Eggs US – Price – Chart

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%.

Bird flu is what's going on.

Bird flu

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

A sign of what's to come.

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

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.

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

People keep fucking buying 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.

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.

And the reason why it spreads so well is still concentrated industrial farming.

No, that's simply not true. It's being spread by wild birds, not concentrated farming.

I know people love to blame "big anything", but it's just not true here.

Here's a source:

https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/virus-transmission/avian-in-bir...

"Domesticated birds (chickens, turkeys, ducks, etc.) may become infected with avian influenza A viruses through direct contact with infected waterfowl or other infected poultry, or through contact with surfaces that have been contaminated with the viruses."

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

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...

"Domesticated chickens may become infected by wild waterfowl or by other infected poultry", and other infected poultry includes domesticated chickens. Nowhere in that web page does it say that domesticated chickens cannot spread it to other domesticated chickens. Once a domesticated chicken becomes infected (however it became infected) in a massive concentrated area, it will spread that infection to other domesticated chickens. You're conflating "spreading across chicken farms by flight" with "spreading within chicken farms by already infected chickens" and saying the first is true so therefore the second can be.

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...

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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).

So you're suggesting there's some other viable model of egg production that would deliver eggs at 2021 prices? People want cheap eggs. Saying, "well if we just adopted a decentralized, more resource intensive model we wouldn't have problems with bird flu" doesn't address that concern.

Why is it that egg producer greed/generosity matches well with the times when there is an egg supply shortage/surfeit?

I'm not conflating it. Spread with Avian flu means to other places. A single chicken in a farm means ALL chickens will get it. That's such a trivial thing, it's not even worth noting.

What matters is how does it spread.

I think what's confusing you is that there are diseases where a single infected animal does NOT mean all animals will get it, and in those cases the more concentrated the farm the higher percent of other animals will get it.

That exists. But it's not the case here. Here it's 100%, doesn't matter if it's a concentrated farm, or a pastoral farm with chickens walking in the house.

it doesn't. The largest egg producer in the nation had no infected birds. There was no shortage. The companies just conspired to restrict supply so that they could gouge consumers and stuff their pockets. They were ordered to pay millions in fines because of it (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/egg-suppliers-ordered-to-pay-17...)

They successfully tricked you into thinking that their prices are set by supply and demand. They're probably not the only company fooling you either. For just one other example, literal tons of unsold/unworn, perfectly wearable and desirable clothing gets shipped overseas, burned, or thrown into the ocean or landfills. The excess supply of clothing is so vast that it's now a form of pollution (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/chile...). If clothing prices were set by supply and demand they'd be paying us to take the clothes off the rack. Supply and demand are a good explanation of economics for grade schoolers, but it doesn't explain the world we live in.

You've got this great opportunity to outcompete Aritzia and you're not doing it? They have no hold over you. When they conspire, just don't play along, like Zuck rejected Apple. Pick 50% their margin. You'll be a billionaire in a year.

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.

Zuckerberg has no ethics and is just mad that apple's lack of ethics isn't working in his favor. A businessman with ethics has very little chance of dethroning an entrenched cartel within a corrupt industry. The hypothetical ethical business looking to outcompete their rivals may be the only one willing to set fair prices, but they also won't be able/willing to do what their competitors do. They won't exploit slaves/children/workers to make their products. They won't bribe governments to pass laws and regulations to keep out competition. They won't cut corners by using poisons in their products and manufacturing knowing it will harm their workers and consumers. They won't dump their waste into the ocean and pollute the environment. They won't collude to set prices, limit supply, or shut out anyone who doesn't play along.

The idea that you can defeat greedy corporations just by treating customers better is a fiction. There's always more money to be made by screwing over everyone at every opportunity, and there's no shortage of greedy people willing to do exactly that. It's why we need the kinds of laws, regulations, and enforcement that even the playing field and allow ethical companies to thrive.

You can't jump into the middle of a rigged game where the referees have been bought off and expect to win by following all of the rules. You have to stop the cheaters and the cheating first to even have a chance.

I think it was Food, Inc, a documentary from a number of years ago. Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms talks about factory farming and Salatin often argues that industrial farming is not necessarily more cost-effective and that his method is both profitable and environmentally sustainable.

Bird flu in the US has spread to wild animals and other species of wild and domesticated animals so it is very widespread, also there is a vaccine but poultry farms refuse to use it because of cost and it would make the meat/eggs not suitable for export, poultry producers have resorted to making their poultry farms as clean as possible, washing trucks that come onto property, making employees wash and wear protective clothing to prevent contamination and the disease still makes it onto these farms. The method we used last time we had bird flu pandemic on poultry farms was mass culling of flocks that had any infected birds, but it has not worked for long this time so the cycle of kill flock, clean everything out, raise new birds raises long term capital costs for poultry farmers in USA.

Because to certain people, when a company lowers prices to compete because of an increase in supply, it's the competitive free market doing its things (not generosity), but when they increase prices because of a decrease in supply, it's greed.

You can just pull this up in FRED and match the spikes to HPAI outbreaks. People aren't making this up. If it's a spurious correlation, it's a really weird and powerful one.

Oh I see. And how much would t-shirts made by this non-slave ethical corporation be?

It's not a coincidence. Companies know that if they suddenly raised the cost of their products 100% consumers would protest. At a certain point people will notice that they're being cheated and change their shopping habits accordingly.

Companies use opportunities like bird flu outbreaks to rip off consumers while deflecting blame. When the nation's largest supplier of eggs didn't have a single bird infected they still jacked up their prices and colluded with other farms to keep prices high and supply low because the news was constantly telling consumers about bird flu and setting an expectation that prices would be higher.

When the pandemic came, there were legitimate supply chain issues and many companies took the opportunity to appeal directly to their customers saying "We hate to increase prices at a time when every household is suffering, but we have no choice because of the supply chain! We're all in this together!" and because consumers knew we were in an unprecedented situation, while they still weren't happy about the price increases, they didn't blame the corporations for it.

The corporations however took advantage of the situation and continued increasing prices far higher than they needed to and for much longer than they needed to. Consumers didn't start to catch on until much much later when the news began reporting that all these companies were making record breaking profits the entire time. Meat packers for example had their profit margins increase 300%. Unfortunately by then they'd already been working hard to plant the idea that their high prices were caused by the disaster relief checks that went out to households during lockdowns. Then they blamed the "inflation" their own greed was feeding to justify raising their prices even higher. The more the news talked about inflation the more companies could rip you off because the expectation of higher prices was set.

The truth usually comes out eventually. Mostly when we finally see what the profit margins look like. They can hide some of it with clever investments and hollywood accounting, but it's harder to hide the money they make for shareholders and while they're doing everything they can to trick the public into thinking that we should feel sorry for them and sacrifice more for them, they're also busy telling investors that they're pulling in record profits and their pockets are overflowing with our cash.

The entire egg industry is a conspiracy, like when that one guy at ADM price-fixed the lysine industry, except keyed to outbreaks of HPAI. I see.

It's always greed. Companies will charge as much as they possibly can while maximizing their profits. It doesn't matter if the price of something goes up or down this week, in either case the change only happens because the company thinks they'll make more money by offering the product at that new price.

I've never owned a t-shirt that wasn't made by an unethical clothing industry which uses child slaves and abuses workers in sweatshops to produce hundreds of tons of clothing filled with plastics and poison every single year most of which will be burned or left to rot in a desert on the other side of the world from the retail shop that overpriced it when they sold it to me.

I have no idea what the fair market price of a t-shirt would be in a world where no one had to compete with the practices of the current industry. I do know that it'd be worth every penny. The price being paid now in environmental harm, inequality, and human suffering is way too high.

Why wouldn't you pick the time when the public would be convinced a price rise is justifiable in order to raise prices (on a fairly inelastic good?) That isn't what you need a conspiracy for; the biggest would just press release that they were doing it, and the rest would follow. You might need a conspiracy to keep smaller producers from defecting from the price the biggest are setting, but the defectors wouldn't actually have the capacity to replace the price fixers, so they'd just be setting money on fire by not following.

I think it's pretty clear that they do explicitly discuss fixing prices with each other, but there's no actual need to do that.

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

edit: also, check out frozen potatoes https://jacobin.com/2025/01/french-fry-price-fixing-antitrus...

Notice how that's not a story about price-fixing of a commodity but of a (delicious) intermediate industrial product destined for ultra-sophisticated buyers. There's no story about people price-fixing potatoes.

Also notice how the prices don't move up and down with incidents of potato blight or whatever.

Further: for this to be explanatory, you have to show why, after HPAI outbreaks subside... prices come back down.

> There's no story about people price-fixing potatoes.

Like these people? https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/closed-settl...

> for this to be explanatory, you have to show why, after HPAI outbreaks subside... prices come back down.

It doesn't matter if prices sometimes go down, what matters is why. As it turns out, the answer to that is collusion. https://apnews.com/article/egg-producers-price-gouging-lawsu...

When companies work together to set prices they can lower them a little sometimes (while still increasing their profits) and ruthlessly gouge the hell of out consumers the rest of the time hopefully without raising too much suspicion.

They sued every major potato producer in the United States and got a $5.5MM settlement.

People want lots of things to be cheap but that doesn’t mean it’s sustainable. Here in the mid-Atlantic we’ve seen the same thing others mention: the local, non-factory farms prices haven’t changed in years but the supermarket stuff went from being cheaper to more expensive.

The theory that optimizing for the lowest price might other negative effects isn’t exactly novel: we’ve seen that in many other areas, and if you’ve ever been anywhere near a factory farm it’s enough to put you off of eating eggs.

It’s not particularly hard to find clothes that are made ethically. I do it for most clothes I own. It’s even easier if (and more expensive) if you wear more traditional clothes (wool suits, coats, dress shoes, etc). You can avoid a lot of the abuses by buying things made in more developed countries (though obviously workers still won’t be paid terribly well, and the garment industry in the United States has some unpleasant corners). This tends to make clothes more expensive, especially as higher quality, more expensive inputs tend to be used too, but you can probably find a tee that isn’t particularly pricey.

I’m kinda surprised you never tried to do this considering how easy it is and how much your comments seem to suggest that you care. Possibly we’re talking past one another and you wouldn’t find any clothing companies that meet your ethical standards.

We've also had bird flu in NL some years ago, but I don't think it was anywhere near that dramatic. I do vaguely recall that it was mostly an issue for free range chickens, because they go outside and can get infected by wild birds shitting from above. I'd expect indoor chickens to be less vulnerable, though I do recall similar measures to prevent humans from spreading it. I think there have been rules that free range chickens need to get a roof over their heads to prevent spreading.

It's still weird that it got so dramatically out of hand in the US this time.

The Trump administration has stated that the CDC and other public health organizations cannot release any data or statements without first running them through the organization. So these public health orgs and the general public have not been communicating like they should during such a disaster. It’s insane and because of this we’re only at the tip of the bird flu iceberg.

Send help. Most of us didn’t sign up for this.

One thing someone else posted is that poultry farms are 1000 to 10000 times bigger in just number of poultry per facility in the USA, some news report speculation this issue is going to force USA poultry farms to vaccinate - this is already done in Mexico and much of EU including NL, but vaccination has been politicized in the USA and it would cut into profits sans bird flu and corporations run the show here. We know vaccination works because the countries that adapted it stopped it from infecting their farm stock.