Eggs US – Price – Chart

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.

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.