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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

#71

Post by walkabout »

gruez wrote: post #24
okokwhatever wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"Culling" is different than "slaughter for meat"

Layers aren’t viable as a meat crop anyway, you’d spend more trying to engineer some one-off effort like that than you’d make and nobody would want the resulting meat. Your competition is freakish mutant birds that get so big in a few weeks that if you don’t butcher them they’ll soon be unable to walk and start to suffocate under their own bulk, and that taste like the almost nothing that grocery store buyers expect.

I assume egg layers are typically either fed back to the flock (chickens love eating chicken) or turned into e.g. dog food, but I kinda doubt they do even that with a disease-cull.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#72

Post by walkabout »

Jeremy1026 wrote: post #53
rob wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on your cooking. Lots of baking, or lots of certain dishes (pastas, stir fries, that call for or benefit from eggs)? You’ll tear through eggs even if nobody eats them scrambled or over-easy for breakfast.

One angel food cake or batch of soufflé and you’ll use a bunch right there. Just a glaze on some meat pasties might burn two or three, and they’re barely even an ingredient in that case. Hell, family of five, one scrambled egg breakfast a week can knock out an entire dozen if you use zero other eggs that week for anything.

The things are little chemical miracles somewhere between useful and indispensable for all kinds of stuff in the kitchen, or good as a (usually…) dirt-cheap source of protein, vitamins, and flavor that can be added to lots of dishes or eaten on their own, making them remarkably versatile and easy to use.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#73

Post by walkabout »

6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote: post #51
stOneskull wrote: post #31

Earlier 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'.

What’s crazy is how many people routinely drink the equivalent of two or more bags of skittles with their meals, between enormous to-go drink sizes and frequent, free refills when dining in.

Like… ew, friggin’ gross.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#74

Post by simonsarris »

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…

huh, maybe I got in just before that. I ordered 1/31/2025, ship date 3/25/2025 from Hoovers in Iowa (even though I'm in NH they are very reliable), and there was plenty of stock.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#75

Post by BobaFloutist »

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…

They might be expensive for eggs, but they're cheap for food.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#76

Post by gruez »

walkabout wrote: post #71
gruez wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Culling" is different than "slaughter for meat"

Layers aren’t viable as a meat crop anyway, you’d spend more trying to engineer some one-off effort like that than you’d make and nobody would want the resulting meat. Your competition is freakish mutant birds that get so big in a few weeks that if you don’t butcher them they’ll soon be unable to walk and start to suffocate under their own bulk, and that taste like the almost nothing that grocery store buyers expect.…

>I assume egg layers are typically either fed back to the flock (chickens love eating chicken) or turned into e.g. dog food

or mcnuggets, or any sort of processed chicken product where the taste of the chicken is drowned out.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#77

Post by PedroBatista »

gruez wrote: post #55
PedroBatista wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The concentration problem is well known in the egg industry but also in the meat industry in general ( Cargill, Tyson Foods.. ) In the past, most farms were independent and the distribution was also very broad. If a couple farms got egg problems ( an example ), the overall market wouldn't even notice other than their county. Now the "farms" are HUGE if a couple ones run into troubles the entire State suffers and the whole national market feels it.

Also, many of the "independent" farms in reality run with a single-"customer" contracts and the margins squeezed to the max in a way they even need to borrow huge amounts of money just to stay afloat and don't breach their contracts with huge conglomerates like Tyson. In practical terms the supply side for the quarters is decided by a couple managers who work for these big food companies which have their own "tough" contracts with retailers like Walmart, Target, etc. So if the manager happens to be a dipshit or making a bad move the consequences of that are national. And I'm not even talking about shoving MILLIONS of animals packed in a couple acres. If one coughs..

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#78

Post by hyperpape »

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…

You could look at the graph and argue that eggs show official uninflation was underestimated from 2000 to 2025, but to be consistent, you'd then have to argue that it was overestated from 1985 to 2000.

I have two points, really: I appreciate the graph showing pretty good correlation between official CPI and the price of a very widely consumed

Secondarily, you can observe (not by thinking about eggs, b/c I don't remember what they cost in 2000, but just prices in general), that there hasn't been huge inflation since 2000 compared to the official numbers.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#79

Post by _heimdall »

walkabout wrote: post #71
gruez wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Culling" is different than "slaughter for meat"

Layers aren’t viable as a meat crop anyway, you’d spend more trying to engineer some one-off effort like that than you’d make and nobody would want the resulting meat. Your competition is freakish mutant birds that get so big in a few weeks that if you don’t butcher them they’ll soon be unable to walk and start to suffocate under their own bulk, and that taste like the almost nothing that grocery store buyers expect.…

Layers do still make good meat birds, not sure why you're assuming they aren't. I'd usually use a layer for soup, but I wouldn't waste the meat if I had to take the bird for some reason.

Cornish cross birds are likely the "freakish mutant birds" you're talking about. People bred them to grow as fast as possible, seems wrong to call them freakish since we wanted them that way. Its around 8 weeks old when they can't walk, that's the point where they have to be processed.

I wouldn't recommend feeding chickens back to the flock. Chickens will eat other chickens, but you need to be really careful with regards to the cause of death. I recommend anyone raising chickens also raises hogs, if you do lose a bird the hogs will east it and there aren't many illnesses that can cross between those species.

Re: Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980

#80

Post by jnmandal »

elthran wrote: post #34
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…

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?

As others have already said, the reason is mainly to cycle yard and food waste, as well as some garden tasks (they can be used to prepare beds as well as cut my lawn). I also plan to raise black soldier fly eventually.
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