Dollar Tree has stopped selling eggs after strong inflation pushed the cost of a dozen to $4.21, a triple increase from two years ago.
The discount chain said the eggs won’t be sold again until at least the fall, but the strike could last longer.
Average egg prices dipped slightly to $4.21 per dozen in February 2023 after reaching a record high of $4.82 in January. In February 2021, the price was just $1.59 a dozen.
The increase is partly due to a global outbreak of bird flu, but runaway inflation has also driven prices up.
In 2021, Dollar Tree raised its prices from $1 to $1.25 for the first time in 35 years, as rising prices meant it couldn’t stock certain products. Some stores now also offer items like frozen meals for $3 and $5.
Average egg prices dipped slightly to $4.21 a dozen in February 2023 after hitting a record $4.82 in January, more than triple what they were in early 2021.
In 2021, Dollar Tree raised prices from $1 to $1.25 for the first time in 35 years, as rising prices meant it couldn’t stock certain items.
The eggs are very sold before the Easter and Easter spring holidays.
Its cost in the Consumer Price Index, which tracks the average costs of popular household items, is also a good indicator of how inflation is affecting the finances of American workers.
Dollar Tree also operates 8,200 Family Dollar stores, selling items up to $10. Those stores still have eggs, a spokesman said.
Rival discount retailer Dollar General Corp currently has “solid in-stock levels” of eggs at its roughly 19,000 stores, the company said in a statement.
Bird flu has been blamed for the staggering rise in egg costs after more than 40 million laying hens were culled in the US last year, marking the worst outbreak on record.
However, Farm Action, a farmer-led advocacy group, says the ‘real culprit’ is major egg producers who are taking advantage of the avian flu pandemic to ‘make excruciating 40% profits’.
Farm Action argues that while the bird flu outbreak was significant, ‘its actual impact on egg supplies was minimal’.
It states that the average egg-laying flock size in any month in 2022 was never more than 7-8% lower than it was in 2021.
The effect of bird flu is further ‘mitigated’ by record laying rates among surviving hens throughout the year, up to 4% more than the average for previous years.
Meanwhile, inflation has driven up the price of nearly all groceries by almost a fifth in just a couple of years.
Americans facing rising inflation have grown nostalgic for the prices of just two years ago, when the cost of some staple foods was nearly half.
In the past, people may have cynically remembered how the cost of everyday items had risen over decades, but now people see prices rise in the space of just a few months.
Avocados were an average of $1 each in early 2021, but had risen to $2.50 just a year later.
Recent inflation has caused some to become nostalgic for the prices of just two years ago: the cost of food has risen sharply, and faster than wages. A graph reveals how much average prices have risen between February 2021 and February 2023
Over the past two years, since February 2021, prices of food items like grains, meat, dairy and fruit have risen by an average of about 19 percent, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Over the past two years, since February 2021, prices of food items like grains, meat, dairy and fruit have risen by an average of about 19 percent, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The price of eggs has increased so much in the last year that Americans have even started smuggling them across the US-Mexico border.
Wages, on the other hand, have risen about 11 percent over the same period, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Wage Growth Tracker.
Although that change in hourly and annual wages is a historically large increase, households have experienced reduced disposable income.
While federal stimulus packages have increased the amount of cash in ordinary American households, the purchasing power of all that money has been reduced by inflation.
In a sign of some respite on the issue, annual inflation in the US fell again in February to 6 percent, paving the way for the Federal Reserve to slow or halt its interest rate hikes as it grapples with a banking crisis. .
A Labor Department report last Tuesday on the consumer price index showed that February marked the eighth straight month of declining annual inflation, from this summer’s peak of more than 9 percent.
The Federal Reserve has been rapidly raising interest rates for the past year in an effort to control inflation by cooling the economy, but hopes to prevent the economy from slipping into recession with skyrocketing unemployment.
However, politics was partly a cause of the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in California, prompting fears that a financial crisis was brewing.
