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Comment by BashiBazouk | Hacker News Reader

"and not even for the lovingly cared-for, cage-free variety"

Which oddly did not increase in price much. I was in a discussion once on a forum and brought up that eggs around me (PNW) were still in the $6 for 18 when everyone else was complaining about $10 for a dozen. Next time I bought eggs, the ones I buy were the same price as always but the normal white eggs were in fact $10 a dozen...

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I had the same experience on the east coast-- farmers market eggs continued to be $5-$8/doz (depending on size) even as the normal white eggs raced to $10. I think the "conventional wisdom" was that these small farmers weren't hit by the flu in the way that the big industrial farmers were, and that their living conditions made them hardier or less susceptible. I guess I now assume that these small farms relying on direct sales were simply oblivious to the bidding shenanigans.

In many places, farmer markets aren't a thing. I live in South Florida and there is just one farmer's market near me that's open on weekends. I tried the organic eggs at $3 each, or geese eggs at $5, meh, stinky and gamey. So I get my eggs through Publix or Winn Dixie and they charge what they want to. It's pure price gouging, a dozen of eggs was under a $1 6 years ago, now it's $4. I wonder how the things compare in Europe, eggs there taste on another level better.

I'm also in the PNW. The egg thing seemed weird to me when the local organic eggs didn't budge at all. We had bird deaths in the wild from the flu as well, so I know it was out here.

Not weird. In general egg demand is very inelastic. Businesses selling products containing eggs do not change their output based on egg prices.

However, specialty eggs sold to consumers rather than businesses will be much more elastic, and thus there will be much less price change with supply changes.

This reminds me of a big fraud in my country: a bunch of farmers sold normal eggs as organic. As you know the difference in price is big enough to make it worthwhile.

My friends in the midwest always tell me egg prices have actually never been lower. They've been tracking them for a while now, and they were low during 2014-2020, then had a massive, unexpected jump, then another massive decrease starting 2025. Curious to know what the reasons are here.

Which wouldn’t be that odd if the conspiracy theory was true (since your local farms presumably wouldn’t be invited to the price-fixing meetings).

Local farms are rarely selling directly to grocery stores. They sell to a number of organic/free range/whatever companies like Vital Farms that aggregate from the smaller farmers and sell to grocery stores (or grocery store suppliers).

At least that is my understanding of the way the scale is managed.

I was mainly reacting to that line which seemed to me a throw away that was never returned too implying: and if normal egg prices are high just think about those more expensive brown eggs. Which is too bad, noticing the higher end eggs not moving much in price might help the general argument of the article...

It doesn't take secret meetings; the industrial players are subject to regulatory costs that a small local farmer isn't. When "big egg" had to slaughter millions of layers because of a birdflu outbreak, then sell a limited amount of eggs while they waited for new chicks to mature, your local farmer's birds kept laying without an interruption in production or a sudden repeat of the startup costs.

Eggs at my Aldi never went much above $3 a dozen. The cage-free, etc hovered around $6 at the worst (normal is around $3-something)

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