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Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

I guess during one of the last surges the question I had was: Isn't a big egg company damned if they do or don't? If I'm a massive egg farmer in an area that's untouched by bird flu, and I keep my prices low: then I'm the bad guy who's running struggling operations out of business. If I raise my prices to stay in line with those operations, now I'm colluding in some way. If we break up big companies so they don't have the kind of power over the market, we trade lower prices for more resilience since the lowest prices are going to come from the highest scale.

I dunno. It's a weird situation. And eggs are particularly weird because, as the article notes, people are definitely willing to pay more for them; the low prices have less to do with true demand and more to do with competition.

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The problem isn’t setting prices in response to market conditions, it’s colluding with other companies to raise prices in unison. That’s what makes something a cartel and that’s what happened here. And I don’t mean raising prices because you saw that someone else did, this was literal phone calls and texts about when prices should go up.

I mean, given a lot of the rhetoric that happens around egg prices, it does seem like setting prices in response to market conditions is a problem to many.

You just read an article describing how egg prices were not set in response to market conditions, and were instead manipulated by egg producers. Are you saying that you think, based on the rhetoric, that in an alternate reality where egg prices were actually increased due to market pressures, that people would still complain? I mean, probably.

The purpose of my first sentence was to establish that I was I bringing in some associated thoughts into an article where some alleged collusion is happening, so it's not correct to read it as an attempted refutation of the article.

If there's actual collusion: sure, that's bad! But to be clear, this is not the total solution to the egg price puzzle; we don't know the extent to which this impacted the market.

I guess I just don't like the idea that every price spike is read as greed, because you lose the ability to tell cartel behavior from a supply shock, and actual bad behavior gets less scrutiny, not more. I'm seeing it in this thread: capitalism bad, republicans bad, khan good, etc. Perhaps I did the same thing in the opposite direction.

Consumers complain about higher prices. News at 11.

The issue is not the complaining, it’s the illegal behavior.

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