Is it my imagination, or would the Extra Large Grade eggs of today have barely made it as Medium grade some 10-15 years ago? Has classification changed in the meantime? Anybody seen “small” eggs sold at market recently? Another example of a consumer rip-off??
Nah,
The chickens merely said “why bust my butt for the extra nickel”.
Omni-not, are you by chance younger than 30? Maybe it’s not that the eggs got smaller…
Laugh hard; it’s a long way to the bank.
Aura: I am, by chance, over fifty (tough just barely) :)…
…I’m also just barely tough, but that’s another thread altogether 
Yes, there has been a change.
Years ago, the size of eggs was determined by passing them through a screen. If they couldn’t pass through “extra-large,” they were classified as “extra-large.” If they made it through that, but couldn’t fit through “large,” they were large, etc.
At some point, someone decided that this was a difficult process and that there should be an easier way. It was proposed that the sizes be defined by weight: if a dozen eggs weighed a certain amount, they were large; a higher amount made them extra large. The weights approximated the sizes of eggs at that time.
But someone got cute. They began breeding chickens to lay eggs with thicker shells. Thicker shells = more weight = smaller eggs. If you check eggs these days, the shells don’t break as easily as they once did. There is usually a higher price for larger eggs, so there’s a nice economic incentive to make them heavier.
So, yes, eggs are shrinking.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Read “Sundials” in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction. www.sff.net/people/rothman
Chuck, ya da man! Here, I’d been thinking for the longest time that I just didn’t hit the edge of the bowl as hard as I used to.
Thanks a bunch, C. Still pissed off, but now I know why…