Are you saying that there's insufficient supply for some reason other than consolidation? I can think of many reasons, but they all share consolidation as a common factor when tracing back to the root causes.
I could go on. I agree consolidation is a problem, but it's certainly not the only one.
I would add on class warfare. There's not really any such thing as corporation vs corporation anymore, it's class warfare with capital vs not, and capital knows it. All the X companies just raise prices uniformly because why would anyone not do it and ruin the party?
But that didn't happen. Eggs became more scarce, and therefore more valuable, and thus prices universally went up. People who still wanted eggs badly enough and could afford the high prices paid a premium for them. Other people bought and ate something else instead.
And then when the supply came back up, egg prices came back down. This is how the system is supposed to work, and it's exactly what I would expect to happen in a situation like this.
You're saying you really think that whole story had nothing to do with supply constraints, and it's all a big corporate class warfare price fixing conspiracy?
Tech vendors are increasing prices "to keep up with inflation" :eye_roll: [0]. Nothing at all to do with supply and demand here.
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/16/tech_vendor_price_hik...
> But that didn't happen. Eggs became more scarce, and therefore more valuable, and thus prices universally went up. People who still wanted eggs badly enough and could afford the high prices paid a premium for them. Other people bought and ate something else instead.
So the egg supply went down. Yes, you'd expect to see empty shelves, because there were fewer eggs to buy, and they're useful. Instead what we saw were shelves as full as before, because of prices went up. What that means is, people were already buying fewer eggs, because the supply was so much lower, but because of prices going up, people bought even fewer than that. There were a shortage of eggs, and yet because of prices being raised, they couldn't even sell through on the eggs they had.
How much of the reduction in egg consumption was due to reduced supply, and how much was due to raised prices? No idea.
What would I expect to see? If the egg supply dropped precipitously, I'd expect a company which makes their money selling eggs to make less money. Or raise prices so that they make the same amount of money. Instead, they raised prices so they made way, way more money.