How Inflation Is Changing The Cost of Groceries And What You Can Do About It
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So if grocery prices are going up, and again, sticking it back just right to eggs, if that's going up an extra $20 when we buy three dozen eggs for a family, that's $20 we can't spend somewhere else. That's $20 we can't spend at the movies. That's $20 we can't spend at Target. And when you kind of multiply that across lots of families that are not spending even $20 more somewhere else, that tends to hurt the economy sort of broadly rather than just at the grocery store.

Hey, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today on Her Money. I'm Jean Chatzky. Scrambled, poached, over easy, fried, deviled, the list goes on. It is no secret that Americans love eggs. And the increasingly high price of a carton of eggs, well, it's been all over the news for the past few weeks.

past few years, actually. Some people have even gone so far as to say that the price of eggs was one of the deciding factors in the presidential election. Yet, despite promises that have been made to bring down the price of eggs, we are still finding ourselves shell-shocked every time we hit the grocery store and dealing with supply issues due to bird flu.

It's impacting restaurants as much as individual consumers. Denny's recently went as far as to implement an egg tax, a surcharge on every meal with eggs. I actually don't think I've ever had a Denny's meal without eggs, but by the same token, Cracker Barrel countered that they wouldn't raise prices because they said there's nothing hospitable about surcharges. That's competition in the restaurant market for you folks. Look,

I know that you all love episodes about the economy. Every time we drop one, the numbers go up and you want to see how these things impact your wallet. So today we are breaking down what's really going on with two things.

Can I call them eggsperts? Don't cringe on the other side of the headphones. Jadrian Wooten is Associate Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech. He's also known as Wootenomics on social media. We love that. And my old friend Phil Lempert is the supermarket guru, a leading consumer trend watcher and analyst. Phil, Jadrian, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Jeef.

Thanks. I appreciate you having me. So the wholesale price of eggs, wholesale, is now an average more than $8 a dozen. That is up from $2.25 just last fall. That's an enormous increase. Jadrian, from an economist perspective, what's up with this?

So you started with the bird flu part, and I think it is important to recognize that is a big component of it. That's the main driver is bird flu. And it's hit hens much harder than it's hit sort of the rest of the poultry market. That's a big portion of it. But then there's human behavior that goes into it. So as consumers, especially consumers who might rely heavily on eggs, they may be in a rush to go out and buy extra eggs, trying to think about

What if it goes up again next week or the week after that? And so people are also stockpiling eggs, which is also not helping the situation at all.

When you say it's hit hens, and that is indeed a very, very difficult phrase to say, hit hens harder than the rest of the poultry market. Does that sort of explain why we're seeing the price of eggs rise more than the price of chicken? That's exactly it. So I think the price of chicken is probably up about 4% over last year. It's fairly stable. So part of it is kind of working in two ways. In some senses, the places in the country where we raise broilers, which is the chickens that we eat,

The places that we've raised broilers, they haven't been hit as hard with bird flu. But the portions of the country that have lots of hens and they do the egg production, those have been hit harder. But then there's sort of a second level to it. To bring a chicken to maturity, that can take four, five, six months before it can start laying eggs. So if we wipe out an entire flock, that farm has to wait at least about six months, about half a year to bring it back to full production.

Versus broilers, those we usually raise pretty quickly. So those might only take five or six weeks. So if we wipe out an entire broiler farm, we can get that entire flock back up in only about six weeks. So the response is much faster in that market, which means if we have to cull an entire flock, it doesn't change the price as much because we can respond much more quickly. Who knew? Right?

Right? I mean, who had any idea? Phil, when we talk about prices in the grocery store, there are a lot of different factors that go into the soup of how that sticker gets on a particular product. Can you break it down for me sort of in the simplest possible terms how a grocer prices something on the shelf?

Sure. I'm not sure I can do it simply, but I'll try. Basically, what you have is you have the cost of goods, and then you've got a retailer that adds a markup. Now, the markup is dependent on labor. It's dependent on where in the supermarket it is.

Obviously, if you're in the frozen food department or in the refrigerated department, it has a higher cost than those unemotional boxes and jars that are in the center of the store that don't have that extra energy cost. If you're in the deli or in the bakery department where you've got human beings working, again, that ups it even more.

Now, the other thing to really understand is competition. So, for example, when Aldi comes to a market, every other grocery store reduces their prices. So you've got the competitive frame in there as well. So all those factors are taken into consideration. And then what you've got is you've got in the case of Walmart, where they have very strong relationships and very strong contracts with a lot of produce companies.

companies, for example, year-long deals, they can offer lower prices even though their stores are that much larger. So essentially, when we are driving our carts then through these grocery stores, I think what many of us, including me, maybe didn't understand is that we're essentially paying for that additional real estate, right? So if it costs more to put a

package of frozen waffles in a freezer case, we're paying more for that product because of the energy costs to keep those waffles frozen. Exactly. And the other trick is now that every supermarket is putting their circulars on their websites,

look at different zip codes. So for example, if I'm in my zip code in Santa Monica, I can look at another store that might be five miles away, same chain, same banner on the front of the store, and they might have cheaper prices in that store because their socioeconomics are different than where it is in Santa Monica.

Talk to me about Trader Joe's. I think it's become very well known at this point that if you want to get low-cost eggs...

One of the places you want to hit is Trader Joe's. Why are Trader Joe's eggs still the cheapest, Phil? Well, let me just give you one caveat. It depends on where in the country the Trader Joe's is. So here in California, Trader Joe's is not the least expensive. California's got hit the hardest because we have so many egg producers here in California that have been affected and their herds had to be culled.

So Trader Joe's has longstanding deals. Keep in mind that the same family that owns Trader Joe's also owns Aldi. They're not really sister companies. They don't work together, but it's the same philosophy that what they do is they pay their bills to vendors on time and quickly. They have great, strong relationships with their vendors. And again, such as I mentioned with Walmart, in the case of produce, they make long-term deals.

So they're able to have a long-term deal with egg producers. And also what Trader Joe's does is they typically are using smaller egg farms where it's not a million birds. And again, you know, as was pointed out, if you have one bird that's infected, the whole flock has to be killed. So one bird, a million birds are being raised.

that whole million gets wiped out. And the numbers now are extraordinary. We've had to cull about a little over 166 million birds. That's amazing. Jadrian, when we look at the price of eggs and how the price of eggs has been rising over time, it seems to me that this was happening before bird flu took hold. Am I right about that? And if I am right about that...

What was going on sort of at the surface level before we got hit with this illness?

I'll say there's different strains of bird flu. So I'll say, unfortunately, we all experienced this five years ago, where we had different strains of COVID that were hitting in different levels at different times in different parts of the country. There was some grocery store increases that were related to supply chain issues that we sort of all were affected. But sort of the first wave of bird flu happened about four years ago. It wasn't as strong. So we saw egg prices go up

at the time, pretty high, not as high as what we're seeing now, but they were going up pretty high. And then when bird flu sort of came back down, you sort of got this wave of the influenza. Egg prices started to come back down again, but then we're sort of in a new second wave of bird flu. And so it's very similar to what we experienced last,

with the pandemic where we have just different strains and different strengths of bird flu happening. And if I could also just jump in on this, when we look at this strain of bird flu, it is probably the most serious that we've seen. This bird flu obviously starts out with birds and it goes to hens, went to ducks,

Now it's in cattle and it's in humans. And what we've also found is there's some raw milk that has been affected and cats have now gotten bird flu as well.

So this is a very serious strain. And in talking to a lot of people pre-election who were very concerned on bird flu, they think that if we don't get a vaccine, if we don't really handle this properly, this could be as big as COVID-19's pandemic was.

Let me stick with the pandemic as we're getting into scary territory here, Phil. I mean, seeing stores where egg shelves are empty and signs in grocery stores that limit the number of cartons that you're allowed to buy is very reminiscent of the pandemic. What are we

What do we need to do to strengthen our food system so that we don't have shortages like this? I would say the first thing we have to do is understand climate control and get that under siege because that's

That's where we have prices going up. Keep in mind that even a Hostess Twinkie had its origins in the ground at some point. And, you know, as we have more fires, as we have more floods, as we have more climate disasters around the world, we're going to see prices go up and we're going to see shortages increase.

So what can we do about it? What we really need to do is talk, frankly, to our government and get them to pay attention to what's going on here. And frankly, right now, I think we've got a problem as it relates to that. Yes, from your mouth to the ears above. Jadrian, one last question before we take a break. You talked about the price of chickens and how that relates to the price of

eggs but there is a bit of a trickle-down effect of bird flu on other products in in the grocery store but also in other goods right we talked a little bit about Denny's at the top of the show can you explain that trickle-down effect where else are we feeling the impacts of eggs

I think the restaurants one that you pulled up is probably the most obvious place that we're seeing it, whether it's Denny's or Waffle House are announcing the surcharges. They're getting hit hard. And especially, I'm going to go back to what Phil said, is that some of the bigger chains are able to absorb some of those costs a lot easier. So Waffle House is selling so many eggs. They're charging more, but they can at least handle a little bit of an increase. Small local diners aren't as fortunate. So smaller businesses that are bringing in 5,000 eggs a week

are getting hit harder. Local bakeries who rely on eggs for cakes are getting hit harder. They don't have the scale to be able to necessarily negotiate those relatively cheaper eggs. And so I don't want to say they're paying the exact same price. They are definitely buying it wholesale. But wholesale egg prices are up just like retail prices are up. And so you're seeing that sort of trickle down from basically anything that requires eggs. And I think the bakeries are probably the most obvious places.

But it's everything from restaurants that are using eggs for whether it's breakfast meals or whether it's some sort of making an aioli, for example. You can see them in a lot of small places. And again, I'm going to echo one of the things that Phil said, because I think it was perfect. A lot of these are very competitive markets where they have very small margins, especially in places that might have lots of restaurants or lots of grocery stores. A small increase in the cost can really hit them pretty hard if they're not able to raise the prices enough to cover those.

We are going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about whether egg prices are coming down anytime soon and what this means for our broader economy.

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bothers people so much. I went to cooking school early in my career. I had a brief moment where I thought maybe I wanted to be a food writer instead of writing about money. I spent six months in cooking school and one of the lessons

that I remember taking away from cooking school was that if you want to make a meal cost effectively, you make breakfast for dinner. You basically lean into eggs, you lean into pancakes, you lean into things that have a lot of flour, a lot of eggs, maybe a little bit of milk, because you can get a lot of food on the table for a very, very little bit of money. I think this is

hurting so many people because people have essentially lived by that advice. Phil, you have studied grocery stores and the patterns of grocery shoppers for many, many years. Is this why we are taking this so personally? That's part of it. But one thing that I'm very, very concerned about is we've got about 40 million people who are on food assistance programs.

And for them, eggs are their primary source of protein. That was the affordable protein that they couldn't get meat, they couldn't get chicken and so on. So if in fact they can't afford eggs and we're going to have 40 million people with protein deficiencies, we've got a looming health problem that really we're not going to be able to control.

So we've got to get the prices of eggs down. And I think one of the way that, frankly, that's going to happen is going back and moving away from these million bird egg production facilities and really relying on smaller producers that can handle the kind of things that we're talking about. I was going to ask this question later in the show, but actually, let me ask it to you now. People are starting to rent chickens. I

I think that sounds crazy. Personally, I don't want chickens in my yard, particularly with bird flu spreading. But is that what we're looking at? A landscape where more and more people have their own chickens and produce their own eggs? I certainly hope not. And there are cities that have really banned backyard chickens. And there's a couple companies that

that are out there that are doing very well, that basically you rent the chicken, they give you everything, and you have your own little chicken coop, and you have five or six chickens. From a food safety standpoint, it's a nightmare to be doing this. If we go back in time, maybe 100 years, for our great-grandparents who knew how to raise chickens and cows and so on, great.

But for you and I to go out and rent these chickens, it's about the stupidest thing that I can imagine. And you're not going to save any money. One of the other problems that we've got, and again, I'm in California, we have people trying to smuggle eggs in from Mexico.

And the border patrol is just going crazy by having to stop people bringing in eggs with all the problems that we have. Again, the idea of smuggling eggs from Mexico, not a good idea. Shadrian, can we expect the price of eggs to come down any time soon? And also, just to sort of pile on to what Phil said about affordable sources of protein,

To me, it seems like even though we've seen this huge increase in the price of eggs, they are still the most affordable source of protein. Maybe beans, but eggs are definitely up there. Well, let me piggyback on what Phil said. Not just the protein deficiency concerns that are happening for a lot of Americans, but I think anybody with young children also realize that children are very picky about what they eat.

And thankfully, I think for a lot of families, a lot of kids eat scrambled eggs. They may not necessarily be interested in eating just about any other source of protein, especially for breakfast. So there's a lot of concerns, I think, these different levels of concerns that we want to think about. Eggs are the cheap source of protein for a lot of families. And we're seeing essentially triple the price, quadruple the price from a few years ago. And it's still relatively affordable, but it's

If you're a family that is consuming two dozen, three dozen eggs a week, tripling that price is a really huge hit for those families. There are things that the Trump administration has done that I think can help bring down egg prices, but I don't believe it's going to be. We're not going to see the egg prices that we saw four years ago that that's they might come down, but not as much. What are those things that are being done and how fast do you think the prices will start to fall?

The easy answer is not fast enough. But one of the things that will lower the prices the fastest is lifting some of the restrictions on imports on eggs.

So sort of ignore all the tariff conversation that happens normally. We protect a lot of our own agricultural products. That's a very common thing for people to do, especially from outside, depending on which country they're coming from, other outside countries. They've lifted some of that. And so one of the big sort of negotiating things that has been happening is that we're supposed to be importing a lot of eggs from Turkey, which is one of the largest producers of eggs in the world.

They're supposed to send something close to like half a billion pounds of eggs. It's millions of eggs are coming. But the problem is, how long is that going to take to sort of trickle through the supply chain? They still have to go through customs. They still have to be inspected. They still have to make their way through warehouses and distribution centers. And then finally to the store.

And then unfortunately, if people do go out and panic by these eggs, the prices will come down, but we might still see some of these sort of choke points. We might not go back to what we saw four years ago. So that's going to help. It's not going to help as much as people want, but it's going to help some. And then there's other investments that they've made in terms of trying to fund vaccine research to try to solve this particular problem.

helping farmers, basically giving them some money to help reinvest in chickens. Because remember, if we wipe out an entire flock,

prior to this move, it was up to the chicken farmer to basically repurchase all these chickens. And so if you have a farm that has a million birds, that's an incredibly expensive repurchase of those birds. And so they're doing things, but the problem goes back to, it's gonna take six months for those hens to come fully mature to actually start laying eggs. So there's some long-term benefits. The short-term ones are maybe the imports. Yeah, and the other thing to point out though, eggs are perishable.

So as we talk about that entire supply chain that you just described, I mean...

the clock is ticking for these eggs to be good. Now, one upside that I have been seeing is there are now a lot of plant-based egg substitutes that are on the market, like Just Egg and so on. And they've seen a major increase in sales as the price of eggs have gone up. So do I think that the average family is going to switch to a plant-based egg substitute? No. No.

But there is some relief for those people who still want eggs. But, you know, there's shortages out there. Jadrine, we also know that there are other food prices that are expected to really spike in 2025. You mentioned tariffs. I know that we're

influx as far as tariffs are concerned. And just for the audience, we are recording this the day after the president said he would take a month's breather on tariffs.

tariffs on Canada and Mexico as far as the auto supply chain was concerned. But there are other tariffs that look like they're going to be imposed that don't look like they're going to get a month's hiatus. Talk about the impact of tariffs as we will experience them as consumers.

So I think the first place you're going to see it is at the grocery store. When we talk about the economy and presidential elections, it's the gas pump and the grocery store, because those are places we go every single week. We see the price every single week. We know roughly how much it costs every single week. So when that changes, we really notice it.

Gas prices have been fine. We've had some ups and downs, but largely we're ready for ups and downs. I don't think people are ready for the future grocery prices that they're going to see if these tariffs, particularly on Mexico, actually do go into place. We grow a lot of stuff. We export more than we import when it comes to food products on a sort of a dollar amount scale. We have a trade surplus when it comes to agricultural products.

I'm going to call it a problem only in the sense that we can't necessarily rely on everything that we make. We make a lot of corn. We make a lot of wheat. We make a lot of soybeans. It's probably one of our largest categories. But that's not our diets. Our diets are fresh fruits and vegetables. It's strawberries and limes and pineapples and mangoes and all these other fruits and vegetables that

California supports a lot of that, but they cannot support all of that. And so a lot of our fresh fruits and vegetables come from Mexico and Central America because they just have a much better growing climate all year long. And so that's probably where people are going to really see it hit first is at the grocery store. You're going to see slightly higher prices for things like avocados and

You're going to see it for limes and lemons and citrus products. We just we don't grow enough of it ourselves here. What do these increased prices at the store, at restaurants say about the state of our economy overall? That's probably the toughest one. So when we think about where people are spending money,

There's obviously big ticket items, right? We saw used car prices go up a bunch over the past four years. Most of us are not in the market for a used car all the time. We see home prices and interest rates go up regularly. Most of us are not purchasing new homes regularly. So where we're regularly spending money on things is related to food, gas, electricity.

electricity is a really big one that we spend a lot of our money on. Those are really the three kind of core categories. And so even when the government releases inflation data, they will often talk about the difference between inflation and core inflation, where it's taking out some of these things, where it's saying, let's take out energy prices, let's take out food prices, because they may be more volatile than others. But food prices really are one of those things that we look at

in terms of measuring the health of an economy. We look at electricity prices, gas prices. Those are a really good indicator because people spend so much of their money on that. So if grocery prices are going up, and again, sticking it back just right to eggs, if that's going up an extra $20 when we buy three dozen eggs for a family, that's $20 we can't spend somewhere else. That's $20 we can't spend at the movies. That's $20 we can't spend at Target.

And when you kind of multiply that across lots of families that are not spending even $20 more somewhere else, that tends to hurt the economy sort of broadly rather than just at the grocery store. What a great explanation. Thank you so much for that. Phyllis, we wrap this up. As I said, you are an expert in how to navigate a grocery store, how to get the most possible out of it.

What do you want consumers to be doing right now in terms of making the most of their grocery budgets? And then also, once they get the food home, how do we get the most meals, the most nutrition out of whatever we put in our basket?

There's some simple steps that all of us can take. Number one, before you go to the store, make a shopping list. But not just any shopping list. Take inventory. When we go shopping, typically without a list, we'll spend about 40% more on those impulse items.

The old saying, never go shopping when you're hungry, in a good mood or in a bad mood because you're going to spend more. Well, if you have that shopping list and what I do, I call it the ultimate shopping list. I take last week's cash register receipt.

because now every item that you have is listed on it. And I start there because about 80% of what we buy week after week is the same. So I cross off the things that I don't need. I add three horizontal lines on the bottom and I allow myself three impulse items, not 10, not 20, but three impulse items. So that's number one. When you do get to the store, don't walk into the produce department.

The produce department is there because it's like aromatherapy. Great colors, great aromas, samples. Puts you in a better mood. When you're in a better mood, guess what? You're going to spend more. So you've got to make sure that you're not doing those kinds of things that the store wants you to do. And then 40% of all of our food in the U.S. is wasted.

let's stop wasting food. Whether you go to a restaurant and you take home leftovers, whether you cook too much and you have leftovers, we've got to stop wasting food because not only from a sustainability standpoint, but from a cost standpoint, that's one of the quickest ways that we can reduce what we're doing. Leftovers for lunch. Got to eat your leftovers. Are you both still eating eggs? And if you're not, what are you eating instead?

I'll go first. I don't have kids. So the egg problem has not hit me as hard. I don't cook eggs for breakfast. So I'm a cold cereal person. I'm a cold breakfast guy. So I will say I'm very, I'm gonna say fortunate in the sense that I have not had to worry about it. I will say when I do need the eggs, that's when I've started to notice it where if I'm going to make cookies or something, and I need to go purchase some eggs, I look at it and I go, do I really need these cookies? I could probably get something else instead.

And Phil? I'm not a breakfast person, but I probably at least twice a week have like a cheese omelet. And I'm going to continue to do that.

Scrambled eggs are a comfort food for me, breakfast, lunch, or dinner. But lately, I've been eating a little bit more oatmeal, not necessarily because of the price, but just because of the stick-to-itiveness. Thank you for digging into this with us. When I pitched my producers on doing a whole show on eggs, I think they thought that I was a little bit crazy. But I do think that this is just such an important lesson in how our

our economic system works and what sort of trickles down to impact us in our wallet. So I appreciate you guys spending the time with me. Thank you so much. If you love this episode, please give us a five star review on Apple podcasts. We always value your feedback. And if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive.

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