With the recent widespread case of avian flu, eggs have become an even more luxurious commodity than they had already been rising to become. 

Households around the nation are scrambling to find the best-priced eggs to feed their families, some venturing to hiding eggs around the market, and others even reverting to theft. This frantic behavior of egg-seeking citizens around the United States just shows how outrageous this situation has become for our society.

To give some background, this egg crisis seems to have begun way back in 2022 when the poultry-affected flu struck millions of chickens, leading to their eggs being unsellable. From this particular outbreak alone, approximately 50 million chickens were lost or compromised. 

Other factors of this shortage include a worker shortage and an increase in the price of chicken feed.

Of course, these combined with the lack of egg supply in the actual grocery stores themselves led to lower sales of eggs. 

With the combination of all the factors listed above, inflation rates have also played their part in this debacle. 

The increase in prices going into wages, transport, and bird care supplies exceeded the budgets of these farmers, leading some to shut down their businesses as they could not meet production demands. 

All of these economic aspects feed into each other, creating a downward spiral into lower supply, higher demand, and overall continuously inflating prices. This spiral has also been proven to allow grocers to take advantage of the pattern and raise prices higher for their own benefit.

This led to “price gouging” throughout grocers. Markets would claim they were selling “cage-free”, ethically sourced eggs when they were really just selling the general “unethical” egg at a hiked-up, premium price. 

MSNBC even reports the court findings of a “price conspiracy scheme”.

Furthermore, this year, a whole new layer of this egg mania has been added. 

In Pennsylvania, a trailer carrying 100,000 eggs was stolen during the worst part of the shortage. This amounted to about $40,000 of stolen eggs and highlighted the extent to which these prices have reached. 

To really show what this “extent” means, the prices speak for themselves. 

Back in 2022, the cost of a dozen eggs across the nation averaged $1.93, and in 2023, they shot up to a whopping $4.82. 

This is about a 150% increase. 

But, as of February 2025, reports of $9 dozen have been popping up around the country. Specifically, on February 22, the cost of a dozen eggs nationwide cost an average of $8.03.

Some customers are purchasing an absurd amount of cartons, so some stores have placed purchase restrictions in retaliation.

This can be loosely compared to the start of the COVID-19 uprising and the mass grocery store terror that accompanied it, although this particular crisis is minimized to just the egg aisle, rather than the canned food and toilet paper.

Typical households, bakeries, and restaurants alike are all greatly impacted by this crisis leading to inflation breaking out from just the dairy aisle and bleeding into typical economic facets throughout American communities.