I checked the egg prices in my supermarket today and they have gone up substantially - today they were .79 a dozen, up from .47. Still really cheap, though.
They might be a loss leader.
This article specifically mentions eggs as a common loss leader in supermarkets:
I’m aware of the concept of a loss leader but do people really choose their market based on the cost of eggs? Around me we have Whole Foods and Bristol Farms which are relatively expensive, Vons and Raphs which are moderately prices and, in my opinion, only marginally worse than the expensive ones and Smart and Final which is cheap and shitty quality. I mostly go to Vons and sometimes Whole Foods when I want something specific that Vons doesn’t have. I definitely choose based on overall pricing but not on one specific thing much less eggs which might save me a dollar a week if I ate a ton of eggs.
I’ve no idea. Small Business Trends seems to think so.
The impression many people have of “overall pricing” may come from a handful of items which they buy frequently, and may well be inaccurate for the store’s actual “overall” pricing. And a lot of it seems to come from neither but from advertising – I’ve had people brag to me about how cheaply they got something from BigBox a forty minute drive away when I’d just bought the same item for less at the independent store downtown in the village they lived in.
Just a thought – have you asked your vet if they can get it for you? My vet had the prescription stuff in stock, so they are getting that from some supplier. Said supplier may be able to get them the nonprescription food, too.
And if the vet knows getting SD food is a problem, they may be happy to provide some for purchase to their customers. My vet told us straight out that we should feed our kitties SD – better for them than most other foods.
Now one TV news station is getting in on the topic. (If there were only a way to cross-link discussion boards…)
I guess there are worse places to have a holiday, just can’t think of any.
Local news had assured people in our area that the real shortage is the packaging. Yep, that makes me feel better.
And thanks to everyone for the egg tips; I’ve used them past the sell by date (much to the horror of my mother), but I didn’t know about freezing them.
They weren’t RIGHT next to each other, but there was only a partial wall.
At the kids’ orthodontist though, they had a long row of chairs, side by side, with nothing between them.
You have to understand that there are some people out there who are insanely cheap.
I once had the “pleasure” of going to a store with a girl who wanted to redeem a coupon for toilet paper. When it turned out she’d misunderstood the coupon, and the toilet paper was 10 cents more than she thought it was going to be, she decided not to buy it at all.
This after walking all the way across the mall to this store, and then having to walk all the way back to where we’d parked. 10 cents was a deal breaker to her.
Just as an aside: I wonder what affects egg prices region to region in the U.S.? A lot of things are cheap in SE Louisiana, but eggs here are rarely less than $2.00/dozen regardless of size. Jumbos are often north of $3.00/dozen.
And it’s not like there no local poultry farming in the outlying rural areas. I guess not to sufficient scale, though.
No idea. I knew the eggs here are cheap. but I’ve never seen them for 47¢ or even 79¢. I think the cheapest I’ve seen them – and this was a few years ago when I was buying the smaller (‘Large’) brown eggs – was 99¢. In any case, I’m not complaining about $1.99 for a dozen Jumbos. That still seems plenty cheap to me.
You know, I posted about the eggs because I snagged the last carton (with one cracked egg) before. When I got eggs Sunday, I came around the corner and saw empty shelf-space. They did have plenty of eggs, but the space for the eggs was only about half-full. Not exactly a shortage, but they usually have a lot more. It may be that they’ve cut back because there are fewer people staying at their vacation homes, or tourists visiting, this time of year.
I HAAAAAAAATED that setup so much. In fact, I still hate it, and I mildly resent the orthodontist too for being such a jerk about how awful the fluorosis on my teeth looked. Seriously, they didn’t look all that great before the braces went on, and and I know the discoloration looked even worse after two years in braces; what was accomplished by fussing at a teenager in an open setting like that?
I drank the last bottle of Rolling Rock at my local bar yesterday. Apparently, there is a shortage of bottles. Things are really getting out of hand.
P.S. - No comments about my choice of beer or a RR shortage being a good thing. I’ve heard it all before. 
Even though I don’t feel like it, I’m about to venture out into the dark. This morning I realized as I looked for the next container and came up empty, that Amazon hadn’t sent my most recent subscribe and save order of fish food flakes. Amazon doesn’t have it in flakes, Walmart.com doesn’t have it as flakes either, so I’m going to have to make the rounds tonight to see if anyone semi-local has flakes (before resorting to ordering from somewhere that’d charge me shipping) because I think pellets would just confuse my poor fish who have never had them before.
About 15 years ago when Walmart first began selling groceries in our area, everyone raved about how much cheaper they were than the other local stores, especially Kroger. So I did a small test by comparing prices on about 15 routine items from my grocery list – bread, milk, etc – and found that Walmart was about 5% cheaper. But Kroger had a senior day with 5% off, so it was a wash for old folks.
Are your other local stores still in business?
You might run another comparison check. Once they got it in everybody’s head that they were cheaper, they may have felt less need to actually be so.
They are. Kroger, for example, now employs a lot less people, but still does pretty well. Another price check is a good idea because Kroger no longer has ‘senior day’ so it’s head-to-head. One reason we still have the other stores is quality – I firmly believe that Walmart gets all the ‘seconds’, goods that don’t meet standards, that companies wouldn’t ship to Kroger.
That seems unlikely; there can’t possibly be enough goods that don’t meet standards to supply all of the thousands of Walmart stores. I do believe, though, that Walmart prods manufacturers to change their products so they can be sold at a lower price at Walmart, and in doing so, might result in lower quality goods available everywhere (since the manufacturer isn’t likely to have two versions of its products).
Check the size of packages, also. I generally stay out of Walmart; but I’ve found that what appears to be the same name-brand product in cut-rate grocery or dollar stores may be that product, but it often doesn’t have the same amount in the can.
ETA: and if it’s something packed in water or even just usually packed in its own juices, check the drained weight, not just the total weight. I tried a can each of tuna and salmon from one of the dollar stores – both of them were significantly, and literally, watered down.
Some manufacturers do have multiple lines of similar products, and may well have quality differences between them.
You may however well be right that some manufacturers just wind up making crappier goods for everybody.