How are the prices of eggs impacting your life?

[dingus@lemmy.world]

Where do you live that eggs are $17 a dozen???

[snowclone@lemmy.world]

The worst possible place to live ever! Ridgecrest, CA! Our sales tax is the highest in three counties, out cost of living matches the trendiest neighborhoods in LA and NYC! We have a military base that's all engineers, and we're an half hour from Death Valley! We get the hottest recorded tempatures on record every summer! We're one of the most earthquake prone locations in the world, we live in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevadas, and off base average income is worst then any other rural location! Our school bus drives are paid less than half of every single school district in the nation! And everyone's a racist piece of shit republican! Yee haw!
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Well, I am from here, and I do actual like most things about living here, but it's not going to work out much longer. Seriously our fast food locations upped their prices so high with greedflation that no one is bothering anymore. They put up ''now accepting EBT" that's food stamps, at all of them to try and get people back. It's crazy. There's an adittude in town of ''you all work at the base making 6 figures you can pay double for everything! Plus it costs at least $60 in gas to drive out of town to do anything, so if you want it done in town we're charging $60 extra because fuck you'' and that's always been the case, nothing new, but add inflation and stagnant wages, it's pretty fucking crazy.

[dannyboy@sh.itjust.works]

I've had to buy a few eggs since my chickens stopped laying for the winter but hopefully in a month or two I won't have to buy.

[gayhitler@lemmy.ml]

We eat fewer eggs.

That seems like nothing but eggs are an insanely cheap and fast way to get a decent meal quickly in the morning or to beef up, pun intended, a bowl of grits or oatmeal or something.

When we run out of eggs we don’t just not eat, we may make something that’s less filling or healthy or may spend more on breakfast because there just isn’t time to make breakfast and the only time permissive option is to pay 8-13 dollars for fast food on the way to work or eat peanuts and coke from a gas station.

So the egg price has knock on effects for us that are pretty big.

I’m gonna spend a little time and express something that isn’t being said in the comments:

people’s purchases don’t exist in a vacuum and the meaning of the price of an inexpensive source of protein like eggs nearly doubling in the span of a year or two isn’t just that it costs more.

Often, people shop. That sounds like a stupid thing to say, but the effect of the piggly wiggly implementing barcode scanners is impossible to deny. Shopping is where you go into a store with some goal, like a list, and some budget like the actual cash you have in your possession and try to make those two things match up.

If you’re like me you grew up going on these excursions maybe once a week or more with your parents and understood innately that if you can get something in the cart early, maybe pudding cups or that peanut butter with the chocolate mixed into it, there’s better chance of you enjoying that treat than if you wait till the end.

As adults you probably recognize that it’s because as a person progresses through the store they’re keeping a tally (my grandmother used a literal calculator) of how much of their budget they’ve run through. It’s a toss up weather they’ll be under enough to afford a very cost ineffective piece of candy from the shelf next to the checkout counter so getting that treat in the cart early means the person shopping has the chance to make little adjustments to make up for its price. I never understood the relationship between relatively expensive sugar added peanut butter and the type of green beans we ate that week but that’s one way it manifested. Cut versus French cut was a price difference and we’d eat the cheaper one to make up for some dalliance in the previous isles.

Eggs are in the dairy cooler section. Most stores have these all in one place at first because it was cheaper to run the wiring for them and then because of food safety practices and finally nowadays because everyone expects it. For reasons I’m not sure of, people tend to hit those isles last. It might be to get cold stuff in the cart last so those items don’t warm up in the store as long.

When you’re at the end of your trip to the store, on the last isle, trying to fit the list to your cash, the price of eggs is what determines your choices. If you put back that box of pop tarts you can get two dozen eggs and a loaf of bread. That’s breakfast for a family of four for a week in a pinch. If you swap the stoufers lasagna for a six pack of ramen noodles, a can of beans and some eggs you have a cheaper dinner for four plus some left over.

If you want to have nicer things to eat and can’t afford to buy them but do have plenty of time, eggs are an ingredient that’s hard to replace in baking. There are substitutes but they’re sometimes more expensive and involve being able to learn a new recipe or do some experimenting which just isn’t in the cards for plenty of people. If eggs cost more it means less brownies, cakes, noodles and a bunch of other stuff because suddenly the recipe costs more.

Eggs are the gateway to making your grocery trip work for a lot of people and so when you might not know the price of that can of beans off the top of your head, you absolutely know what eggs cost and make adjustments accordingly. Maybe you buy lower grade eggs like “a” instead of “aa” or you buy more eggs and less meat.

The price of eggs is the backstop to being poor and healthy while maintaining whatever position on the 5d chessboard of equipment, time, money, calories and experience that you occupy or want to be in.

A lot of the posts and comments I’ve seen that specifically reference eggs have a sneering tone or are either denying the price changes or downplaying their effect. I personally think that expressing such sentiments makes you at best inexperienced and ignorant and at worst a bad person, but opinion aside, those kinds of sentiments aren’t helping anyone to understand who you are unless you just want to be seen as an out of touch elite.

To go a little further, the price of eggs is an undeniable metric that shows wages haven’t risen with inflation+cpi+externalities. It means there’s a problem in a way that can’t be denied or misdirected from.

If eggs were 50-100% more expensive and wages had risen across the board by that same 50-100% then no one would be complaining except old timers in the rocking chairs in front of the gas station.

That’s not what’s happening and now the things that let poor people keep living and not quite poor people buy all their groceries are 50-100% more expensive. If that isn’t alarming to you it should be.

[pseudo@jlai.lu]

It is impacting my life a lot. It affect my meal plan, the balance of my meals, my overall food budget, my snaking possibilities. It also ruined my mood whenever a see how quickly the money I spend on eggs adds up to the cost of owning a hen!
Also eggs retail have consentrate most of today retail malpractice.

I'm not from the USA btw.

[scott@lem.free.as]

I'd love to see your snake possibilities. Slithering, constricting and dislocating your jaw.

[pseudo@jlai.lu]

I would love to see it too. Eggs swallowing, egg laying... Unfortunatly, I don't have snake. I meant snack.

[psythik@lemmy.world]

Haven't affected my life one bit. It people weren't mentioning egg prices on Lemmy, I would have had no idea that there was a shortage.

Never understood everyone's obsession with eggs. There are so many other sources of protein out there.

[thewolfofsouthend@lemmygrad.ml]

Why is eggs being made into such a huge issue?

[sudoer777@lemmy.ml]

Not at all, I don't eat eggs

[bonesofthemoon@lemmy.world]

Checkmate I'm vegan so I don't have to worry about that. My spouse used to work in a winery that had a chicken coop and bring home many boxes of eggs for free before I went vegan, and you could keep them on the counter. Room temperature fresh eggs beat grocery store eggs by a million years for cooking with, go to a farm and buy a few boxes, they keep a very long time, and learn how to make Frank Prisinzano's crispy egg recipe.

[communism@lemmy.ml]

Not at all. I don't eat eggs. Never knew the prices went up (beyond just general inflation) till I saw this post.

[thoro@lemmy.ml]

Staple breakfast food. Also used in plenty other meals. Ramen, etc. Just a very common food in people's diets so people are less likely to forgo them, like milk and bread.

And they're a lot more expensive than they have been so people notice and use it as an indicator of rising prices.

[nitefox@sh.itjust.works]

They still cost 3 euro for 8 eggs, right?

[tenniswaffles@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

People don't need them, they like them.

[atempuser23@lemmy.world]

I feel this joke needs an eggsplination for those that get it.

[jay4@lemmy.ml]

Either too rich to check prices or too broke to step into a store.

[tobogganablaze@lemmus.org]

I actually checked yesterday, it's $9.40 for a dozen.

[bigboismith@lemmy.world]

In Europe tho price off eggs are still stable. Even if they rise I live rural so I know some local egg producers so I'll always have access to cheap eggs.

[hadriscus@lemm.ee]

Locally they've gone up to 50cts an egg, because most chicks died in last month's cyclone.