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Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

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Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#51

Post by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn »

stOneskull wrote: post #31
screenoridesagb wrote: post #12

Eggs and milk used to be staples people “needed” they were just few alternatives in the food market. Now they are basically luxury goods with staples being things like chicken nuggets and colas. I’m not saying it’s good or bad either way, but if the price of eggs were increased 1000% it wouldn’t effect people’s quality of life as much as a 1% increase in the cost of education or healthcare.

how can cola be a staple? it's disgusting. imagine before giving your kid a glass of water, you add 10 teaspoons of sugar to it.. and a bit of coffee

not to be facetious but image getting a glass of water, adding ten teaspoons of sugar to it and a bit of coffee and thinking that it is . . . 'cola'.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#52

Post by acdha »

elzbardico wrote: post #5
mc32 wrote: post #2

Looks like actual prices are trending back to the index. There was a big spike induced by the culling of millions of birds a couple of years back.

Yes. It is a shame both sides explored this politically in the most superficial manner. Those cullings (there was also a more recent one), for sanitary reasons, should have sparked a higher level debate on food security viz novel epidemic threats. But, politics in the US are completely dominated by lawyers, everything is about rhetorics and scoring talking points. But problems like that require an engineering mindset…

> It is a shame both sides explored this politically in the most superficial manner.

It was one side. The liberals were trying to have the conversation you mentioned, with extensive discussion about why this wasn’t as severe in other countries due to differences in farming practices or talking about vaccination, but the Republican strategists saw an opportunity in just hammering the idea that Biden had some kind of magic egg price lever in his office. Saying “both sides” is supporting them by reinforcing their framing even though it’s ahistorical.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#53

Post by Jeremy1026 »

rob wrote: post #13
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #6

$6.20 for a dozen eggs still sounds like a good deal. Think about the amount of work to get those onto a refrigerated shelf in the supermarket. It's amazing.

No it isn't. A dozen can fly by for a single person or a small family. You'll probably need at least two dozen a week. Hell, a lot of recipes ask for 2-3. So now you're looking at almost $50 a month just for eggs (2dozen/week @6.20.) That might be easy for you when you're working at Microsoft and making $500,000 a year, but that's a significant amount of money for a lot of people in the United States. And eggs aren't…

> A dozen can fly by for a single person or a small family.

A dozen eggs lasts months in my house (family of 4). We just aren't egg people. The kids will ask for scrambled eggs occasionally, but it's pretty rare. The only time we use a lot of eggs is when we make Christmas cookies, and an 18-count pack typically does the job there. My point being, it's all relative.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#54

Post by acdha »

somenameforme wrote: post #14
hyperpape wrote: post #4

I appreciate this graph as a (very partial) rejoinder to the inflation truthers. I could believe that there is some modest measurement error in how we calculate inflation, but, picking relatively arbitrary dates that I happen to remember, the idea that 2000-2025 inflation was double the reported numbers doesn't pass the sniff test.

I don't have a horse in this race outside of general skepticism of official numbers (though inflation is particularly difficult to fake since you can literally just buy/assess the basket of goods the figures represent yourself), but I don't think this is the rejoinder you're looking for. Eggs went from 0.975 to 3.587, a 3.68x increase. CPI went from 1.69 to 3.23, a 1.9x increase. So the price of eggs increased 93% mo…

Wouldn’t that make eggs the outlier? For CPI to be wrong you’d have to show similar rises in lots of other things.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#55

Post by gruez »

PedroBatista wrote: post #45
gruez wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which I intuitively attribute to massive concentration of both production sites and ownership of businesses. This doesn't pass the sniff tests. There are plenty of other goods with equal or greater concentration that don't see wild swings like this, cars and CPUs, for instance.

Not every product is the same. You can't "manufacture" an egg like you do with a car. Entire egg "production" sites need to be shutdown and millions of chickens killed because of some strain of bird flu for example. And you can't just order 5 million egg laying chickens to substitute the old production with a lead time of a few weeks.

Right, but the OP blames it on "concentration", whereas you're just describing factors that make a commodity volatile. The global crude market isn't anywhere near as concentrated as the US egg market, but it's also quite volatile.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#56

Post by pixl97 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #32
jnmandal wrote: post #9

As someone who keeps backyard chickens and recently got a new flock, I will say anecdotally this spike was observed even in livestock. In March 2025, I tried to order baby chicks to replace some of my aging flock. Not only was every hatchery sold out, but going in person to farm stores meant waiting in lines on the days shipments were received and dealing with rationing (3 chicks per person, etc). I opted to order ch…

The other thing about chickens is they are pretty easy to care for. If you feed them grain and provide them decent shelter and clean their cage out every week or two, they will be perfectly happy.

Of all issues predators are the biggest risk I've seen in small raising operations. Especially if they wander open range or have a sizable fenced in area. Raccoons can be the worst as they are good at getting in places they shouldn't be, but Hawks, foxes, coyotes, and ferel pets cause problems too.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#57

Post by jimlawruk »

grigio wrote: post #47
jimlawruk wrote: post #44

I have been haphazardly tracking my grocery prices at Aldi since 2022. My lowest price was $1.12 per dozen in Nov 2023, my highest was $5.97 in Feb 2025. Last recorded price in September was $2.71. https://aldi-prices.lawruk.com/

404 - File or directory not found.

Thanks. Updated link to the home page. Didn't realize my SPA generated Urls don't work. Sigh.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#58

Post by IAmBroom »

jnmandal wrote: post #9

As someone who keeps backyard chickens and recently got a new flock, I will say anecdotally this spike was observed even in livestock. In March 2025, I tried to order baby chicks to replace some of my aging flock. Not only was every hatchery sold out, but going in person to farm stores meant waiting in lines on the days shipments were received and dealing with rationing (3 chicks per person, etc). I opted to order ch…

To be fair, March 2025 was impacted by bird flu, so the prices were destined to be anomolous.

One of my huskies got out and did $70-80 worth of damage to my neighbor's flock: two laying hens.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#59

Post by IAmBroom »

aesh2Xa1 wrote: post #35
jnmandal wrote: post #9

As someone who keeps backyard chickens and recently got a new flock, I will say anecdotally this spike was observed even in livestock. In March 2025, I tried to order baby chicks to replace some of my aging flock. Not only was every hatchery sold out, but going in person to farm stores meant waiting in lines on the days shipments were received and dealing with rationing (3 chicks per person, etc). I opted to order ch…

Not to be that guy, but feed/enclosure are direct costs. Externalities are costs/benefits to someone uninvolved with the chicken/egg transaction (noise or free insect control affecting your neighbor are negative and positive cases).

Another externality: in the city, chickens attract children. :D

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#60

Post by IAmBroom »

drdec wrote: post #38
candiddevmike wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That chart still shows the prices being higher than they were a year ago. People voted for cheaper eggs, right?

> People voted for cheaper eggs, right? I suppose people who don't understand markets did, yes

The same people who voted to stop Jewish Space Lasers, presumably.
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