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Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
- mc32 1y agoLooks 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.
- _heimdall 1y ago166 million chickens were culled earlier this year [1] [1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-02-26/poultry-culling-hasnt-stopped-h5n1-bird-flu https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-02-26/poultry...
- okokwhatever 1y ago[flagged]
- gruez 1y ago"Culling" is different than "slaughter for meat"
- walkabout 1y agoLayers 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.
- gruez 1y ago>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.
- _heimdall 1y agoLayers 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.
- _heimdall 1y agoThey don't process and sell culled birds. At large scale when culling due to disease, they generally turn off the ventilation system and suffocate the birds en masse.
- tomhow 1y agoYou can't post snarky dismissals like this on Hacker News. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines when commenting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- elzbardico 1y agoYes. 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.
- acdha 1y ago> 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.
- hyperpape 1y agoI 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.
- somenameforme 1y agoI 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% more than nominal inflation.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- acdha 1y agoWouldn’t that make eggs the outlier? For CPI to be wrong you’d have to show similar rises in lots of other things.
- hyperpape 1y agoYou 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.
- programjames 1y agoWhat dates? 2000 August–2025 August gives 3.18%/year for the consumer index and 7.12%/year for egg prices. Even if you assume egg prices will come down to $3/dozen, it's still 6.24%/year.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago$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.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago> refrigerated shelf in the supermarket Wow, today I learned that in some countries, the supermarkets keep their eggs in the refrigerator! Apparently there is a protective coat on eggs that sometimes gets washed away, and when it is, you need to store the egg in a cold environment otherwise bacteria gets in. In other places, eggs aren't washed (that much at least) so the protective coat is still there, so we store our eggs on normal room temperature shelves.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoNo comment about refrigerated eggs goes unanswered.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoOne of us has to be the lucky 1 in 10,000, today it was my day :)
- kbcool 1y agoThat much is the key. They're still washed, otherwise they would have all kinds of crap on them (literally, chickens only have one hole), they just aren't subjected to chemicals and scrubbing etc. Having very low salmonella rates in the flock makes it really unnecessary
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago> otherwise they would have all kinds of crap on them The eggs I buy in my supermarket don't have literally crap on them, but it isn't uncommon that they have bit of dirt or hay/grass on them, and those are bought from a mainstream supermarket chain. I do realize they obviously do a quick cleaning pass regardless, just wanted to clarify that many eggs aren't pristine when bought :)
- mikaeluman 1y agoOut of all thousands of products, goods and services you will find plenty that track the official number "fairly well" out of of pure chance. I fail to see any significance of this one chart.
- cjs_ac 1y agoThe retail price of eggs was a significant talking point in the campaign for the last US presidential election (which I'd forgotten until I saw this post).
- chrisco255 1y agoThat's because they slaughtered a huge amount of chickens due to bird flu. As you can see from the chart, the egg prices have plummeted as chicken populations have recovered.
- candiddevmike 1y agoThat chart still shows the prices being higher than they were a year ago. People voted for cheaper eggs, right?
- chrisco255 1y agoThe chart ends in July, but egg prices have continued to plummet, as noted in the wholesale data: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eggs-us https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eggs-us You can see wholesale price per dozen dropped from $3.35/dz in July to $1.17/dz today.
- drdec 1y ago> People voted for cheaper eggs, right? I suppose people who don't understand markets did, yes
- IAmBroom 1y agoThe same people who voted to stop Jewish Space Lasers, presumably.
- jnmandal 1y agoAs 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 chicks for the fall instead of doing a normal spring brooding and luckily the weather cooperated, but as is normal I ordered some extra chicks as padding. The extras I have now been able to sell locally at a premium, covering my entire cost. 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. But I think many people decided they wanted a steady supply after eggs became hard to come by. I personally keep chickens for reasons besides eggs but I am still happy that more folks are keeping chickens.
- chrisco255 1y agoThe 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.
- pixl97 1y agoOf 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.
- elthran 1y agoYour 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?
- Jeremy1026 1y ago
- screenoridesagb 1y agoEggs 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.
- stOneskull 1y agohow 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
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 1y agonot 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'.
- IAmBroom 1y agoOK, OK... make that sugar HFCS, and also add artificial coloring. And carbonate it.
- walkabout 1y agoWhat’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.
- chrisco255 1y agoThis chart seems off, for some reason. It shows the average price for a dozen eggs as hitting $1.20 in 2019. I don't remember ever paying that little in my adult life for eggs, and I've lived in small towns during that time frame too. Also this should be noted: Large white, Grade A chicken eggs, sold in a carton of a dozen. Includes organic, non-organic, cage free, free range, and traditional. Egg options in grocery stores today are way more diverse than they were when I was a kid in the 90s. Organic eggs were rare. None were cage free. Today's options include soy-free, cage free, free range, etc. I pay a premium for soy free, free range eggs. This wasn't even an option in 1997 or 2005 or most of the years listed here.
- bluedino 1y agoBefore Covid it wasn't uncommon to see eggs under a dollar per dozen.
- PedroBatista 1y agoThe only significance I can see is in the amplitude of the fluctuations. Which I intuitively attribute to massive concentration of both production sites and ownership of businesses.
- gruez 1y ago> 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.
- PedroBatista 1y agoNot 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.
- gruez 1y agoRight, 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.
- PedroBatista 1y agoThe 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..
- mjd 1y agoI don't remember being able to buy eggs for $1.50 a dozen.
- jimlawruk 1y agoI 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/ https://aldi-prices.lawruk.com/
- IAmBroom 1y agoSo, 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.