certain staple foods.

The usual rhetoric against this is that we should be getting cheaper prices by letting in foreign competition. This ignores that doing so would allow foreign subsidies to wipe out our local supply of critical foodstuffs, then making us dependent.

It's not an ideal system but it seems to have yielded some tangible results when things like bird flu are making their rounds.

I'm 50 and grew up in a medium sized New England mill town. One of the few memories I have of my grandfather is taking a quick trip to the local egg farm to get some eggs. These have all but disappeared from New England.

They are still here in Vermont!

I hope this bird flu thing is a push for other places to re-establish demand for local eggs and chickens. As someone else pointed out, it’s also a great opportunity to push your local legislators to allow backyard chickens.

> Fresh, local eggs have remained around the same price here.

Same here. Local eggs have gone up a bit, but it's mostly the cheap (caged) eggs from large producers that have shot up in price or are unavailable.

We eat plenty of eggs and haven't felt the effect of the "egg crisis". But then again, I buy local eggs and don't shop at Walmrt/Kroger/etc.

I should have invested in eggs and bitcoins

I built a little project to help with this over the break, still needs a lot of work - hopefully helpful for folks looking to connect with their local farmer:

https://www.farmersstand.com/farmers-markets

This is the kind of advice that can work for anyone, but can't work for everyone. Scale kills all things.

Not necessarily. Supporting local is the opposite of supporting scale, it's supporting decentralization. A single local provider might not be able to sustain all local demand, but there need not be only 1 local provider.

This is how it should be. Consolidating egg production is a bane on society. It might make the profit cheaper but it also greatly increases the opportunity for cross contamination to occur due to the distances they have to travel. I always buy locally sourced.

Ok, but, you can't feed 340M people with "fresh, local eggs". While it's nice you buy six eggs at a time from Joe Farmer off the back of his '72 Ford, but factory farms are an unfortunate necessity to feed everyone that isn't so privileged.

> you can't feed 340M people with "fresh, local eggs"

i think the opposite, i would like to hear a good argument why you can't.

We’re not reliably feeding 340M people eggs right now, either. The current system has significant friction points and deadweight loss.

To an extent, yeah. But farmland utilization has been dropping for decades. We are nowhere near not having enough farmland to feed people even if production efficiency was to drop significantly.

Man, if only it were possible to adjust the number of eggs that we eat in order to account for the increased cost of eggs that are farmed humanely and whose purchase benefits the local economy instead of massive corporate conglomerates. But alas, 340 million souls need their daily eggs.

$4 and change here for locally sourced eggs in San Diego, CA, at an organic food store no less.

Meanwhile, $9+ at commercial supermarket for bottom of the barrel factory produced eggs -- strange times...

We were thinking the other day getting some from the local farmer's market, but then hearing about the bird flu, and decided against it... :(

someone is leaving money on the table

no reason not to hike up the prices: a. if everyone is doing it b. if the demand > supply

| no reason not to hike up the prices

Because they're happy with the income they're making from it probably. Not everything has to make the absolute maximum amount of profit possible.

My local sellers are $4/doz for the good ones, $5/18 from another seller whose eggs taste 'off' so I quit buying them. I think $4/doz for quality eggs is worth it.

This is also hopefully a catalyst to get people to petition their city for backyard chicken rights. Raising chickens is relatively easy and can be rewarding. Even if you don't want to personally, support the right of those around you to, please.

Generally, mixing livestock and people in the confined conditions of a city is a very bad idea (if you're talking about suburbs, then that's a completely different thing, and I would agree with you about supporting it).

The local eggs here have the same price but they are selling out very quickly. $9.50 a dozen and used to have them all week. They come in on Friday evening and now sell out quickly. People are probably buying more than they used to when available and that is making the scarcity worse.

We're lucky enough to have a pretty substantial network of local suppliers. Our grocery carries eggs from at least six local farms that I can think of off the top of my head.

I've read that some of the farms are having a hard time keeping up with both the increased demand from groceries and also trying to keep eggs available for their regular farmstand customers and such, but it seems like so far there is enough slack in the system that it's working out okay.

What I find endlessly fascinating is how often I see anti-capitalist sentiment, which your comment is, in the context of how often and how much people will defend capitalism and attack socialism. For the record, I don't know if the second part applies to you, specifically. This is a general observation.

Local food production is quintessential socialism: it is quite literally the workers (the farmers) owning the means of production (the farm).

When people hear that, they so often reject it with some variant of "no, that's a business; that's capitalism". Businesses (and markets) existed millenia before capitalism and exist in every economic system.

The defining characteristic of capitalism is exploitation by capital owners. In the eggs case, it's Cal-Maine Foods (or any other large company) owning the land and in all likelihood employing undocumented workers because they can pay them sub-minimum wage. At least that's how the likes of Tyson produces chicken.

It's also worth adding that something like avian flu is used to justify price hikes well beyond what the supply change would otherwise warrant.

Ballsack

Lots of people suggesting to build chicken coop. i have one, sure it's not much work. 2 minutes every day to grab the egg and bring the food and water, but then every 3 year you got to take the hatchet, grab each chicken, cut right on the neck and then hang it with it's feet while it's bleeding out and flapping its wings.

then there are the few occasion where you miss with the hatchet and it cuts half its neck, its head hanging down, attached by a quarter of the neck from it's body with the blood jumping out and the chicken running in circle for quite a lot of time.

it's also rare but sometimes even when you cut perfectly, the chicken will manage to get out of your hand and again you got to watch a headless chicken running in circle for some time.

If you are the kind of animal loving people in city, i'm not sure it's worth it.

bonus point, in summer you get a lot of fly because of the chicken shit, they reproduce in that. you can get in there and clean it everyday but it's a lot of work, and fly traps barely works when the heat is shinning strongly on the chicken shit. fly reproduce too damn quick.

Also chicken have hierarchy where all the up top chicken will bite on the ass of the chicken under it, so if you are the top chicken you got a nice ass but the one at the bottom it has a bleedy ass and sometimes they manage to kill them.

if you got to buy another chicken to replace it, it may not be accepted by the old one and so again -> bottom hierarchy, death by ass biting lol. it's funny but it significantly decrease the economic worthiness when you got to replace you chicken once in a while.

Beside i don't know what you do with chicken corpse in city, you aren't going to put it in recycling can.

Support your local farmer.

Having slaughtered my fair share of chickens on a relatively small but not back yard operation, there is a much easier way!

Buy a t-post (any 3-5 foot rigid metal pole will do but a t-post has perfect geometry). Next, you'll grab your chicken, lay her down on her back or stomach [1], once she has settled down you're going to lay the t-post gently across her spine just a bit behind her skull.

Now place your feet on either side of the t-post to secure it, grab her legs, and in one swift motion pull and stand up.

You will very quickly decapitate the hen and once you do it a couple times it'll be very low stress for both you and the chicken. This latter part is key, if you're stressed, unsure etc, the animals will be the same.

You can improve this further by keeping an upside down traffic cone around, drop the bird into it once slaughtered and that'll contain the flapping/running around you mention.

In my experience, for novices, this is the easiest method for all parties and reduces the risk of slips, mistakes etc.

[1] Back is sometimes easier, they'll often go into a trance. Sometimes you can lay them on their stomach and trace a line to relax them, there are youtube videos of this.

This is all so brutal. I can’t believe you people are discussing such things so nonchalantly

Can I just say you've made my day with:

"You will very quickly decapitate the hen and once you do it a couple times it'll be very low stress for both you and the chicken."

Best giggle I had in years!

Use a traffic cone. It will be easier and calm the chicken down.

That's actually very clever.

>>but then every 3 year you got to take the hatchet, grab each chicken, cut right on the neck and then hang it with it's feet while it's bleeding out and flapping its wings.

We've had chickens - up to about 20 at times - and have never done this. We're not farming them. Once they become too old to lay they can still hang out with the other chickens and scratch around. We don't mind that they're "retired".

I have had to dispatch sick chickens, or ones that have been attacked by foxes, but that's maybe one a year if that and I typically do it by wringing their necks.

//edit// And if you have a rooster, it stops a lot of the intra-hen fighting, especially if you introduce new hens into the flock.

Its certainly an option. Chickens can live 7-12 years so that's a lot of feed for a chicken to not produce eggs. More economical to make soup. Their livestock, not pets.

Just to offer a different experience, we've kept chooks for years and it's been great.

However, we do have a large yard where they are free to range around – I think this is key.

In my experience there is no need to kill a chook after 3 years. Average lifespan for a chick is 8-10 years. Egg laying frequency does decrease with age, but there's no need to kill them just because they're slowing down a bit. Our oldest chook is 8 years, and laid her (probably) last egg only a few months ago.

When it does come time to kill one for whatever reason, the broom stick method breaks the neck instantly - easy and clean, just a bit of flapping around. As for the body, we just bury them if we are not going to eat them.

I think the heirarchical behaviour depends somewhat on the breed and the environment. Our chooks do have a clear hierarchy, none of them have died as a result. We have a mix of breeds - Australorp, Plymouth Rock, ISA Brown and one other mystery breed.

Flies probably depend on your environment – in Australia here we have a ton of flies already, I don't think the chooks make much difference!

Some of our chooks have a lot of personality and are almost pets, especially the early ones we basically hand raised as chicks – although you don't want to be too sentimental about them either. You have to be OK with killing them if that becomes necessary - it's still a sad time when I have to do that though.

If you have enough yard space and like the idea of being connected to the creatures that supply some of your food, I'd totally recommend giving chooks a go.

* edit: should have added, we don't keep a rooster which probably changes the dynamics too

> In my experience there is no need to kill a chook after 3 years

I assume you don't have ISA Browns? We just had 3, gorgeous girls, but they all started laying lash eggs at about 2yo.

The ISAs are bred to lay, and -- turns out! -- 300 eggs/year isn't sustainable for a poor little chook's insides.

Don't get ISA Browns. It's heartbreaking and, if you decide to treat it vs. letting them die (we did), expensive.

We loved our girls to death. Chickens are amazing pets.

there is absolutely a reason to kill your chickens that aren't laying - it costs money to feed them. if you don't optimize for price by slaughtering your older hens you will easily be paying > $10 a dozen for eggs.

all bets are off though if you consider chickens pets, instead of livestock.

basic economics for me: 20 chickens, a dozen eggs a day, 30 dozen eggs a month. decent non-organic feed is $20 a bag, organic is $35 a bag. one bag per week if you have the space to do daily free ranging on a decent sized chunk (half acre chicken yard in my case). Round up $0.50 per dozen for incidentals (bedding, repair, replacement chickens semi-regularly due to predation). That's $3 a dozen for non-organic, $5 a dozen for organic.

Drop productivity in half, organic eggs start costing $10 a dozen, and you have to work for those eggs. Cut productivity to 25% and you are even more expensive. In my experience, you are at 50% productivity within 3 years depending on the breed.

Also slaughtered old hens make good soups :)

After reading that, I'm not only not want to build a coop, I don't want to consume eggs anymore lol. I guess I'm too "animal loving people".

You don't have to slaughter them, if you get regular heirloom chickens. The ones bred for corporate mass farms, yeah they are better off dead because they are genetic freaks either bred to only be meat and turn into a solid mass of meat that can't really walk or to shoot eggs out like a gatling gun, both of which are horrible for any potential long-term health. But traditional chicken breeds you can just accept having less eggs as they get older. Really the super genetic bred chickens aren't good for backyard growers to start with, you aren't going to consume that many eggs or want to have them so fat and meaty they can barely walk after 3 months.

My parents have had chickens for the last 40 years, never once slaughtered one. They either live to old age, or a predator comes along and grabs a slower older one or two.

This is the harsh reality that a lot of people that have gotten used to the convenience store aren't ready for, but also we're in a slow revolution where people are becoming more conscious of the humane cost of animal products and are switching diets or changing their purchasing behaviour.

Definite difference between "city people" and rural people though. We had cousins stay with us for a week or so the one time, granted they were a little younger, but they didn't realize milk comes from a cow. So of course we took them to the local farm we got our milk from so they could see the cows up close.

It's a good idea to see where your meat, milk and eggs come from. If you can't stomach it, then why put it in your stomach?

> but then every 3 year you got to take the hatchet, grab each chicken, cut right on the neck and then hang it with it's feet while it's bleeding out and flapping its wings.

Is this a requirement? My friends parents keep chickens and dont kill any of them.

They dont have fly problems as the chickens spend most of their day outside of the coop letting them shit on the ground like nature intended. This disperses the waste preventing it from piling up into a fly trap.

As far as the pecking order, yes, there were issues with birds attacking others but they dealt with this by splitting up the pens. The chickens sort of form clicks around roosters and the in-crowd is safe while outsiders are harassed. So they identified the clicks by watching who follows who and moving them to the other pen. In some cases they had protective garb, chicken clothing, that protected chickens rear ends from further harm or aggressive rooster mating.

> Beside i don't know what you do with chicken corpse in city, you aren't going to put it in recycling can.

NYC sanitation has a composting bin program (granted it's not popular) which would likely be the best method of chicken corpses disposal. My only issue in cities is chickens should be raised on green land and most is paved allowing little to no ability for the chickens to feed off the land.

How many do they keep? It's not a requirement but after ~3 years they hardly lay, but still eat, and most people looking for serious production are not interested in running a chicken retirement home for X additional years of life as well.

You don't have to kill them if you're doing it for fun/as a hobby.

If you're trying to do it commercially you might want to.

The solution to an potential cross species epidemic is probably not to have a bunch of people live in closer proximity to the primary disease vector

The axe blow is the fastest method when you have to kill several chickens.

Alternatively, use a very sharp kitchen axe against a wooden plank. Place the chicken's neck between the axe and the plank and hammer the axe. This is the slow approach

Alternatively, use a long sharp blade to sever the neck the same way you would slice a cucumber, with a fast sliding cut.

EDIT: Cannibalism is more frequent when there is some malnutrition. Of course, sometimes you have to sacrifice the worst offenders.

In our setting predators do the job - hawks do lions' share (LoL) and foxes the rest. So agingn chicken does not happen. Although we had a rooster - a tiny one, which had incredible surival skills - was over 10 years, killed 2 bigger roosters himself, numerous unobedient hens, survived direct fox attack and dodged hell knows how many hawk strikes. Eventually went blind and had to part with his head out of mercy.

>Beside i don't know what you do with chicken corpse in city, you aren't going to put it in recycling can.

You do with it the same thing you do with a turkey carcass after thanksgiving: throw it in the trash.

"City folk" throw away meat trimmings, spoiled meat, or other meat products in volumes greater than a single chicken carcass every day.

Put it in a bag, put that bag in an another bag, and throw it away. It isn't magic or esoteric wisdom.

If you're worried about a carcass stinking because you're too far from bin day, freeze the bag and then bin it the night before your refuse gets picked up.

> If you are the kind of animal loving people in city, i'm not sure it's worth it.

If you care about animals this is still infinitely better than 99.9% of the industrial production which basically amount to concentration camps. But yeah, the blood is on your hands, it's much easier to forget about it and abstract it away.

I believe most people would be vegetarian if they had to slaughter and prepare a pig, or even a chicken

Having chickens taguth me that the phrase 'pecking order' is a pretty horrible thing.

Isn't the problem here bird flu? I'd be very afraid of raising chickens right now and inviting this kind of thing directly into my home. The solution here is to suck it and go without eggs while this thing hopefully blows over.

Wow this is such a real life comment. Very much a breath of fresh air on a site devoted to software, business, politics.

Thanks for taking the time to write it.

I have chickens also and, like with most other things, you don't have to cut off their heads if you don't want to.

Traffic cone nailed to a tree.

What do you do with chicken corpses in the country? Burn them?

Yeah, you want some separation from the house to the coop. Granma just picked em up by the neck and cracked the whip. Did it two handed on holidays. She knew which were sick, old, or just not laying. The feet did keep going for a while, and granpa did have to cut the heads and feet off. Removing the feathers after par-boiling was our (kids) job. That sucked.

My experience is that without at least one rooster the hens won't lay well, you won't have chicks, and frankly the hens aren't safe from predators. But, nobody likes roosters, especially other roosters and neighbors. That's what kills chickens in the city for me.

> My experience is that without at least one rooster the hens won't lay well

This is just not true. Hens will lay just as many eggs with or without a rooster. And a rooster doesn't do a whole lot to fend off predators, from my experience.

I've been fiddling around with the Albertsons API for fun. It's kind of neat to see a whole year's worth of purchases in nicely formatted JSON.

I have half an idea to create something like a personal inflation tracker, but I'm still thinking about it.

It's entirely possible that these goons will start fiddling with official statistics around things like unemployment and inflation to tell us that inflation is not actually happening any more and that therefore we must cut interest rates, or some such.

You may be interested to know MIT did a project called ["The Billion Prices Project"](https://thebillionpricesproject.com) to scrape the web and calculate CPI.

Sorry to all the tinfoil hats, it closely matched official CPI.

It will be interesting if that is the case by this time in 2026,2027, and 2028

for now, wait until the Trump admin gets into full gear

Changing data doesn't seem like their style, I suspect the pattern for this administration (based on past history):

1. Simply drop the topic and ignore it / drop the topic (arresting Hillary, china tariffs, etc).

2. Declare the problem fixed and again ignore it.

3. Blame the boogieman of the moment.

And as usual just behave like children in order to fill the airways / distract.

Trump's last administration drew on a NOAA hurricane map with a sharpie to try to convince people he was not wrong about a hurricane path. Changing data is his style.

> It's entirely possible that these goons will start fiddling with official statistics around things like unemployment and inflation to tell us that inflation is not actually happening any more and that therefore we must cut interest rates, or some such.

in the end statistics is a science, and results can be cross-referenced with independent sources.

you may get away with a bit, but not with much [1].

[1]: https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/economy/argentina-loses-bid-...

Don't rely on this. It works when bad actors are isolated and hoping nobody will notice, but not so well when there are tens of millions ready to repeat the official line, whether they believe it or not.

And yet we have the saying "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics"!

Is it an official API? I’m not able to find any links about it, if you could provide some I’d love to look into my own purchases.

It's apparently an API, although it's both difficult to find, and apparently only available through an email request to Albertsons. The website is here:

https://www.albertsonscompanies.com/amc/

The email request is at the bottom. mediacollective at albertsons

If you get in touch with me (email or Blue Sky DM) I would be happy to think about how to share what I have so far, although it's not much at all.

Like when the BLS overstated payrolls by 818k!! in March of last year, the largest negative revision in 15 years? And then the Fed did an emergency 50bps rate cut in September just as payrolls unexpectedly went up 250k and inflation seems to be coming back.

The unemployment and inflation data has been inconsistent for a while now.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/04/job-openings-decline-sharply...

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

Still happening. We sure have been suddenly wild unaccirate with the job market while the Feds need to keep saying "everything is fine but...".

> Like when the BLS overstated payrolls by 818k!!

So one Meta SRE? Is this supposed to be a lot?

I see an advertising API, but I don’t think that’s what you’re taking about. This sounds pretty interesting, can you point me to where you found it?

It'll be funny when crypto people's "Truflation" reveals that the pro-crypto government caused more inflation than anyone.

I live in CA and saw a massive jump in prices when the state ordered chickens to be euthanized due to bird flu. It was also the first time I saw grocery store shelves completely empty of eggs for days at a time.

Prices for organic eggs have somewhat returned to pre-bird flu levels but the regular sales and discounts have stopped. Non-organic eggs are still significantly higher.

My understanding is that free range law have recently gone into effect in CA.

Were the organic eggs already free range? That would explain the price stability there and variation of the non organic.

AFAIK, free-range and cage free are not heavily regulated terms like organic, which is a registered and trademark enforced term. At best they just mean the hens have a bit more room to move around. Neither of them actually mean there is no cage.

It's why we see "pasture raised" as the more premium marketing term. It still doesn't mean much without looking into the specific farm.

Do you mean cage-free hen regulation? This statewide regulation has been in effect since 2022.

I am in NJ and shelves are not empty here but the prices are off the charts. In December I bought eggs in Stop and Shop for $3.19 for a dozen of large brown eggs. Yesterday I bought the same eggs for $9.75 each.

Y'all are getting hosed. The Whole Foods ones around here (upstate NY) are $4.19/dozen as of today.

I'm in CA and TJ's was empty for months not too long ago.

Im oretty sure thats TJs fault, they regularly run out of eggs for years now if you go at the wrong time

Not sure what time you go to TJ's. In SoCal, I go nearly daily, a benefit of living 50ft from the store, and while stock is currently low, I have only seen it empty once. Again, it could be that when I go at lunchtime, they have the daily delivery available, but by the evening it is gone. Their prices for regular eggs remain <$4/dozen.

I'm in NorthCal, they usually have some supply in the first few hours of opening

I'm in South Florida.

There are 3 Whole Foods within a 15 minute drive of me, 4 Publix, 2 TJ's, a Sprouts, and 2 Costco locations in that same range as well.

Nowhere have I seen eggs.

I'm in socal and have been buying vital farms eggs. The price has been near constant.

Same in norcal. Vital Farms has been constant except Safeway owned grocery stores used to have them on regular sales. Now they're always full price.

This is it? This the big meme of 2025? "Remember when eggs were expensive"?

Ukraine is at war, minorities are being oppressed at home, an economic tidal wave is about to hit us vis-a-vis Chinese imports, the economy is on the ropes, and big brother is literally banning the government from saying words like "sex" and "gender" - but, oh boy, can you believe the price of these eggs???

Is every person in this country eating thousands of eggs a week and I had no idea?

It is finally some positive news. Before the election, inflation was down, but egg prices were up. So this was a big thing according to social media bots and algorithms.

Now prices have gone through the roof, but it is not a big thing anymore.

This is what people fundamentally care about. The price of food, a roof under their head, clean water, fresh air and general healthiness. The problems you describe are beyond most people's grasp or reach.

I submitted this. Egg prices became a political trope during the election, and were summarily forgotten afterward. Eggs are skyrocketing now and it is not a front page story. The reason they are skyrocketing, out of control H5N1 contagion in cattle and poultry operations, is not a front page story. There seems to be very little being done about food cost or yet another widely-predicted-by-epidemiologists emergent global pandemic. Apparently those are less interesting for the person in charge than punishing federal employees for perceived slights while doing their jobs.

I have posted previously about the Russian genocide on the Ukraine people and I agree with you about the rest. Some people can't see past the tip of their nose, though, and care about eggs.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I mean egg prices became a meme for exactly the subtext you're implying. This election season was unbelievably frustrating because of how large a focus was placed on economic conditions which as a general rule leads to throwing out incumbents. And the new generation running the GOP is a bunch of people who look more like a conspiracy forum than a government. To the point where Democrats got nervous and ran someone who in 2008/12 could have run as a Republican. Trying to give moderate Republicans for whom the economy is their biggest issue someone to vote for.

But as soon as the election was over the economy was suddenly great and none of that mattered. Despite consumer prices having either not moved at all or gotten worse thanks to bird flu, looming tariffs which look to extract straight from people's wallets and a proposed tax policy that is about the same for everyone who isn't mega rich. The egg price thing has become a, "guess we know what people really voted for." I was looking forward to the tax cut that'll probably never come.

Strangely enough, just last week I heard somebody complaining about egg prices in Dollar General. And I live in red country. So at least on the ground, people haven't forgotten about the eggs.

Yup, bird flu moment. I'm very glad my family put up a chicken coop in our backyard years ago; we get a ~carton a day, and they last forever even outside the fridge due to the natural "sealant" still being intact.

Hopefully store prices will come down as the year goes on and flocks bounce back.

I've been thinking about this for a while as well

A question if you have time to answer - How many birds per sq meter do you have? What's your total land area? And how do you deal with accumulation of chicken poop?

Thanks

Off the top of my head:

* Maybe 0.25 birds/square meter? There's ~12 total (we raise some for slaughter now, so it fluctuates) and they have a large enclosed outdoor area attached to the much smaller (6m^2, perhaps a bit more) indoor coop.

* Several acres. We let them free roam during the day with someone to supervise, but otherwise they have to stay secured (coyotes.)

* Inside the coop, the standard way is the "deep litter" method. You cover the floor in several inches of pine shavings and turn it over with a rake daily. Add a new bag of shavings here and there, and cycle it out completely maybe twice a year. The old bedding makes for good compost. If it doesn't smell, then you're good. For the outdoor area, we just auger it over and add mulch/soil around the same time the bedding is replaced.

(Note - tending to the birds hasn't been in my wheelhouse for a while, so don't take this as gospel!)

With a coop, it's a bit like a litter box. We put down hay, and change it out with the poop every couple of weeks, into a compost pile.

Chickens are way easier than a dog or cat day-to-day, with distributed risk.

The commercial eggs also last forever outside the fridge. That thing about the natural sealant is a widely believed myth.

Source: I leave my commercial eggs outside the fridge, and they last with zero problems.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8561600/

what myth are you talking about?

The study found that washed eggs had higher bacterial counts in their contents after storage compared to unwashed eggs, particularly at higher temperatures. Key findings include:

Cold Storage (4°C for 8 weeks): There was no significant difference in bacterial counts between washed and unwashed eggs.

Warm Storage (30°C for 12 days): Washed eggs showed significantly higher bacterial contamination, suggesting that washing increased the likelihood of bacterial penetration.

Bacterial Types: The number of hemolytic bacteria and coli-aerogenes was also higher in washed eggs.

As I understand it this can be safe or not-so-safe depending on where you live. If you're in the US you're likely buying sanitized eggs, whereas that's not standard practice in most other countries.

> source: anecdote/survivorship bias

I don't think it's a myth compared to unwashed eggs.

You should try leaving washed eggs out on the counter for 20+ days (incubation for a chicken) and see.

I live in NJ on some bird migration routes, the area I'm in has nesting snow geese right now and they are infected, birds dead, dying, and struggling to fly, some of the parks have been closed to the public due to concern of it skipping to humans. There's at least one large egg farm only around a 5 minute drive from this flock (one of ISE's). I have no idea if it skipped in there but given the short distance it's very possible.

What's going on with eggs in the US? The whole world had high inflation after Covid, so that's not US-specific, but eggs tripling in price? That is extreme. I don't think my (Dutch, free-range organic) eggs went up more than 25%.

Massive bird flu outbreak that has killed many egg laying chickens and required euthanizing many more to try to contain the spread.

In just the last 3 months over 30 million chickens were killed, which is about 10% of the total US egg laying chicken population. Overall the US has lost so far something like 40% of its egg laying chickens.

I guess the flu hasn't made it to the EU, large eggs at Lidl have been about 28 cents each for many months now.

Bird flu, made worse by concentrated farming of chickens. Those operations are basically disease factories and some bird flus come from them.

That's actually not true.

Bird flu comes from wild birds, not factory farming. Chickens get it when wild birds land near them due to free range laws.

The solution (possibly temporary) is to confine the chickens in sealed buildings so they can't contact the wild birds.

An avian influenza outbreak has killed roughly 20 million chickens so far and is not yet over.

Bird flu is what's going on.

It's just greed. A couple years ago Cal-Maine Foods, whose birds were never infected at all, raised their prices anyway and their profits went up 718% https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/business/egg-profits-cal-main...

Bird flu. Though, also, US inflation was _somewhat_ worse than Eurozone inflation (Eurozone peaked higher but rose later and fell faster).

Meanwhile, chicken prices haven't increased at KFC, Hooters, or Popeyes.

That's because chickens raised for meat don't live long enough to be affected.

A second reason is because chickens get sick by contact with wild bids, due to free range laws for egg laying chickens.

Meat chickens don't go outside, they are kept in large barns, although without the pens and egg collection of their egg laying sisters. So they are not affected.

Bird flu

People keep fucking buying them!

Price fixing under the cover of catastrophes, such as covid and bird flu. Frozen potatoes did the same thing over the past few years, without any excuse and without the prices of unfrozen potatoes going up similarly.

I think the industry has decided that a dozen eggs are going to retail for $5, just because it's a nice round number that will have "support." A few months of paying $8-9 for them will make it seem like a drop to $5 is going back to normal, and make $2 eggs seem like a misremembered dream.

https://www.newsweek.com/kroger-executive-admits-company-gou...

https://apnews.com/article/egg-producers-price-gouging-lawsu...

-----

edit: (2023) https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Farm-Action...

> The first case of avian flu in a commercial table-egg layer facility was detected on February 22 in Delaware. Over the ensuing Spring season, avian flu outbreaks would be reported in 10 states and result in the loss of 30.7 million egg-laying hens. After the end of May, however, avian flu discoveries would slow down dramatically. Notably, no hen losses were reported after the beginning of June except due to sporadic outbreaks in September, October, and November. All in all, the total number of egg-laying hens lost to avian flu in 2022 was around 43 million birds. Although these figures seem to support the theory that the avian flu outbreak of 2022 was significant, its actual impact on the egg supply was minimal. After accounting for chicks hatched during the year, the average size of the egg-laying flock in any given month of 2022 was never more than 7-8 percent lower than it was a year prior –– and in all but two months was never more than 6 percent lower.

> Moreover, the effect of the loss of egg-laying hens on production was itself blunted by “record-high” lay rates observed among remaining hens throughout the year. With total flock size substantially unaffected by the avian flu and lay rates between one and four percent higher than the average rate observed between 2017 and 2021, the industry’s quarterly egg production experienced no substantial decline in 2022 compared to 2021.

> [...]

> Contrary to industry narratives, the increase in the price of eggs has not been an “Act of God” — it has been simple profiteering. For the 26-week period ending on November 26, 2022, Cal-Maine reported a ten-fold year-over-year increase in gross profits — from $50.392 million to $535.339 million — and a five-fold increase in its gross margins. Notably, Cal-Maine’s gross profits increased in lockstep with rising egg prices through every quarter of the year — going from nearly $92 million in the quarter ending on February 26, 2022, to approximately $195 million in the quarter ending on May 28, 2022, to more than $217 million in the quarter ending on August 27, 2022, to just under $318 million in the quarter ending on November 26, 2022. The company’s gross margins likewise increased steadily, from a little over 19 percent in the first quarter of 2022 (a 45 percent year-over-year increase) to nearly 40 percent in the last quarter of 2022 (a 345 percent year-over-year increase).

A sign of what's to come.

Meanwhile, my chickens cost exactly the same as they did 12 months ago. :)

Which is great, so long as your flock does not get the flu and die.

We have had chickens in the past, and while I fully support anyone wanting to do their own chickens, the level of effort to keep them clean and healthy, safe from predators, and the labor to take care of them is non-trivial. They were the most expensive and labor-intensive "free eggs" we ever had.

I have lost 2 flocks of chickens to a combination of raccoons, foxes, and skunks. Interestingly enough none of those could kill my turkeys - they are big enough to fight them off I guess. They don't lay as many eggs though.

It is a lot of work, but after my last group was killed off 2 months I have not impressed by store eggs, so I'm planning on re-enforcing my coop so I can get another group of them soon.

yes. i have a flock and the feed alone puts a doz at $3.

the labor is somewhat enjoyable and the chickens are incredible child-leftover disposal machines. but when you factor infrastructure and labor youll probably never recoup your “investment” in eggs.

for anyone dealing with land predators, get electric poultry net. it’s magic.

You say that, but just wait until they unionize.

Fake/Vegetarian eggs are priced the same here, so I made the switch and am only using fake eggs now for most of my cooking.

One packet of Kala Namak salt goes a long way.

This tofu scramble recipe became an instant staple in my diet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc5pZ-PY-H8

Tastes more eggy and hearty than real eggs. And, like eggs, it's a good base for throwing in other ingredients like chopped tempeh, seitan, some sort of grain, mushrooms, etc.

It's a good gateway recipe into eating tofu in general.

Which one do you use? I was looking up the Just Egg brand in the US and it was more expensive than the free range chicken eggs brand we use. We've been trying have a more plant based diet but just stick with chicken eggs for now because we don't use it every day.

My local grocery store only has 1 brand, so I use that one. I don't know the brand, but apparently others say it's "Just Egg". I have no idea. I don't pay attention. If I ever got another option, I'd try that one too and then perhaps care :)

I agree if the pricing wasn't basically the same I wouldn't have even attempted the switch.

I just happened to notice the cost of eggs going up again and saw fake eggs at the same price and thought, well I'll try those, why not!

Are there any particular brands that you like?

I use different things based on what it's for. Ground flax seeds for baking, aquafaba for souffles, tofu with black salt for scrambles, "Just Egg!" for egg wash when frying, and maple syrup for egg wash on breads. Of those, I mostly bake, so keeping the flax seeds around is much more convenient for me than regularly buying eggs anyway.

I've only ever tried one brand. It's the only brand my local grocery store carries. It's a yellow carton with black writing, if that helps. I'm too lazy to go walk into the kitchen at the moment though.

arent eggs already vegetarian

It's not a strictly defined term, in the UK people generally mean lacto-ovo-vegetarian by it (they will eat eggs and milk) but many combinations are possible and what's most common varies geographically - in India for example it would generate taken to mean lacto-vegetarian (milk, no eggs).

Wikipedia has a nice table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Varieties

Yes.

Vegetarians don’t eat meat (including fish, although some religious sects have a marketing deal with fishermen to count fish as a vegetable for some reason), do eat animal products.

Vegans don’t eat meat and also don’t eat animal products.

The usage of the term "vegetarian" in the US is not consistent enough to come up with a precise definition, probably due to the mixture of so many cultures bringing their variation and translations. So it's always good to clarify on particular food items in my experience. Some will consider eggs part of a vegetarian diet, others will be practically offended at the ridiculousness of the idea.

Eggs are definitely a grey area for vegetarians, to the point where vegetarians will describe ovo-lacto-vegetarians where they are ok with eggs (and animal milk) whereas others aren't.

Technically since they're not meat and aren't born, but they're not vegan or ethical. The treatment of hens is inhumane.

Some vegetarians make exceptions for eggs, but I wouldn't call it "vegetarian" personally. You do you though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism

Did you find some that aren't filled with terrible oils and other bad-for-you ingredients? I haven't in my area yet.

Just fyi the whole "vegan foods are full of toxins and chemicals" is mostly nonsense pushed by the dairy and beef industries. They've spent a lot of money paying fitness, alt-right, and trad-wife influencers to push nonsense about vegan foods.

The one I love is the "there will be mass famine" if everyone goes vegan narrative that meat-heavy eaters like to talk about.

Here in Ontario I'm buying eggs for $2.99 / dozen, or about $2.10 USD.

This isn't a boast or schadenfreude, but is an observation that the protected, stable industry (supply management), which itself yields smaller, less industrialized operations means that while bird flu is a problem, it's hitting smaller clusters rather than gigantic mega operations where gigantic numbers of birds get culled.

So while our eggs are more expensive at times, there are benefits.

It’s great for the industrial food processor or restaurant chain that has a consistent demand/menu for eggs.

But more meh for the consumer that’s more liquid/dynamic/reactive and can easily substitute ad hoc if something gets too expensive.

It’s an industrial subsidy at more than one level.

Consumer demand for eggs and milk is extremely consistent over the short term, and when the price explodes people just...pay more. Hence all of the mad rushes and bizarre hoarding behaviour for this perishable product across the US. People are just spending more of their income on eggs, and bizarrely might be buying even more than normal. Over decades people change habits but for something acute they just suck it up.

>It’s an industrial subsidy at more than one level.

It's food security. There have been times Canadians were almost convinced to eliminate it to pander to the US, but in the face of the idiocracy taking hold down South, and its boom-bust agricultural sector (one that yields enormous numbers of farmer suicides)...yeah, it isn't ever going anywhere.

I highly highly recommend keeping chickens for those with the ability, space, and time to care for them. You don’t need acres. I was able to do it on a 1/4 acre in my city and as long as you follow the local ordinance you’ll be fine. Getting a half dozen eggs a day at this moment. Happy to answer questions if anybody has any. Been keeping chickens in town for 3 years.

I'll just add that the coop is for you to look at. The chickens don't need anything fancy, so you can build one out of nearly anything.

Neighbors might complain if it looks really weird or run-down.

Perfect time to build chicken coop.

Also eggs price is increasing globally witch is not good.

I built a chicken coop, mostly as a hobby, and the eggs were a bonus. the 1,000 in materials for the structure and 25 bucks a month in food and bedding make that amortization table go out a couple of decades before you see ROI.

I joke that they are the most expensive organic eggs you can buy. ;)

That $800 first egg...

10 years back, we were getting eggs at something like 25c/egg in feed costs. But we had a bunch of birds that only laid every 2 or 3 days, so they were no where near as efficient as a first year dedicated layer. OTOH, they all had names, we had most of the egg colors, and the bantam eggs were so cute. And the one hen that basically only laid double yolkers.

Health does not have a price.

Owners of coops know how different are those organic eggs. Totally diffrent color of yolks, also they have totally different smell when they are cooked.

I've noticed a fun split among people I know—those who grew up on a farm will move heaven and earth never to deal with chickens again, while people who grew up in cities or suburbs are really into the idea.

Having dealt with my share of pig shit, chicken sheet and cow shit, I can assure you that chicken shit is the worst.

Counterargument: Having a backyard poultry flock in the middle of an avian influenza pandemic (it is a pandemic in birds), is maybe not the best idea.

If your goal is to increase human-bird contact and contact between bird species during a bird flu pandemic, then sure. Perfect time!

The California Dept. of Food and Agriculture has numerous alerts on their site regarding H5N1 spreading in non-commercial backyard flocks.

A chicken coop is a major time investment for most urban/residential owners.

Just keeping predators out alone is an ongoing effort, weather events damaging it, then the smell/near constant cleaning, sick chickens/vaccinations/health checks, and you better figure who is doing all of this if you ever want a vacation or are sick yourself.

If you're a full time farmer, this is just your normal day, and a personal chicken coop isn't even a blip. But people with no farming/livestock experience don't even have an idea of what they're signing up for. I've known two different people that didn't last two years and were out thousands.

And when the price of eggs go back down, taking it out is also work.

PS - Check local zoning/rules; for example some have size/chicken limits or require it to be XYZ feet from the property line (due to smell/noise).

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/historical-statisti...

16% in 2024 for the uk, but thats probably due to heating costs/the odd cull

I've personally not seen a massive spike this year

I agree. Just remember that hens take around 18 weeks or longer to start laying so get started sooner rather than later.

And you can get an automatic coop door to make your life easier.

Meanwhile, over here in Costa Rica, I've just bought 6 eggs for about $1.50 USD and that's the convenience store price. They are cheaper at the super market.

The price is a proxy for Bird Flu activity multiplied by the intensity of regulations around bird flu incidents.

So either your area has low incidence of bird flu, low regulations around bird flu, or both.

We have high prices because the regulations are strict around dealing with bird flu detections. I wouldn't necessarily interpret low prices as a good thing without the big picture.

In the past... we'd just eat the eggs, get the flu, spread it about a bit, take a day / week off work, go back to work. You know, normal life. Now we overreact and just cull all the eggs and/or chickens and jack the prices up. It seems kind of weak tbh. You're never going to purify the world and make it perfect. One day someone in the future is going to say, "Ew they ate real food instead of processed food pellets?" unironically.

Then a disease will arrive that will make the entire population vanish because their immune systems never had to interact with anything.

My friends parents live on a nice piece of land in rural Maryland and have chicken coops. The chickens eat just about anything so food scraps go to them making them great recyclers: garbage -> food. Also cuts down on the amount of feed they need to buy. Any time I visit I get a dozen or two of fresh eggs.

Some people can't keep chickens because of city or HOA regulations or because of space requirements, but they would like to.

A good option for those people might be Coturnix quail. Quail eggs are especially delicious, and so are quail (if you can stomach cleaning them, it is pretty easy). These birds take up a very little space and are extremely quiet. Eggs are about 1/3 the size of chicken eggs. It's a really good way to sustainably have top quality eggs in a suburban setting (and possibly even indoors).

We keep chickens and wouldn't go back to store bought eggs even if they were 50 cents a dozen. Not the same egg. It is a little bit of work, but not bad once you are set up. It helps that we are also avid gardeners and so chickens get a lot of waste and greens (which also makes much nicer eggs).

Michigan here, this is has been made worse by a new law requiring all eggs to be 'cage-free'. I think I paid $9 for the cheap store-brand eggs (18) last week.

And that is, if they even have any eggs at the store. I've been to Wal-mart and Kroger when the entire section is empty with a sign saying there are egg supply issues.

It's also winter so my 'chicken farmer friends' are low on eggs, when it's cold the chickens don't lay nearly as many.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2024/12/18/m...

If it were actually impossible to have affordable eggs without confining chickens to tiny cages for their entire lives, that would be a damning indictment of our entire food system.

But luckily that isn't actually the case. The price difference between cage-free and "caged" eggs is negligible. I'm in New York City, not known for its local egg production, and I can still get cage-free eggs for $4/dozen. Kroker/Walmart is just ripping you off.

How does cage free make this worse? The supply shortages are coming from avian flu in every report I have heard.

Just paid $3.59/doz at Kroger here in Ohio about an hour ago (plain store brand). They were stocked pretty well.

The Target brand Good & Gather eggs were $9.49 in Boulder Colorado this week.

seems such laws would benefit the prices in neighboring areas, as 'non-cage-free' producers seek available markets. but i have not seen this to be the case, strangely.

It’s funny seeing the forecast is for $9.67 in 12 months time. It reminds me how it’s so easy to project based purely on the numerical patterns and not including the external event that created the numbers.

Checking all of the prices on that page, food prices have clearly been inflating faster than core CPI. Poultry has inflated at an average rate of 8% for the last 16 years.

Because core CPI is a big fat lie. There's absolutely zero chance inflation topped at 9.1% in 2022.

Aye it would be interesting to correlate the S&P 500 returns to food prices alone over the last 15 years of zirp. A higher “real” inflation rate on food could indicate that many retirees budget projections are broken.

IMO, price comparisons are a very misleading signal if you want to understand what's really happening in the world. They tell you that something is now more expensive, but not whether that's due to external events, evil corporations, evil corporations blaming external events, or some mix of the three.

What you really want to look at is costs, income and profit margins in the supply chain, which prices are a direct result of.

I’ve got a flock, not counting infrastructure my costs are tied directly to feed. I source local non-gmo and herbicide free grains. My cost is about $3/doz. It’s unusual to be so close to a farm that produces the variety of grain at that level of quality.

A local farm that produces on a large scale and sources grain from the same farm charges $8/doz. Seems totally fair, if not a little too cheap.

Are you counting your labor and coops as free?

Almost nobody has the space/time/money/skills to do this.

question: why hasn't this had a side effect of raising food prices in general? a significant percentage of foodstuffs involve eggs.

It certainly has. Raw chicken has noticeably gone up in price as well, and poultry is completely unavailable at some retailers.

But a lot of restaurants in my area have been price gouging under the guise of “inflation, it’s out of our control” and have much more room to absorb price increases, to a point.

It's starting to. Waffle House recently added an egg surcharge to their menu.

Who cares about eggs when we now have the Gulf of

What an incredible resource. They have so much data, even from tiny countries - https://tradingeconomics.com/countries

I wonder how (where) they are able to get so much data. Maybe they are paying for data?

If you have a garden, get your own chickens. About as much maintenance to look after as a pet rabbit.

If you want to be frugal with egg use, Chia seeds work great as an egg substitute in cookies (and other things.)

https://chiaseeds.us/chia-seed-replacement-for-egg/

I was at a local Costco and the eggs were just completely raided and people were lined up grabbing as many cartons as allowed (3). Organic eggs were all gone and only free range were available.

It makes you really realize how fragile supply can be, even for domestic products.

Costco people recommended showing up early. Went there right at opening in the morning and there was plenty. To their credit, they haven't raised their prices.

Also, shocked to see people hoarding multiple boxes of 50 eggs. Hoping it was for a commercial purpose and not someone panic-buying like they were for TP during the pandemic.

"Average Price: Eggs, Grade A, Large (Cost per Dozen) in U.S. City Average": https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111

I can still get local farm eggs for the same price. Perhaps the monopoly egg places should learn to do better with their strategies. I can get 18 eggs for $5.40. I typically buy only 18 eggs lasts me a month an a half.

Any quick explanation why Canada’s eggs simply have not gone up in price like this? What is stopping Canadian egg sellers from selling them at twice the price to the US market? Regulations? Existing agreements?

Setting aside the recent price increase, I'm shocked that their data shows a price of 0.77 in May 2023. A dozen eggs for less than a dollar, and that was after the worst official inflation had already happened?

From the page:

> according to trading on a contract for difference (CFD) that tracks the benchmark market for this commodity

You aren't buying eggs on a commodities exchange, you're buying them at the grocery store. There's a lot of overhead between the eggs being sold wholesale as a commodity and the eggs making it to your front door in neat little cartons.

eggs in Canada are still $4CAD/dozen which is $2.80 USD. Canadian egg producers have smaller and spread out farms preventing disease spread along with better supply issues overall.

> Canadian egg producers have smaller and spread out farms preventing disease spread

Canadian and Mexican egg producers vaccinate their chickens [1].

This isn’t a story about industrial farming. It’s about animal vaccine requirements and trade protectionism banning Canadian and Mexican eggs from the American supply chain.

[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-vaccinating-chicke...

Based on this article, there are other trade agreements which limit use of these vaccines.

> This intersects with Craig’s main point — if we started vaccinating chickens, it would kill our poultry exports:

> The biggest sticking point is around trade. The US exported more than $5 billion in poultry meat and products on average every year for the past three years. The USDA enters into trade agreements with each individual country it trades with, explained Upali Galketi Aratchilage, a senior economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Each agreement outlines specific biosafety and production requirements that both countries agree to follow. The USDA said, in an email to Vox, that many of those agreements do not allow bird flu vaccination.

I wonder if that's a geographical thing, with fewer infected wild birds in Canada.

The disease is not spreading due to factory farms, large or small, it's spreading via wild birds.

Local organic free-range eggs still selling for $5/dozen here at the local grocery store. Shelves stocked with non-local eggs are all empty.

I found this article today in the CBC about why Canada's egg prices have remained reasonable while the neighbouring US has gone crazy interesting: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-u...

TLDR: 1) we still have a bird flu problem, but have smaller flocks in the farms, so the impact of having to do a cull is far far less and

2) we have supply-management for poultry and eggs and dairy (basically a form of central economic planning around a quota system) ... which in good times is a rip-off for consumers [and some farmers] but in bad times... turns out to provide some value (which is why it was rolled out in the first place)

So: "black-out factory farm eggs doubled in price". Sounds like a good opportunity to finally ban black-out factory farming?

How are the prices so out of whack from one area to the next? I just bought eggs for $3/dozen last weekend.

Apart from the eggs: can anyone tell me what they used to make this website? Looks awesome in its simplicity.

When did we become obsessed with egg prices? Even at their current levels they are a relatively cheap meal.

I got two dozen eggs at Costco yesterday for $6.69 (the run of the mill white eggs).

Has the cost of chickens increased as well? Maybe its time to take production in house

New commercial egg laying hatchlings start producing at around 16 weeks

Am I reading this right? A dozen eggs in 2021 went for less than 1$?

“H5N1 has not been spiking the Mexican chicken industry because Mexico vaccinates its birds. This has a certain up-front cost, but it also means they don’t need to do flock-wide cullings any time a bird tests positive” [1].

I don’t think we need to vaccinate all our chickens. But we clearly need to vaccinate a resilient core to stabilise egg prices.

(The author also said “Americans in border states were driving to Mexico to buy eggs and bringing them back home,” nothing that “this is illegal, so please don’t do it.” Egg prices, like housing prices, are a policy choice. Not an act of god. In the case of eggs, we favour protecting domestic production over consumer prices.)

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-for-vaccinating-chicke...

Eggs store very well when refrigerated and are naturally optimal in terms of physical volume. Buy eggs in bulk and store them in a large mixing bowl or other round container in your refrigerator.

Oblate spheroid packing is anything but optimal! Eggs that perfectly tile 3-space when?

Eggs have famously short shelf life, even in the refrigerator. They’re not going to last more than a month if you’re lucky. The egg cartons they’re sold in are already the most optimized way to store them. Moving them into something else doesn’t make any sense.

Eggs store pretty poorly in the fridge because liquids transpire through the shell. Within a month your egg will be 20% air.

Round mixing bowl does not pack well into refrigerator. Surely the flat pack they come in is better?

Also I store eggs outside the fridge. It works fine.

fresh eggs are even better and do not require refrigeration at all

Time to trade the BTC miners for some chicken?

We could get eggs for 40c a dozen 6 years ago?

Can you give a comparison of egg price/egg yield as i feel this is more due to the euthanising of chickens rather than economic policy.

Why is there a spike every two years?

7 buckaroos for 12 eggs?? can any American in here confirm those prices? are they real?

Yes

Time to buy chickens!!!

You'll have a significant upfront cost for the coop, fencing, feeders and other equipment. Around $1000-2000 or so. And presumably, you'll be buying baby chickens, which require their own special care. It takes about 6 months for a baby chicken to start laying eggs.

But once you do that, you can maybe get to a reasonable place. The upfront cost being ignored, at today's egg prices, you can basically break even.

I have 9 egg laying chickens. They go through about $30 of food per month. They need another $20 in bedding supplies. $50 / month basically. Plus I spoil them with meal worm treats, so add another $30 per month for that (but I'll ignore that in my numbers below).

In winter, I average about 5 eggs per day out of my 9 chickens. In summer, it's closer to 8 per day. So we'll assume the best case here.

    8 per day * 30 days per month = 240 eggs
    $50 per month supplies / 20 dozen eggs = $2.50 / dozen

So not bad overall. But in winter it's worse, and my costs are higher because I give them worms.

We can't eat through all the eggs though, so we try to find nice people/places to give them away (single moms, food banks, etc.).

Ultimately, raising chickens is just for fun. They are pets and enjoyable creatures. Highly recommend if you have the land for it (and no HOA rules).

It is worth considering how chicken exposure impacts your risk of contracting H5N1 and the state of current treatments, and likelihood of obtaining those treatments if you need them.

On Craigslist live chickens are 2x the price of grocery store rotisserie chickens

And them watch them die from the avian flu?

Get your own chickens.

No. I use like 3 eggs a week. Not worth the effort.

Yes, bird flu is bad.

OTOH, the US egg industry has a history of price-fixing, and other dirty tricks.

For instance: https://apnews.com/article/egg-producers-price-gouging-lawsu...

Cory Doctorow's commentary from 2 years ago:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep...

Farm owners are not our friends. Example #1000000

Yeah, bird flu is really bad.

This is why we must freeze USDA funding, halt all public health communications from our federal government, and urgently (TOP PRIORITY!!!) scrub all mentions of the word "women" from every public-facing piece of scientific content we can find.

Why does this mostly affect the US? I've been abroad most of the year and eggs don't seem overly expensive.

What is the executive branch of the government doing about H5N1 currently? I have not seen any press releases or statements about it.

edit: I'm not being facetious, and don't welcome flippant replies. I'm genuinely interested, since I haven't seen any updates and have well-founded reasons to be skeptical this is getting the necessary attention.

What are the precautions the USA government is taking? Also how much of the local market is consumed by USA?

Currently imagining the political furor that would inevitably erupt over deploying a flu vax for poultry.

Odd it affects only the USA but not Mexico.

Luckily the federal government doesn't get to talk about all that scary stuff right now[0], and maybe never again! /s

[0] https://www.salon.com/2025/02/02/administrations-communicati...

Similarly, GasBuddy uses crowd-sourced data from their app and exposes that data here:

https://www.gasbuddy.com/charts

Gas is incredibly cheap in the US. It's silly that's being used as a political rallying cry when we had $4+ gas across much of the country 20 years ago. With inflation, that would be approaching or over $7 today.

“Just let me know how much I should be contributing to my child’s egg fund.”

I'll be that guy. No sympathy at all for those exploiting these birds. Hope the price goes to infinity.

From September 2020:

Trump administration rolls back U.S. inspection rules for egg products.

https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/commodities/trump-ad...

> The change, first proposed in 2018, makes inspections consistent with those for meat and poultry products, said Paul Kiecker, administrator of USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. Inspectors will operate under a "patrol" system, in which they will cover multiple plants each day, he said.

> "We feel very confident that, based on the once per shift that we have them there, we'll still be able to verify that they're producing safe product," he said.

So, what's the issue here?

Seems like a great time to stop eating eggs.

I always wondered why the people "in reality" in the Matrix only ate grey gruel.

First they came for the chickens and I said nothing because I was not a chicken... What's next, avocados!?

They're tamasic, anyway.

The impacts of climate change are real. We have known for a long time that as the climate worsened animals would be more vulnerable to illness that live outside and have to deal with a destabilizing environment.

I rarely eat eggs so haven't been paying attention to it

I pretty much eat the same thing everyday: packaged peanuts (spicy ones), microwave single piece of batch baked chicken, frozen vegetables, brown rice, throw some terriyaki and soy suace on it boom, lazy meal. The peanuts are $0.69 each

Well, it beats Soylent.

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