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My wife has a cottage baking business and would buy 15 dozen eggs from Costco Business Center. Already high, a few months back in cost about $45 for the box. Ju
by bigtex 4y ago
My wife has a cottage baking business and would buy 15 dozen eggs from Costco Business Center. Already high, a few months back in cost about $45 for the box. Just last week it was $110. She doesn't recall but it fairly certain the box was between $20-30 before inflation hit.
However she said they had chicken legs that were .49/lb which is a great price but hard to reconcile with the narrative that avian flu is the cause for the price increases. Why are broiler chicken cheap but eggs from layer hens not?
- plasticchris 4y agoLonger business cycles? Broilers would be last years layers
- sct202 4y agoBroilers actually only live to be 9 weeks old, so their business cycle is very short. The old layers are labeled stew hens when you can find them at the store.
- skeeter2020 4y agoOnly if you live on a farm! Broilers are purpose-bred on a ridiculously fast timeline.
- captainredbeard 4y agoBroilers are different breeds than layers and “spent hens” tend to only get eaten by farmers, etc, because of the raised risk of deboning error and undesirably tough meat
- datadata 4y agoCould it be that broiler chickens are being slaughtered ahead of time to prevent forced losses from avian flu? No clue about this industry.
- bagels 4y agoBroilers take a fraction of the time to grow compared to the five months it takes before a hen lays the first egg.
- lettergram 4y ago12 weeks for most chickens we eat. It’s honestly crazy lol
- user22 4y ago8 weeks max, probably more like 6. disclosure - I raise meat chickens at a small scale
- HEmanZ 4y agoI don’t know whether to be amazed at this agricultural feat that brings cheap, tasty, high-protein meals to the masses of humanity, or sickened by an abomination of nature that turns a living thing into a bio-engineered fast-growing blob. I guess both?
- lotsofpulp 4y agoDo you consider plants to be living things?
- HEmanZ 4y agoYes but it’s a fuzzy term, what I meant was more in the “animal” realm of living. Just to give an example, I (and I think most humans) feel negatively about deforestation or destruction of plant life because it is destroying or profaning something beautiful. It’s like burning art. Same with the chickens. I’m not sure I consider factory farming immoral, and I definitely don’t consider killing animals for food immoral. I grew up raising chickens (laying hens, it was a family hobby and not a business)and don’t feel any moral or aesthetic issue with killing them. I also hunt and fish a lot, my freezers are full of wild game whose lives I personally ended. Still, certain kinds of factory farming, like the raising of chicken-blobs, disturb me because they take something I find beautiful and make it ugly. Not sure what to make of the disturbed feeling tho, it’s not a moral condemnation or political position. That’s the best way I can put it on the internet.
- foreverobama 4y ago[dead]
- mynameisash 4y agoI do a good deal of baking, and I buy a lot of my supplies from Costco. I also have spent a fair amount of time very diligently tracking my family's grocery expenses. (I have a spreadsheet of almost 3 years of just about all groceries we bought.) In 2019, I picked up 15 dozen eggs for $8.69, and the 5 dozen was $8.99 at that time. (There were times when they didn't stock the 15 dozen, so I had to opt for 5 -- a much more expensive $1.80/dozen but still reasonable.)
- coding123 4y agoSince you have done this, are you convinced inflation is what they say it is?
- mynameisash 4y agoAfter three years ending ~EOY'19, I stopped tracking all these data. (It turns out combing every grocery store receipt and manually typing, categorizing, and calculating the data takes a lot of time.) I can't say how my experience tracked or would have tracked inflation, but I can say that even before the pandemic, I did see wildly varying prices on things. Costco's large vanilla extract was once around $10 (though this was before my spreadsheet, so I don't have dates/exact prices). It was up to $35 in '18, then down to $30 a year later, and just a few days ago, I noticed it for a little over $20. But 25# of flour used to be around $6-7, and I bought a bunch the other day for ~$12. So some things up, others down.
- atwebb 4y ago> I picked up 15 dozen eggs for $8.69, and the 5 dozen was $8.99 at that time. Is there a typo?
- mynameisash 4y agoNo, those numbers are correct.
- mym1990 4y ago
- coding123 4y agoIsn't it convenient that we discuss inflation like it only affects us 1 year at a time? All these articles shouldn't be saying 60% they should be saying 5 to 6 times more expensive from before the pandemic.
- SECProto 4y ago> 15 dozen eggs from Costco Business Center. [...] Just last week it was $110. Might I suggest buying eggs from a normal grocery store or other alternative source? That's $7.33 per dozen and unless you have some very unusual situation, a dozen eggs can be had for less than half that price at a grocery store.
- Damogran6 4y agoPossibly availabilty, in our Denver Suburb, Kroeger and Walmart shelves are nearly always bare. We've had to resort to buying 5 dozen at a time at our Costco...which I don't like, because it takes awhile to get through them.
- ihaveabeardnow 4y agonot sure what 'awhile' is for you, but you can freeze them if needed. just beat the eggs in a container, and stash away in the freezer.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- poulsbohemian 4y agoWhere? I live in a poor rural area and every grocery store in town (and we ain’t talkin Whole Foods here) has even generic eggs for more than $5/dozen. Thank goodness I have my own chickens.
- dcchambers 4y agoThat's insane. I can get 2 dozen organic eggs for $6.50 at my regular local Costco. She's paying more than double that at a business center.
- jonnycomputer 4y agoPrices vary by state and municipality https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/pybshellegg.pdf https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/pybshellegg.pdf
- brewdad 4y agoMy Costco didn't have a single egg in stock at any price last week. They've been limiting egg purchases for months.
- paxys 4y agoI buy a dozen eggs for $3-5 in the middle of San Francisco. If your wife is paying double that, that too for bulk orders, then she is definitely doing something wrong. She can literally shop at Whole Foods and save money.
- brewdad 4y agoI've seen egg prices all over the place in my area. Ironically, the high end stores seem to have lower egg prices right now. I'm guessing the huge industrial type farms are getting hit hardest while the smaller farms, offering true free-range and other marketing gimmicks are largely business as usual.
- brewdad 4y agoIf the chickens are dying from avian flu, they can still be consumed as food assuming they live long enough to develop but you will miss out on the ongoing egg production of the laying hens. Healthy or not, a chicken can only give it's two wings once. Laying hens produce eggs repeatedly for as long as their bodies allow.