I don't remember being able to buy eggs for $1.50 a dozen.
National averages are not locally valid.
Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
61–70 of 80 posts
Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'.
OK, OK... make that sugar HFCS, and also add artificial coloring. And carbonate it.
Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
166 million chickens were culled earlier this year [1] [1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-02-26/poultry...
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Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
#64So, the eggs roughly follow the CPI, except during spikes in avian bird flu? 2015, 2022, and 2025 were peak years for bird flu in avian populations.
Since 2022 and 2025 are close together, and the latter very recent (the flu outbreak peaked in early 2025, not today)... it's not even suprising to see the non-spike prices of 2023-2024 and late 2025 elevated. Chickens are fungible, but the manufacturing method still has a latency to it.
Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your phrasing of the last sentence caught my interest. Is the other reason fresh chicken meat, or is there another benefit to keeping them that I can't think of?
Chickens are incredible composters. Put in your raked leaves, almost 100% of your food waste, paper towels if they don't have chemicals in them, grass clippings, etc. They'll be clawed through and pooped on and turned into fresh soil. If you have the space for the chickens, they can be worth it for this reason alone. They're less work than bagging up your leaves and you'll reduce the food volume in your trash to almo…
This. How do you harvest/refresh the compost though? Just move the cage over? Do you kind of suspend the cage a bit and let the little stuff fall through?
Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chickens are incredible composters. Put in your raked leaves, almost 100% of your food waste, paper towels if they don't have chemicals in them, grass clippings, etc. They'll be clawed through and pooped on and turned into fresh soil. If you have the space for the chickens, they can be worth it for this reason alone. They're less work than bagging up your leaves and you'll reduce the food volume in your trash to almo…
This. How do you harvest/refresh the compost though? Just move the cage over? Do you kind of suspend the cage a bit and let the little stuff fall through?
For me we have a coop and then a fenced in run which is relatively large. I built my gate so I can fit a wheelbarrow inside. I just shovel some out and smooth out the pits I've made. The ground doesn't need to be perfect because the chickens will always be making more compost and shuffling it around. If you had a smaller setup, I'd think a mobile coop & mobile run would serve you really well.
Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
#67$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…
You're missing my point that it's amazing they're as cheap as they are considering the logistics involved. Bananas are also amazingly cheap considering where they ship from.
Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
#68As 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…
> Let me just add I don't think backyard eggs are cheaper, even at the height of price spike, because when externalities like feed and enclosure are calculated the resulting product won't have the economies of scale
The math checks out if:
1) You build your coop and enclosure basically out of junk or otherwise for near-free (good luck with the, ah, “spouse test” on that);
2) You lean heavily on kitchen waste for food;
3) You place no value on the time spent on anything chicken-related;
4) You butcher and eat each chicken after ~3 years when their rate of laying drops off (you stop wasting food and space on an unproductive layer, and gain “free” chicken meat);
5) You raise more than you eat and sell the excess (ten chickens aren’t much more effort than four chickens, and the extra may cover feed and replacement costs for the flock);
So yeah it doesn’t really work out, just buy $5-$8/dozen backyard chicken eggs from someone else who’s bad at math or has different priorities (loves the smell of chicken shit, maybe?), you’ll come out ahead. Or get them from the grocery store if you don’t care much about the chickens’ diet and conditions.
Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
#69Earlier 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.
Not quite that fast, but not too far off. Certainly a lot faster than building a new factory. Laying chickens start producing in a matter of weeks. Time for breeding to scale is also needed (but very fast), and they’re not producing at max rate for somewhat longer than that, but still, in the scheme of things egg production has got to be among the most-responsive products in the market.
Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
#70I don't remember being able to buy eggs for $1.50 a dozen.
Never bought eggs before covid, or never shopped the sale ‘fridges at the grocery store and/or regular-priced eggs at Costco? Under $1 wasn’t uncommon.