Eggs have gotten so expensive in New York that some delis are selling them like “loosie cigarettes,” in little bags of two or three. “People don’t have enough money to buy a dozen eggs, so I have to sell them separately,” Fernando Rodriguez, owner of Pamela’s Green Deli in the Bronx, told the New York Post. Like many stores in the city, the deli charges $10.99 for a dozen.
“I used to give everybody two eggs for breakfast,” said Frankie Vasquez, a customer, as he picked up a bag of three eggs. “Now I’ll scramble these for my two sons, me and my brother to share.”
Across the country the price of eggs has doubled since August 2023, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts egg prices will continue to rise, going up another 41% in 2025.
But a close look at how this has played out against the epidemic of bird flu is instructive about the reality of the dog-eat-dog capitalist system. Some small farmers have been wiped out when their hens tested for bird flu. But a monopoly of four giant companies that sell half of the eggs in the U.S. have raised prices far beyond what’s needed to cover the loss of 15% of their birds hit by the disease.
Cal-Maine Foods, run by the four daughters who inherited the company from Fred “Big Chicken” Adams, is the country’s largest egg producer. It reported $356 million in gross quarterly profits last month, a fourfold increase over the previous year.
These companies were found liable for price fixing in 2023 and ordered to pay $53 million in damages to the likes of Kraft Heinz, General Mills, and Nestle, which use eggs in their products. They are some of the monopolistic companies that control the vast majority of food found on grocery store shelves in the U.S.
What’s involved isn’t “price gouging,” as the liberal press claims. This is simply the character of the capitalist system, where the drive for profit, not the quality of their product or the interests of working people, is permanent.