By contrast, eggs went up quite a bit a couple of years back due to a combination of increased demand and a coinciding outbreak of avian flu. But while one could feed chickens less or selectively breed for smaller eggs, the actual manufacturing of the egg is basically up to the animals rather than the accountants. If you crack open a fresh egg you pretty much know what you're getting and it isn't easy to change. It's not feasible to sell cartons with only 5 or 10 eggs rather than the more common amounts of 6 or 12 (or 30 if you have an insatiable appetite for them as I do). So there normal forces of supply and demand have reasserted themselves and prices have (somewhat) returned to where they were a few years ago. It's been easier to observe changes than for items like beef which I buy more intermittently.
It was sufficient proof to convince a full jury, which makes them guilty of price fixing. They can certainly appeal, that's how the court process works. It's how all trials in the US work.
Also, I have to take issue with the insinuation that these egg producers are the underdogs with a small business budget for lawyers themselves. They're the largest egg producers in the US with billions of dollars worth of assets.
Going back to your prior comment:
>It's amusing to point out eggs as some kind of holy grail of how price moves naturally, when the two largest egg producers (Cal-Maine Foods and Rose Acre Farms) were just fined in federal court for price fixing.
I mean, prices did move naturally. The egg producers reduced supply and price went up "naturally". In the case of covid "greedflation", you don't really need an explanation to explain the reduced supply and/or increased demand: covid and stimulus checks explain the situation pretty well.
Sure, but it's still the lowest burden of proof. My point isn't to make Cal-Maine the underdog. It's to point out the irony that anticapitalists will suddenly trust capitalists 100% whenever they say something that agrees with them, regardless of the motivations of such a claim. It's like when people use Microsoft's antitrust lawsuits as evidence as that all billionaires can't be trusted, yet they're completely uncritically accepting arguments made by lawyers who represented other billionaires.
Of course the market is perfectly efficient, but 90% of the time it is, especially for commodities like eggs. It may be the case that this is getting worse, but no it is not possible for companies to suddenly decided to be greedy in 2021.
This seems like a twisting of the facts.
First of all, one does not need to be "anticapitalist" to believe that price-fixing is bad.
Second of all, it's less that we will suddenly "trust capitalists" and more that when you've got an actual trial in our actual justice system (whether civil or criminal) and solid evidence can be presented to prove that one set of capitalists was acting in bad faith (that just happened to be in a way that happened to hurt other capitalists as well as regular people)...
...it holds much more weight than just "someone saying something", whatever preexisting biases it might agree with.
Afaict, there was no direct evidence of any conspiracy. The egg producers were exporting more eggs and giving chickens more room. The former can be explained by market conditions and the latter can be explained by pressure from animal rights organizations.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/antitrust/kraft-kellogg-go-aft...
https://abc7.com/eggs-egg-prices-cal-maine-foods-profits/130...
It's beyond absurd to suggest that Cal-Maine deserves a "reward" of > 700% profit for their chickens not getting a disease. I can't even fathom your reasoning there. Their "reward" should be "having plenty of eggs to sell when some of their competitors don't" not record high price increases for no reason in the middle of a global pandemic where household debt is at record levels and families are struggling to keep food on their tables and roofs over their heads.
A tech toy and food, what a comparison... What's next, let's jack up water price?
So you deserve more money for providing a luxury instead of a necessity? Limits placed on how much you could profit from food never made food cheaper. It has discouraged people from providing food.
It's not that I think eggs are immune to price fixing, but rather that the packaging of fresh eggs isn't easy to change; the eggs themselves can't be altered and while you could sell fewer of them per box consumers (in the US at least) are used to multiples of 6 and would immediately notice. In contrast you could reduce the volume of, say, detergent but redesign the container, and many consumers might not notice that they were getting 6-7% less.
What I'm getting as is that while the causes of egg price changes might be legit or greed, it isn't as easy to hide the price changes from the consumer as when you operate a whole production line and can alter the appearance and volume of the package itself.
4grain cage free
Egglands Best
Farmhouse Eggs
Land O Lakes
Fassio Egg Farms
Rocky Mountain Eggs
Red River Valley Egg Farm
Meadowcreek foods
Specialty Eggs Inc
Southwest Specialty Eggs Inc
ProEgg Inc.
American Egg Products Inc.
Texas Egg Products LLC
Wharton County Foods
Benton County Foods
Sunups
Sunny MeadowTemporary high egg prices were at least partly caused by a temporary supply shortage from a bird flu outbreak. That was somewhat different from the monetary issues which usually drive inflation.
https://apnews.com/article/bird-flu-outbreak-turkey-egg-chic...
Here is my theory:
Consumers generally have an "acceptable" price range in their head for each product. When most retailers have prices within that range, it is really hard for a single company to raise prices above that range, as they'll lose a lot of business. But, COVID forced input prices to rise and fluctuate quite a bit. Once companies raised prices to account for input costs, consumers lost their sense of "normal". Then, companies were able to get away with charging prices even more, and could get away with raising prices above their competitors without losing any business.
You're right in the sense that this idea that corporate psychology just randomly changed over the last few years makes just as little sense as saying customers skimping and building up savings in 2020-2021 contributed to inflation in 2022.
I understand people look at their grocery bill and get mad, since nothing seems to bring down food though.
Still waiting to see the ‘prices come back down’ from the parent post, meanwhile our main shopping companies all posted record profits.
Ahh, just realized $1.3 USD is about $2 AUD or ~$5.1USD/gallon, so yeah that tracks I guess.
For many years, consolidation, deregulation, and other factors have led to a gradual but marked decrease in genuine competition in all sectors. As long as things were still trundling along as normal, the people at the top didn't really think about this too hard.
Then COVID came. Between supply shocks, lockdowns, and various other temporary effects, we were told to expect inflation. Indeed, for a time, there were genuine, honest-to-god price spikes rippling through the economy directly because of the pandemic.
But the causes of those spikes subsided.
And the prices didn't come back down all the way.
The people at the top realized that, because of how much we were all being told to beware of inflation, they could simply make the inflation happen and pocket the extra, and no one would notice.
And for...I forget exactly how long, but well over a year, at least, the public broadly didn't notice.
Now, we're noticing, and trying to make clear that this is what's happening.
But people like you are still trying to act like this is impossible, companies can't really cause inflation purely by raising prices, that would be ridiculous, this is purely the aforementioned price shocks (that ended years ago, while the inflation didn't).
In my experience around here, MOST things have nearly DOUBLED in price since COVID. And the prices aren't going down. They're just holding steady-ISH
Gas is not really down though. It just stopped shooting up (which was my original point).
Take a look: https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_gas_price
December 2019 - 2.67 12/2019 This time last year (12/2022) 3.20 (+20%) Today (12/2023) 3.36 (+5%)
(1) The majority of companies expected their input costs to rise so quickly increased prices to compensate, when they didn't rise as much as expected they slowly lowered prices to remain competitive. Since nearly everyone was reading the market the same way, they weren't punished for this.
(2) Companies became really greedy a few years ago, and increased prices just because they could. Recently they have been less greedy, and prices have come down.