WTF is up with egg prices?

[regexcellent]

Just because I never buy them doesn't mean I've never eaten them. I have misguided friends who buy them.

[Jon Miller]

Almost every meat eater I know prefers better quality meat and considers American meat to be garbage.

This is even true in Chile and South Africa, where people are cheap and relatively poor to the US.

JM

[PLATO]

Almost every meat eater I know prefers better quality meat and considers American meat to be garbage.

This is even true in Chile and South Africa, where people are cheap and relatively poor to the US.

JM

The U.S. exports its best beef. South Korea, for example rejects beef that Americans would pay extra for. You can find the good stuff, but it is very expensive domestically.

[PLATO]

Eggs...Walmart brand this morning: $1.39/dz
Egglands Best: $2.49/dz

[C0ckney]

most brazilians i know who've been to the US say the meat is poor compared to what one finds in brazil. i've never tried it myself, though.

[KrazyHorse]

It depends what you buy. Supermarket cheap steak is not great. If you want better quality you can pay more.

EDIT: For instance, the steak I generally buy goes for about 18-25$ a pound. But if I wanted a much cheaper cut I could get wholly acceptable steak for 6$ a pound at the supermarket.

https://craftbutchery.com/

[KrazyHorse]

As for egg quality: I have never noticed any difference between the cheapest available eggs and more expensive eggs. I agree that if you have ethical concerns about egg farming the cheapest eggs are unlikely to meet your requirements. But I caution against conflating the two concerns (quality and ethics) as they are sometimes but not always linked.

I also am not particularly worried about the living condition of chickens. My concerns about farming are in descending order:

1) environmental (especially the currently uncertain potential impact of sub therapeutic dosages of antibiotics on resistant strains of bacteria)
2) suffering of mammals
3) everything else

The really unfortunate thing about ethical and quality considerations is that legitimately better quality and process is often only available in a bundle with downright harmful practices like locovorism.

[onodera]

2) suffering of mammals

Didn't expect that to be ranked that high by you, KH.

[Dinner]

There's no difference between free range and other eggs except one is a huge waste of money. They all taste the same hardboiled and scrambled.

The color of the yolk is different, more orange than yellow, and they are marginally more nutritious but that is about it besides animal welfare.

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Back on thea in topic, it appears the state proposition which set up the new larger cage requirements for battery hen cages also included a provision which is being challenged in court as an illegal restraint on interstate commerce. It requires all eggs sold in the state to also conform to the larger cage requirements.

This means almost no eggs from out of state can legally be sold here. The proposition was dumb and I voted against it. If you are concerned about the welfare of egg hens then vote with your wallet and only buy eggs which are produced to your personal standards but don't try to legally restrict everyone else due to your personal ethics code. The ****ing hippies are worse than the religious douche bags sometimes with how they try to legislate their morality on to everyone else.

So we have prices going up because of the expensive cage redesign, decreased availability because of restrictions on the sale of eggs not produced the new way, decreases in production due to the new designs meaning smaller flocks, and now shortages in other states meaning our fancy animal welfare eggs are getting exported. All of this adds up to $5 a dozen eggs.

[PLATO]

I was at at Vons yesterday and their regular large AAA eggs, not organic or free range, we're $5.49 a dozen. I didn't buy any because someone is going to toss in a hand job before I pay almost $0.50 an egg. Google says there has been an outbreak of avian flu in a few Midwestern states and that federal law says the whole flock has to be put down if even a single bird tests positive so I get why egg production in those states are down.

What I don't get is that here in California most of our eggs are produced in state and our birds haven't been effected. Are fresh eggs really such a fungable commodity that they can ship them around the country profitably? I mean they have a limited shelf life so it sounds like they wouldn't travel all that far. Is this just profit taking or are eggs from the western states being sent back east to make up for their production shortages?

Back on thea in topic, it appears the state proposition which set up the new larger cage requirements for battery hen cages also included a provision which is being challenged in court as an illegal restraint on interstate commerce. It requires all eggs sold in the state to also conform to the larger cage requirements.

This means almost no eggs from out of state can legally be sold here. The proposition was dumb and I voted against it. If you are concerned about the welfare of egg hens then vote with your wallet and only buy eggs which are produced to your personal standards but don't try to legally restrict everyone else due to your personal ethics code. The ****ing hippies are worse than the religious douche bags sometimes with how they try to legislate their morality on to everyone else.

So we have prices going up because of the expensive cage redesign, decreased availability because of restrictions on the sale of eggs not produced the new way, decreases in production due to the new designs meaning smaller flocks, and now shortages in other states meaning our fancy animal welfare eggs are getting exported. All of this adds up to $5 a dozen eggs.

Looks like you have your answer.

[KrazyHorse]

Didn't expect that to be ranked that high by you, KH.

To be clear, quality ranks higher than everything else. Nonhuman utility is a distance behind human utility.

[Hauldren Collider]

There was a time when I paid close attention to the prices of the things I was buying at the grocery store until I realized price differences of maybe $5 to $10 a week on my grocery bill is not a meaningful amount of money, and I just started buying what I felt like eating. Food is cheap. I'll pinch pennies on expenses that are actually large enough to be important.

[Dinner]

I have always been a cheap bastard, it is a way of life. I am the type of underhanded dirt bag who will find the lowest advertised price on something like a tv, go to a store which says they will beat it, get their offer in writing (usually something like the other guy's lowest advertised price minus 5%), promise him I will buy it from him... Then stab him in the back by going to a 3rd competitor show g him the writing offer and demanding he take 5% off that price too. That way I actually get the item for 10% lower than the lowest advertised price instead of just 5% lower.

If suppose if I was really cheap I would start using coupons but that is too much effort for me. I do use a grocery shopping app which helps me automatically find price matches and manufacturer's coupons. All you have to do is scan the stuff with your phone before putting it in the cart. You'd be amazed how much you can save that way. Easily $200-$300 a month.

[Aeson]

I pay attention to prices, but it's done on the fly and generally affects ratios/timing of items. No real shopping around (not much of an option here anyway).

For example I usually pick up a 250ml honeybear when I take my ~monthly trip to Tag. I noticed honey had gotten a lot more expensive (+$4/250ml) last time so I got more Goya and strawberry jam instead. Saved a few bucks and the time spent was essentially nil. Goya right under the honey, jam the next isle over that I was going to anyway. We have some honey still. Next time I see honey on a better deal I'll pick up extra. There are so many interchangeable items, and the price ratio vs my preference ratio is the determining factor. The money saved always matters. That $4 could be another 125g pack of bacon. (Or something more useful/valuable if I've already got enough.)

I should probably take a bit more time when shopping, especially in cases where I'm just going to end up waiting on the bus anyway rather than using a few more minutes in the store. Not like that time is going to do me much good anyway.

When Net does the grocery shopping we save quite a bit more than when I do it.

[Nikolai]

Hah! Current price in USD in Norway, the expensive country in the frozen north, is 3.08.