James Carville’s phrase, which he used during the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid” may have been the right one for the time, but the last few years of soaring consumer prices have generated a need for a new yardstick to measure just how our economy is doing.
Welcome to the new standard that has now replaced the ubiquitous gallon of unleaded gasoline. Enter the farm fresh chicken egg – the new preferred way to tell how well or poorly we’re doing as a nation!
Unless you’ve been marooned on a desert island or mountain-climbing without the Internet, you cannot help but have noticed that the ordinary chicken egg has pushed the gallon of gas and the pound of ground beef off the field of contenders for the top economic pain barometer.
The supermarket has overtaken the filling station where we are now spending the lion’s share of our disposable income, especially if we have large families.
Since COVID struck, and our supply chains and production facilities were interrupted, Americans have been experiencing an increasingly higher level of food-related anxiety. Price rises have become the bane of our existence and changed our buying habits, markedly. Now, trips to the market are planned with D-Day-like precision. We comparison-shop and prepare extensive shopping lists that contain fewer and fewer impulse or snack food items. We’re clipping coupons if we still have a newspaper subscription or we watch our mobile phones for announcements of discounts on our favorite food products. We’ve downsized our food expectations and relegated certain comfort or luxury foods to the bottom of our lists. Bags of potato chips are now costing upwards of $6.00, not to mention breakfast cereals that are packaged with less content for the same or even higher prices. We’ve also deserted name brands in favor of generic or “house” brands to save some money, hoping that taste and quality are not victims of our penny-pinching purchases.
Even vegetarians are paying a high price for their virtue. Green vegetables and fruits now command more and more from our pocketbooks, forcing some families to forego garden fresh, organic, healthy food. And those trips to the fast food establishments are also making us cough up more of our hard-earned money to satisfy his highness, the Burger King, or to placate our children, who do not share our parsimony.
And now, after all those years of gas and hamburger comparisons, we have the egg to contend with.
Most of us have always regarded eggs as a commodity, a staple, a necessity, but not something to be overly worried about when it came to the occasional rise in poultry feed. We always knew we could count on eggs being there for us, like good friends that always made themselves available when we needed them. Even during outbreaks of avian flu we knew that eggs would bounce back and prices would fall again once things settled down. There was nothing magic about eggs. We accepted their cholesterol and protein content as part of the deal to enjoy our breads, desserts and our hearty breakfasts at the Waffle or Pancake House.
These days, egg displays at upscale supermarkets have taken on an air of luxury, and are now enjoying their life at the top of the food price pyramid. Comedians are telling egg jokes. Economists are studying their ability to forecast the country’s economic future and journalists are penning articles about their exorbitant prices and castigating the current administration for not taking the “egg war” seriously.
Notice how I have avoided using any egg puns in this article. It is not because I haven’t been tempted, it is just because eggs have now become the new economic third rail and I do not want to be the cause of egg producers’ attacks on me for disparaging their products. And since any good article must have some statistics to be readable or memorable, here are a few:
According to Statista, over 9 billion dozen eggs were produced in the U.S. in 2023. That’s over 280 eggs for every man, woman and child in the U.S. (source: the Washington Post). Not to be outdone, China remains at the top of egg-producing countries in the world (source: The American Egg Board).
The World Atlas says that our friendly McDonald’s hamburger chain buys 2 billion eggs a year from different sources. But before you conclude that all those egg purchases are for American chicken-laid eggs, think again. The U.S. imports nearly $80 million worth of eggs from Canada, the U.K., China, Turkey and Belgium. America’s – strike that – the world‘s largest egg producer/supplier is Cal-Maine Foods, located in Jackson, Mississippi.
And when it comes to foreign producers, the world’s largest exporter of eggs is The Netherlands, clucking in, strike that, clocking in, with $1 billion in exports, or nearly 20% of all global egg exports. (And you thought the Dutch only grew tulips and made cheese in that densely populated little country of theirs, built on land reclaimed from the sea.)
Finally, the U.S. Inflation Calculator reported that: “In March, the average price of one dozen Grade A eggs was $6.227, representing a 5.6% increase from the February price of $5.897, data released April 10, 2025, by the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed. Over a longer period and averaging the BLS’s monthly pricing data, the cost of a dozen eggs jumped to $3.17 in 2024 from $2.80 in 2023, representing a 13.2% increase.”
Whichever way you boil down the numbers or fry up the statistics, Americans love their eggs and will probably continue to pay whatever it costs to keep themselves in a perpetual state of albumen. And that is very definitely a lot of yolks. I suspect that U.S. consumers’ very personal relationship with their eggs will, eventually, persuade them to return the lowly gallon of gas back down the ranks to be the measurement of the country’s economic vulnerability, proving that the egg is resilient and is indeed mightier than the fuel that takes them to our tables. After all, it’s purely eggumenical, my dear Watson.
Stephen Helgesen is a retired career U.S. diplomat specializing in international trade who lived and worked in 30 countries for 25 years during the Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush Administrations. He is the author of fourteen books, seven on American politics, and has written over 1,500 articles on politics, economics and social trends. He now lives in Denmark and is a frequent political commentator on Danish media. He can be reached at: stephenhelgesen@gmail.com.
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License
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