Pre-Easter ham sales are a thing here, but not eggs. The fact that there are just a handful of poultry farms of size left in the state might have something to do with it now that you mention regional effects.
Our town voted to ban non-cagefree eggs a couple years back. Said ban took effect Jan 1 this year. Great timing,eh?
Just back from a grocery run and the canned cat food shelves looked like Kyiv. There are a lot of finicky felines out there getting very upset about the lack of their preferred munchies.
So do you have an actual shortage of eggs, and if so is that why?
We’ve got plenty of cage-free and even pastured eggs around here. Of course, this area supplies a lot of small producers; who are more likely to stay in business (and to deliver even when there are long-chain delivery problems) when the criteria for egg production includes something more than “as cheap as possible, no matter what it does to either the hens or the humans involved”.
Same thing I am seeing.
I guess it depends on what you call a ‘shortage’ and as for WHY?
Over the past roughly 30 years I’ve been shopping at this store, the eggs case was at least four feet wide, went from knee height up to at least five feet tall, and had six and 12 and 18 pack boxes of both white and brown eggs. Over the past few years there have been an increasing variety of other eggs choices, too. Cruelty free, cage free, pastured and regular. Also organic and non-organic plus some varieties that claimed their hens were fed special diets so they were higher in amounts of something or other, and/or possibly lower in something else. Plus cartons of just deshelled eggs whites. And pre-hard boiled eggs!
I had literally NEVER had any problem finding whatever variety/size/amount I’d ever been shopping for.
Since the start of the year, huge areas of that case are completely empty. This last shopping trip the case had only a few of the most expensive ‘special’ varieties, plus brown medium eggs in 12 packs. That was it. Actually, that was fine for me, I always used to buy large or jumbo eggs, but I can deal with using medium sized eggs, I’m not a total snowflake. 
As to why? I’ve got to figure that a lot of supply contracts got changed or cancelled in anticipation of the new law. Some smaller producers might not have been able to change how they handled their hens. Some larger producers may have decided not to change and just sell their eggs to less picky stores. And no doubt the general screwed-up-ed-ness of the entire delivery system in our country currently piles on as well.
All I know is that buying eggs, which never used to be a problem at all, has now become a weekly gamble. Will they have what I need or not? Just like with noodles and saltine crackers.
And that’s not even going into what you have to pay now if you’re lucky enough to find them…
I think egg prices - for store brand eggs - are way up in my grocery…….up to $1.29 a dozen. That’s actually really high for this store brand, the highest I’ve seen in 2 years. The low point was .47 a dozen.
That’s a huge increase percentage wise, but stil extraordinarily cheap. I don’t know how this one grocery chain manages to get such cheap eggs, but I’ve never complained.
Non-store brand eggs are way more expensive, but I didn’t pay attention to the price last time I shopped the egg section.
Some of it may be a timing problem; as you say people not having time to adjust. I think in the long run you’re less likely to have shortages if more smaller producers are able to keep going – and the smaller producers have been IME the ones least likely to be using the tightly caged operations; they can’t compete with the big guys on that level no matter what they do and need some other way to get enough market. I know that I wasn’t worried about egg shortages here because we’ve got a lot of local smaller scale producers who weren’t going to be affected by delivery problems, and not much by labor problems either as they’re mostly family labor.
Went grocery shopping today. Eggs at Aldi were $1.59/dozen. IIRC they were about $1/dozen a year ago - but just about everything has gone up. I bought 2 dozen – even at $1.59, eggs are a pretty good deal.
Jewel has spiral-sliced half hams at $.99/lb if you spend $25 on other purchases. I’ll get a ham for Easter, but will wait until next week – I don’t want to give up that much refrigerator space for that long.
Mom has reported that the cracker aisles are wiped out at our local stores. It doesn’t seem to be any brand in particular.
The cat food supply looked a bit better this past weekend, but Wegmans still had their supply chain signs posted.
If you are having trouble finding saltine crackers, take a look at the Hispanic section of the grocery store. A brand of saltines called Gamesa saladitas caught my eye today. The price was good, too.
Couldn’t get any type of apple sauce yesterday…but I’m pretty sure that’s due to Passover.
Are there shortages or supply chain issues with Covid boosters these days? I had a bit of trouble finding an appointment today, and my own HMO only has three appoints left for this coming week and none thereafter.
Going back to an observation from a couple of other posters some time ago — the non-antiperspirant form of my regular deodorant brand has been nowhere to be found around here since early winter.
The feds have run out of money to order the vaccines. I suspect that if the feds have stopped paying the manufacturers, the manufacturers will have stopped or slowed down production until they know they will have a guaranteed of payers.
Not sure if it’s Covid related, but I haven’t been able to find food coloring packs – you know, the box with small squeeze bottles of red, orange, green and blue food coloring.
I ran almost out of green with Christmas baking, and couldn’t find them for a few weeks after. Figured they hadn’t restocked after the Christmas cookie rush. Looked at two stores last week, assuming they’d be back in stock for Easter egg dyeing, and still couldn’t find any.
Looks like Amazon has it, so I guess I’ll add it to my next order.
I think last time I managed to find that was Winco, if you live near one.
And yet, it seems to be a crapshoot what you will or won’t find where, and when. I shop at Winco a lot, and just like every other supermarket around, it’s anyone’s guess what they will have in stock on any given day.
I’ll have to check that out. I shopped one day last week and the saltine shelf was STILL empty.
Today, I could not find plain old cheap hard peppermints. There was not even a shelf tag for them where I would have expected them to be, next to the cinnamon disks and butterscotch candy.