Understanding a problem requires a holistic view of the larger system. An egg producer may say prices are higher Because supply is lower due to culling. Part of that statement is true. The author then zooms out to better understand the larger system.
The truth of a matter deviates significantly from one party’s assertions.
it’s scary to me that people lack the skills, the desire or incentives to understand and objectively seek understanding of what’s happening around us especially in highly charged US political landscape. This isn’t like pure scientific pursuit of knowledge but a more practical day to day ability to question, understand and gather new information with the purpose of developing an objective understanding of the world.
It does, but the result is extremely uncomfortable. And the solving it will require actions that are even more uncomfortable.
You have to come to grips with the fact that there are monopolies at every single level. There is no inventory anywhere except bottom. There is no over capacity at any level.
Consequently, supply and demand simply do not work. There is no "excess supply" to use to make extra profit by eating the extra demand. There is no upstart supplier who can absorb the extra demand. The big suppliers can ratchet up prices with zero consequences. What are you gonna do about it?
> it’s scary to me that people lack the skills, the desire or incentives to understand and objectively seek understanding of what’s happening around us especially in highly charged US political landscape.
They don't lack the skills. They have chosen to treat politics like sportsball rather than something to actively think about.
I think one (uncomfortable) solution is this. Consumers should budget their expenses. So when the egg prices increase, they should consume less to maintain their budget for eggs, for example, a month.
This will mean that when the companies increases prices, more of their stock will remain unsold, increasing their expenses stocking them to go up. This could also cause disruptions on their supply chain. This should force them to reduce prices.
There are some other options:
Substitute blood - https://nordicfoodlab.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/2013-9-blood-... - I am not sure why people don't do this but maybe they are squeamish. Food grade blood is cheap and readily available from slaughterhouses and butchers.
Buy some chickens
There is no inventory anywhere except bottom? Fine. I'll go to the bottom.
> They have chosen to treat politics like sportsball rather than something to actively think about.
Not going to argue about that one...
More like neo-religion.
If I was that bothered about eggs, I'd simply grow my own. Americans on average have way more space to mess around in than say most Europeans - the place is fucking huge. Chickens are very easy to "grow your own".
I'm not an American and clearly you have managed to get your collective knickers in a twist over a non issue, which almost certainly means that there is a bigger picture and a rather more important issue that really needs fixing.
Please stop fiddling whilst Rome burns.
you've just described scientific persuit.
Just because the object of said persuit pertains to everyday life, doesn't mean it isn't scientific. The goal of science is to understand truth, and discern it from falsehoods (which might appear true intuitively).
Science isn't about researching niche, or cutting edge things. It's about the method, rigor and ability to change one's mind based on evidence regardless of priors.
In my experience, people don’t care about systems, they care about outcomes. The world is driven by people who care about outcomes and held together by people who understand systems.
[1] https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/...
Any small competition that eventually gets large enough will just be bought out by the next one up in the food chain (literally).
If the orange Cheeto was truly interested in combatting corruption, he would break apart this entire industry clear down to individual factories and processing plants, and implement laws to prevent anyone from ever buying out anyone else. Consolidation would be impossible, only organic growth would still be legal.
Or just put the entire industry under public control by nationalizing the industry. Without investors and CEOs to Hoover up those profits, prices could crater by 80% or more without affecting production or maintenance.
Game theoretically, these groups would still collude to maximise profits.
> this is the inevitable end-game of unfettered capitalism
I'm in awe, friend.
It's funny how some things (real estate) are supposed to keep going up in price, and it's a disaster that requires government intervention if they don't, while for other things (eggs) just the opposite is true. I suppose it depends on who benefits from each.
https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/results/80AF9DAE-99AE-31D0-...
Hopefully yall can make heads or tails of the data.
The querying tool is also linked at https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/#80AF9DAE-99AE-31D0-8F1C-EC...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/national-chicken-council-asks-fda...
It also means this is not going to be a huge impact either:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/turkey-export-15...
That import is 240,000,000 eggs if my math is right. If it is spread over a few months we will barely notice it. If it were achieved in a single month, it might be more noticeable.
I am reasoning mostly based on significant figures. I did not compare historical lows to production figures to try to get an idea of what actual demand is and I assume there is a bit of a smoothing effect that allows a surplus and shortfall in adjacent months to cancel.
Added 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order curve fits to give an idea of the general trends in production.
what stops new entrants from reaping this price rise? Your monopoly would have to prevent new entrants from even starting. That would be where monopoly laws come into effect.
I love examples like this showing how this moral cultural movements are often just propaganda for nefarious purposes. People talk about recycling being pushed by the plastics industry but I’m sure there are more in the environmental side of things.
I agree with the description in the linked document - defendants presented "substantial evidence that grocery stores and other customers demanded animal-welfare standards", companies like McDonald's, Walmart, and Kroger demanded or required the animal welfare standards, the program was developed with input from a "Scientific Advisory Committee" of experts in animal reproductive welfare, and there was pressure from animal-rights groups and consumers for better treatment of hens.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ilnd.26...
> For their part, Defendants argued at trial that the UEP Certified Program was a bona fide effort to satisfy customer demand. In Defendants’ view, the UEP Certified Program was a natural response to pressure from animal-welfare groups, buyers, and end consumers. According to Defendants, they felt pressure to make life better for hens.
> In that vein, Defendants presented substantial evidence that the grocery stores and other customers demanded animal-welfare standards. So did consumers. And so did animal-rights groups.
> For example, before adoption of the UEP Certified Program, Cal-Maine lost McDonald’s as a customer after McDonald’s demanded producers expand the size of cages for their hens. See Defs.’ Ex. 182. And within a few years of the creation of the UEP Certified Program, grocery chains like Walmart and Kroger would purchase eggs only from UEP Certified producers. See Defs.’ Exs. 329, 374, 639.
> According to Defendants, they were simply responding to market demand when they implemented the cage-space restrictions in the UEP Certified Program. The jury heard evidence that the UEP Certified Program was a legitimate animal-welfare program. Specifically, Defendants pointed out that the UEP created the standard after following the guidance of a Scientific Advisory Committee.
> That Committee consisted of an all-star team. See 11/1/23 Trial Tr., at 3085:25 (Dckt. No. 657) (Armstrong) (“I was very, very pleased. We put our dream team together.”). It was chaired by a leader in the field, Dr. Jeffrey Armstrong, who has degrees in physiology, and specializes in the reproductive physiology of farm animals. See 11/1/23 Trial Tr., at 3074:19-25 (Dckt. No. 657) (Armstrong). Reproductive physiology of farm animals is what it sounds like – how animal reproduction works. Id. at 3075:1-10.
> In sum, the jury learned about the UEP Certified program, and about its standards. And the jury heard dueling views about the purpose of the program.
> Again, Plaintiffs alleged that the UEP Certified Program was a backdoor way to restrict supply. Plaintiffs told the jury that the program required the birds to have more space. More space equals fewer hens in each cage. And fewer hens means fewer eggs.
But once they discovered that it’s a convenient excuse to raise their profit margins, they hopped onboard.
By that logic, we’d probably still be paying double-digit cents per minute for long distance calls. (Less than a dollar - a small price to pay to talk to your loved ones across the country!)
Tuna/sardines are a bargain by that measure.
Interestingly, in the early weeks of the Kamala Harris campaign last year, she actually advocated to fighting or stopping "price gouging", something that was wildly popular: 66% of respondents on a Harris Poll approved [1]. After bringing on her brother-in-law and the former Biden campaign staff however, she never mentioned it again because Wall Street didn't like it.
Now you will find all sorts of articles online from serious outlets about how price gouging won't work and they'll simply put a bullhorn in front of economists who say that but there is precedent, namely when Nixon put in a freeze on prices and wages [2].
Now one can agree or disagree with such a policy, whether it's a long term fix or not and so on but we can still say the following:
1. There is absolutely opportunistic price gouging going on, way more than the avian flu would otherwise warrant. This is true for so many things beyond eggs; and
2. Life is becoming unaffordable, especially with housing and food. Ordinary people feel this. Politicians who address those issues will resonate with voters; and
3. Gutting the executive branch, which is currently going on, will only make this worse as there will be even less enforcement of price-fixing than there currently is.
[1]: https://theharrispoll.com/briefs/america-this-week-wave-240/
[2]: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/22/nixons-famous-price-...
>from serious outlets about how price gouging won't work
I think you meant to say "price freezes", "anti-gouging regulation" or similar.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eggs-us
No one appears to be reporting the drop yet, which is fair since it is not clear the trend will continue as fundamentals have not changed beyond possible imports from Turkey.
That said, Safeway is an expensive store. Shop at Aldi. It is cheaper. Aldi is so much cheaper that you likely could have groceries delivered from it via Instacart and still save money.
I guess I should have known that it was a misdirect...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kevin-hassett-face-the-nation-t...
And then there are other stores that saw this as an opportunity to raise egg prices to like $13 a dozen. Those eggs basically go unsold.
I think at this point the biggest factor in the egg supply crunch is that its so publicized and making people act poorly. As a result we see the effective number of available eggs crash as some of these are marked up and go unsold and some linger in someones fridge for a month before consumption. If everyone just bought their usual load of eggs maybe there wouldn’t even be a supply issue.
On the contrary - there's nothing more American than corporations abusing their oligopoly status for financial gain.
It was a really dumb thing to bring up and it chips away at the authors' credibility.
Edits: grammar
Layoff some hens
Naturally they could have it be a loss leader, but then I would expect them to be curtailing quantities. The shelves are fully stocked every time I'm there.
The other chains, all more expensive, have half or third stocked shelves and a dozen eggs is $7-8 and up.
The egg "shortage" is manufactured bullshit. There's only a handful of major egg producers and they're clearly in collusion.
Just like the shortages that supposedly lasted a while during the pandemic; CEOs were bragging on earnings that they had raised prices more than their costs went up, and they kept them high after costs dropped - they decided to keep them high because people would pay that.
Apparently they don't care that a lot of things folks in poverty / low income buy...aren't discretionary spending.
This is not getting solved for at least a decade, probably 50+ years before another regime change occurs.
No, they didn't. They campaigned on a vague anti-"price gouging" promise while pretending they didn't even know who Lina Khan, Johnathan Kanter and Rohit Chopra were.
Harris never made it clear if any of their jobs were safe, her advisor and brother-in-law Tony West was Uber's general counsel, and Mark Cuban, a proxy for Harris during the campaign, screamed from the rooftops how much he hated them all and how they would be gone if Harris won (until the campaign told him to stop saying that.)
The only people mentioning antitrust during the campaign were on the Republican side, all the way up to Vance at least, and they continue to engage even after winning. Democrats were campaigning on companies "doing better" and not "taking advantage" and on anything else that wouldn't be definable or enforceable.
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edit: it's important to mention that this is the second avian flu outbreak since covid to kill an enormous (but not as enormous as it sounds) number of birds, the previous outbreak was used as an excuse to raise the prices just as high, and egg profits skyrocketed. This happened entirely during the Biden administration. I don't know how Harris would have differed, but we have already seen the Biden response and it was to let everyone get away with whatever.
It’s so absolutely wild what the litmus tests are for each party. Absolutely fucking wild.
A little pessimistic, no?
People thought the blue wave would never end after Obama was elected.
No way to tell what the future holds.
Seeing as how there are a lot less principled people involved, and the oligarchs enjoy the idea of personal techno-fiefdoms the odds are at least non-negligible that the USA as a democracy could end.
What is Trump doing? Promoting imports of cheaper eggs from abroad, if nothing else. He is the first politician this century to make a big deal out of balancing the budget and our imports/exports. This will not be a painless process but something has to be done.
H&W may have campaigned on this, but there's two things critical to good advertising: offering what people want, and offering it credibly.
Maybe interesting to you and others largely insulated from the downsides of "a different strategy". Others might not find it so "interesting" at all ...
