There's a national egg crisis, and one company is making a lot of money | Hacker News Reader

There's a national egg crisis, and one company is making a lot of money

wsj.com

33 pointsimpish920822 comments

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/business/egg-prices-shortage-cal-maine-f...

This article is clearly written by a journalist and not an economist.

Retail prices of eggs going up is not proof that the egg suppliers are being exploitative. The end retailers need to be investigated for their margin on eggs for it to be determined who in the supply chain, if anyone, is exploiting a narrative to make excess profits.

The other piece of "evidence", Cal-Maine's quarterly P/L, is also useless, for all we know they decided to invest in less capital equipment than previously in Q3 2025. It's actually very curious to choose P/L over gross revenue to "prove" the point the author is pushing. Unless of course the point of the article is not a genuine economic/corporate analysis and instead a narratively political topic du jour by some untrained journalist.

I was waiting for the pay-off in your comment - the actual informed analysis.

Is there anything to say here other than a shrug of the shoulders?

People can prove things to be wrong without having to substitute their own complete analysis. This is how misinformation on the internet spreads so virulently; people can just post false claims and misleading content far faster than those with the know how to counter it can do their own complete analysis.

"for all we know", "is not proof" are not "proving wrong". It's sowing doubt of an analysis without anything concrete and without providing an alternative.

> The other piece of "evidence", Cal-Maine's quarterly P/L, is also useless, for all we know they decided to invest in less capital equipment than previously in Q3 2025

There's no serious moral or value distinction here; if you insist on pointing fingers you can, but at the end of the day the profits we see celebrated come with higher costs, and the continuing-to-increase wealth inequality in this country confirms that not everyone sees the benefit.

> You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket.

Or read the Cory Doctorow article exposing this months ago, https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/10/demand-and-supply/ . This link actually has text you can read with eyes. As opposed to the wsj link which is just javascript.

The Trump administration could do one thing that would bring accolades from all political sides, break this monopoly up at least for a while.

They aren't interested in accolades, they're interested in money

You're right but it could help the GOP in midterm elections which would further the agenda, though they would have to start now unless they just strong arm Cal-Maine like a green card holder or asylum seeker, he got all those law firms, universities and tech companies to bend the knee and kiss the ring.

They are interested in both. The Trump admin is full of corrupt greedy narcissist and part of being a narcissist is that you love people telling you have great you are.

wellllll, it might be more acurate to state that they have discovered how to manufacture there own accolades, and then help themselves to all the money they want, and handback the leftovers to whoever it is that validates the accolades and anything else they are doing. move fast and take everything, cept of course that, you know,bit of push back thing happening which in.the current state of affairs, boils down to, that they want all of the money so badly, that other people are just backing off, as it's dangerous to want any yourself, so then counterintuitivly, money looses value past a certain survival level, and here we are..... egg mafia, and smuggling operated by the same people doing the fentanil

He's a Reddit-type reactionary, and the furthest thing from a trained economist. That analysis takes no consideration of the supply chain at all, and doesn't consider that if the thesis is true, perhaps the store selling the eggs are the ones making the majority of excess profits and not the egg farms.

All throughout this saga of people screeching about eggs, I've never paid more than $4 a dozen for organic eggs. How are Trader Joe's and Market Basket continuing to offer such prices to customers (non-organic eggs continue to be around $3 per dozen), if the egg suppliers are the ones collecting excess profits? Surely the suppliers are not charging less to Market Basket, a small regional grocery chain, than they're charging to Stop & Shop right across the street, an internationally owned food conglomerate? Why is Stop & Shop not selling any eggs for less than $7 per dozen, then?

Ah, I suppose the WSJ is reddit-type reactionary too? Maybe it is useful having them repeat this story so people with (different) ideological biases can perceive it without discomfort on hearing Doctorow's name.

I just left a parent comment poking holes in the WSJ article, too. The author of the WSJ article, Patrick Thomas, is also a journalist, not an economist.

You kinda just said "nuh-uh" at the WSJ article without providing any counter-evidence. I wouldn't call that poking holes, IMO.

Eggs have often been a notable loss leader in supermarkets. The business tolerance of that status is reliant on specific cost expectations, and retailer behavior has varied in response to the price hikes. While egg prices are going to vary regionally, you can get a more authentic picture from restaurant bulk supplier prices.

Aldi used to charge 59 cents a dozen, limit two dozen. Not any more.

Aren't trained economists exactly the kind of people who'd suggest greedflation as a growth strategy?

Doctorow also focuses more on the decision NOT to expand flocks (which comes late in WSJj. Really easy to say “it’s just supply and demand” while obfuscating that you’re limiting supply.

There was an interesting juxtaposition on the page when I read it.

The story tells us that Cal-Maine's profits are 4 times what they were a year ago.

At the bottom of the page after the story where they list a variety of other WSJ stories they suggest to read, one of them when I read the page was to a story about how Cal-Maine missed Wall Street expectations in the their latest quarterly earnings report by a significant amount and it hurt the stock price. (The stories at the bottom change every time the page is loaded and I only saw that one once despite visiting the page several times).

Was Wall Street expecting their profits to actually grow more than the large growth the story reported?

It's difficult to tell if there is any wrong-doing without more evidence, which I guess the DOJ will find in time. It looks like their profits ebb/flow, and they are also set to pay a record of $313m in taxes on $991m income.

| Year | Net Income Common Stockholders | Tax Provision |

| ---- | ------------------------------ | ------------- |

| TTM | 990,814 | 312,872 |

| 2024 | 277,888 | 83,689 |

| 2023 | 758,024 | 241,818 |

| 2022 | 132,650 | 33,574 |

| 2021 | 2,060 | -12,009 |

I was sure the company was going to be Elon Musk's Eggs

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