I paid $7.99 for a dozen eggs this morning

I've been blogging about bird flu for a long time and wondering when it would show up in grocery shopping.  The graph above is from Bloomberg.

I'm not screaming bloody murder because I can still have breakfast for under $2, but of course this cost is going to metastasize through the food production chain to affect everything else that contains eggs or egg proteins.

American restaurants are falling victim to a national egg shortage that has already plagued grocery stores from New York City to San Francisco and sent prices to $7 a carton.... the breakfast chain is planning to switch to liquid eggs for dishes such as omelets, scrambled eggs and batters, he said. It has less wiggle room for other offerings such as sunny-side-up eggs.

Some 104 million egg-laying hens have been lost since the outbreak started in 2022, with 29 million killed since October, according farmer group United Egg Producers. That’s resulted in shortages at grocery stores at a time when shoppers just keep on buying more.

Organic eggs have been in short supply too. Over the weekend, refrigerated shelves were almost completely bare at a ShopRite in Brooklyn. The few crates left were priced at about $1 per egg.

It will be interesting to see how this gets blamed on the Biden administration.