Eggflation is just more price-gouging

Cal-Maine Foods owns every egg brand you’ve ever heard of and its profits are up 65%.

4 min readJan 23

Humpty Dumpty, smashed and crying at the bottom of a wall. To his left, a tiny Jacobin makes ready to decapitate an aristocrat in a guillotine. The guillotine’s basket is full of eggs.

The very instant that world governments rolled out relief funds so quarantine-shuttered businesses wouldn’t fail and covid-furloughed workers wouldn’t starve, corporate executives started rubbing their forelegs together and planning to raise prices and blame it on inflation brought on by letting The Poors have too much money.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

They weren’t exactly subtle about it: the CEOs of America’s largest companies got on their quarterly investor calls and chortled about the willingness of “consumers” to blame inflation for the price-hikes they were cramming down their throats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/20/quiet-part-out-loud/#profiteering

Republicans — always happy to serve as useful idiots for monopolists — stickered gas-pumps up and down the country with Joe Biden “I Did That” stickers, even as gas companies declared record profits and boasted to investors about how they were able to drill directly into drivers’ wallets under cover of inflation.

In absolutely unrelated news, eggs are suddenly incredibly expensive. A dozen “conventional” eggs are currently averaging $2.88, which is double what they cost a year ago. Supposedly, this is caused by a supply chain shock (an avian flu outbreak).

But — and this will shock you, I know — the single company that dominates the US egg industry, Cal-Maine Food (AKA CALM — ugh) is making record profits. Their Q3/22 net was up 65% from the year before. Cal-Maine’s Q4–22 sales were up record-smashing 110% — $801.7m:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/13/business/egg-prices-cal-maine-foods/index.html

Egg prices have climbed month-on-month even as other prices have stabilized or fallen. In its communications to investors, Cal-Maine’s eminently guillotineable CFO Max Bowman attributed the monopolist’s good fortune to “significantly…