Easter is upon us. The time for decorating eggs and hiding them for … some reason. There actually seems to be a lot of history behind the tradition, but we’re not focusing on history today. Our topic is a bit more contemporary.
The United States is still reeling from the spiked inflation rate in 2020, rates have come down but we feel the echoes of price increases that haven’t been seen in over 40 years.
On top of this, we’re seeing a novel strain of bird flu that has killed an unfathomable amount of chickens, reducing domestic egg production and making prices soar to record highs.
And as if that wasn’t straining things enough, there have been massive tariffs introduced — now threatened at as much as a staggering 245% — causing aftershocks through the market as businesses struggle to even comprehend how operations could continue under that level of taxation.
In short, it’s not a great time to be buying eggs.
But buy eggs we shall! We’re Americans, damn it! We’re not going to let something like fiscal responsibility stop us from doing what we want. It hasn’t worked before and it won’t work now!
Hmm. The rent still has to get paid, though. And The Last of Us season 2 just came out, so that sub’s going to stay active for another month or two. We don’t like to show restraint, but we’ll do it for shelter and Pedro Pascal. So how are we going to stretch out our egg budget? I guess we’re going to have to choose which comes first: the chicken egg or the Cadbury egg.
The average price of eggs is $6.27/dozen in the US, as of March. As a price comparison, a 12 count of Grade A, non-organic, store branded eggs at my local Giant cost $8.29/dozen. For a historical reference, in February 2020 (the benchmark I now use for just about everything) the national average was $1.49/dozen.
So against pre-Covid costs the US has seen over a 4x jump in price, and I’m personally seeing a staggering 5.5x increase. As a final point of reference, the value of the S&P 500 based SPY has grown 1.58x in that same time period. Maybe I should have been keeping my eggs in one basket.
And in the other corner, the Cadbury creme egg. An Easter tradition as essential as the Easter Bunny and picking fake grass out of the couch in mid-May. The egg, in keeping with tradition, has been notoriously hard to hunt down. Walking the shelves of candy, I found not a single over-sweet ovoid. I found marshmallow Peeps large enough that I lost feeling in my toes just from walking by them, but no eggs.
So we do what everyone else does when their brick and mortar stores no longer have what they need. We go to Amazon (this works so often it’s almost like they planned it). Sure enough a store display box of Cadbury eggs is one of the top results. 4 dozen individually wrapped diabetic comas. All for the low, low price of $27.98.
($27.98 for 4 dozen) / 4 = (~$6.99/dozen)
I didn’t confirm the math until I started writing this, and I honestly didn’t expect it to be this close. The national average is still just under the creme egg, just, but my local eggs have been undercut. We find ourselves at a tipping point. For the first time in human history it may be the economical choice to have a breakfast of creme eggs and toast rather than chicken eggs. Omelettes will be forever changed.