The article does discuss why there isn't a significant decline in price. Its two proposed explanations are increased demand from Chinese buyers, and increased d

The article does discuss why there isn't a significant decline in price. Its two proposed explanations are increased demand from Chinese buyers, and increased demand from the relatively new lobster-roll phenomenon: > This leaves the Maine (and Canadian) lobster industry with another interesting challenge: how to find enough buyers for all those lobsters so that prices don't collapse. As you can see from the chart below, they've mostly succeeded: > [price chart] > Affluent Chinese diners have been one reason. This January, five chartered 747s full of live lobsters flew from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to China to supply Chinese New Year feasts. Maine's lobsters tend to make the voyage less dramatically, in regularly scheduled flights from Boston, but $27 million worth of them were shipped to China in 2016. > The national and even global spread of the lobster roll has also helped a lot. I came to Maine on a trip organized by Luke's Lobster, a fast-casual restaurant chain that now has 21 "shacks" in the U.S. and eight more scheduled to open this year, along with six licensed locations in Japan. ... Luke's Lobster now has its own plant in Saco, Maine, that processes between 4 and 5 percent of the state's lobster harvest. Processing, in this case, means cooking and picking the meat out of the claws and knuckles for Luke's lobster rolls while cleaning and freezing the raw tails and clawless "bullet" lobsters for sale to restaurants, groceries and such. > Holden's father, Jeff, says that tails used to sell for much more than claw meat. Now lobster rolls, for which tail meat is generally too chewy, have flipped the price equation.