Egg Prices Are Rising Again. Why Are They So Expensive?
Egg Prices Are Rising Again. Why Are They So Expensive?
Eggs are so expensive now because of lowered supply caused by an unprecedented bird flu outbreak. Increases in labor, transportation and chicken feed costs have also affected egg prices.
One word: capitalism
Correct. Under capitalism, food is produced for profit, not for the hungry.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
A few suppliers sell most of the eggs.
And during the pandemic those giant corporations found out they can just all raise the price of stuff, sell less, and make more profits
Worth a read https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on
At the same time the last egg price spike was happening in the US, one of the largest market share producers just so happened to have a 65% YoY profit increase. Go figure.
Yep. No reason not to think it isn't just corporate greed again.
(from the article about the previous insane egg prices)
In absolutely unrelated news, eggs are suddenly incredibly expensive. A dozen "conventional" eggs are currently averaging $2.88, which is double what they cost a year ago. Supposedly, this is caused by a supply chain shock (an avian flu outbreak).
But – and this will shock you, I know – the single company that dominates the US egg industry, Cal-Maine Food (AKA CALM – ugh) is making record profits. Their Q3/22 net was up 65% from the year before. Cal-Maine's Q4-22 sales were up record-smashing 110% – $801.7m:
Shit is infuriating, Americans should be tarring and feathering these people
I'll take greedy corporations for 500!
because dem chickens is organized
Aye, dem in a chicken coop
Article doesn't mention this affecting anywhere other than the US. Why is this in world news?
Is world news only for news outside the US? Genuine question
this did affect Russia at least because I've seen many memes about egg prices (though I don't eat eggs myself so I have no personal experience to validate that)
tl;dr: prices =/= costs, price is cost + what the market will bear.
I have an anarchocapitalist friend who is convinced to his core that prices are driven by costs, which any economist will tell you is not the case. He believes, therefore, that lowering wages, lowering taxes, and lowering costs on businesses in a truly fair and free market will make things more affordable. And maybe he'd be right if we had a spherical cow kind of economy, with perfect competition and elastic demand for everything, but that's not we have, and most sane economists will agree that that's not the way things are.
In reality, any MBA can tell you that prices are independent of costs insofar as you just have to be bringing in more money than is going out. The role of a corporation is to make money (to make a return on investment), and this has been especially true since the Friedman doctrine (tl;dr: the sole moral obligation of a company is to its shareholders) has been the dominant school of business thought. So if your costs are a dime and you can sell for a dime and a penny, then you sell for a dime and a penny. If you costs are a dime and you can sell for a dollar, then you sell for a dollar. If your costs go down to a penny and you can still sell just the same for a dollar, you don't lower your prices nine cents. The only force that drives down prices is competition, because in a spherical cow economy, if your costs are fifty cents, you can't sell too much above that or your competitors will undercut you and murder your profits, so you have to be very careful about price increases and constantly seek new means of cutting costs. In reality, there's very little competition and demand is highly inelastic for a lot of important things like housing and healthcare, so it's pretty easy for prices to just go up until so many people get priced out that the price increases yield a negative return. I think we're already there, and have been for a while, but not to worry, we came up with a solution: debt and subscriptions/payment plans.
Few people can swing $40-80,000 for a college education, you might have to settle for lower prices to get the volume you need, but if you say "not to worry, we'll just have you pay us back later," you can suddenly charge a lot more and still get a high volume. If you charged $100,000 up front for lifesaving care, people would just die because nobody has that laying around, but if you just make it debt, well, hey, nbd, charge whatever the fuck you want and worry about it later. You can't sell a $60,000 truck, or a $1500 phone, but you can sell a $600/mo truck (apparently, as much as that amazes me) or $35/mo phone. We're seeing this same phenomenon at work with the latest push towardss 40-year mortgages amid continuously insane housing prices.
So, to answer your question, it's going to keep getting worse as long as production is highly centralized, as it is continuing to be, because investors need their profits. Who's got odds that we'll see an egg subscription plan before the year end?
It's the Houthis, right? ;p
The answer won't shock you.