https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CALM/cal-maine-foo...
> For the 26-week fiscal period ending in November 2021, gross profits were $50.4 million. In 2022 for the same period, gross profits were $535.3 million.
They had a near zero profit margin for 2021. And based on their record of profit margins, it seems like their business has been volatile since 2015 or so.
I am not an expert on the egg business or food in general, but there is no reason that a 10x increase in profit has to mean malfeasance.
Volatile businesses can have large swings in profit margin, otherwise no one would want to do them.
But that is beside the point that there is no set nominal “appropriate” profit margin for a given business.
That does not mean that businesses with high profit margins are not colluding, or corrupt, or acting in ways that should be illegal.
But it also means you cannot simply conclude from a few quarters of higher profit margins that a business is behaving unethically.
That is what makes it gouging. The profit margin was greatly increased through potential collusion and/or unfair pricing for what they correctly perceive as an inelastic good.