Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello! Welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios with Emily Peck of Axios. Hello, hello. With Elizabeth Spires of... It's not Pamplemousse. What is it? I keep on forgetting. Passion Fruit. Passion Fruit in New York Times and all manner of places.
We are going to talk about how people just insist on using normal messaging apps, iMessage and Signal and things like that, rather than the difficult-to-use ones. And this isn't just a problem at the top levels of government. This is a problem throughout Wall Street. We are going to talk
about migration and what various Trump administration and US government policies are doing to how people are moving. We are going to talk about Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, all of these stores. They get confusing. We have Shayna Roth back for Egg Watch because there's big egg news. There's a Slate Plus all about Satoshi Nakamoto. And it's all coming up on Slate Money.
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Okay. So Emily, you and I have multiple coworker relationships.
between Slate and Axios, not to mention that we're like friends. And we communicate in, I have no idea how many ways. We have text threads, we have email threads, we have DMs in the Slate Slack, we have DMs in the Axios Slack. And this is modern life. Everyone is communicating with everyone else. They have a phone, they're using different apps, they're communicating with each other all the time. And...
And a couple of SEC commissioners are basically saying the toothpaste is out of the tube at this point. And you can tell people not to do that, but they're going to do that. Yeah.
obviously the reason we're talking about this right now is that a bunch of very important people who really should have known better wound up using Signal instead of like highly encrypted government phones to talk about war plans. And we do not need to relitigate that story. Attack plans. But the angle here that I'm super interested in is if
if you know okay like stipulated that these guys were completely moronic and they shouldn't have done it and they were breaking all manner of laws in doing so and all the rest of it but there does seem to be something profoundly just part of modern human nature about the fact that people are going to text each other about stuff
And every single securities company in America basically has been fined for the fact that its employees do this. And every single securities company in America keeps on doing like these mandatory training saying, do not do this. And then people end up doing it anyway.
So my question for you is, is there a world, now we are here in 2025 and the phones are just an extension of our brains and we don't even realize that we're using them half the time. Is there a world in which we can enforce OPSEC? Or is the phone just like this thing that is more powerful than any protocol? Yeah, so I mean...
We are again talking about connected things, but very separate. So with regards to finance firms and Wall Street and banks, they've been fined, I think it's something like over $2 billion or something since 2021, because this all became very problematic in the pandemic. All the bankers went home. They couldn't just talk to each other in person. And the use of text messaging just absolutely exploded. And there are all these financial regulations requiring all these
requiring everything to be record kept. And all of a sudden you have people on WhatsApp, you have people texting, maybe on Signal, just like impossible to keep track of. And so the SEC is doing these fines. And then, yeah, those two commissioners, Hester Pierce and I forget the other commissioner's name, they're still at the SEC. They're like, fining isn't working. We need to find another way because just like you're saying, Felix,
People, you used to talk to people. We used to be people talking to each other, but now we type to each other. It's different. So by the way, this reminds me very much of Hackgate, if you remember that, because our favorite family on Slate Money, the Murdochs. When there was the Leveson inquiry into the Murdoch phone hacking,
There were a bunch of emails that were sent to James Murdoch and they were like, James, yada, yada, yada. And then he would reply like, what the fuck are you doing putting this in an email? Like, if there's anything sensitive, you just talk to me about it. You come into my office and you talk to me because that can't be subpoenaed. That can't be traced. There's no document retention policy about in-person conversations.
I'm sure that the SEC would love there to be like a sub rule saying that all in person conversations need to be recorded by some AI and transcribed and kept somewhere. But like, obviously, these SEC rules date back to the 1930s. And that wasn't possible then. And it's not feasible now. But
The point that Hester Pierce was making is that, especially post-pandemic, a bunch of those things that used to be in-person conversations became signal messages. Right. So things we used to do in person, say in person, learn in person that the SEC never cared about before. Well, they cared about, but they just never saw before.
are now being documented. So yeah, it is a really juicy opportunity for them, but at the same time, it's a place to push back, I think, and carve out some private spaces. It's also not just a matter of that. When these laws were enacted, they really put constraints around what they defined as an inter-office memo. I think Matt Levine joked about this the other day. He said, by their definition, I sent probably 200 inter-office memos every morning, but half of them were just LOLs.
And so it's sort of like, what constitutes an inter-office memo in this context? Is it anything that's written down? Or is it stuff that's very specifically and narrowly focused on the business? Yeah, no, the SEC, for obvious reasons, wants a maximalist view of like, if you guys are talking to each other, we want to know what you're talking to each other about. And if you're talking to each other about
go sports team last night, didn't they score many goals, then fine, you know, you can do that. We will record that. We will not hold that against you. We're not trying to say that you have to use work messaging only for work. We are saying that if you're doing any kind of work, you have to use work messaging.
So err on the side of communicating using recorded channels rather than not. I mean, a lot of these guys are client facing and I feel like your client sends you a text, you're going to text them back. Like your client message, wherever the client messages you, you're going to be there. This is a really good point that the clients want things to be seamless. The clients don't have access to these secure channels and if they don't care about it and they hate going through the 18 factor authentication that is needed to get
the email saying, I received your text. And you're like, why did I just spend half an hour going through all of this to receive an email saying I received your text? I would much rather just get a tap back or something. But the tap back is unlawful. It feels almost unnatural to you to just...
explicitly separate business and the rest of life. I know so many people use the Bloomberg messaging function just to chat about stuff that's not work-related. And just conversely, I think people have trouble separating the two. And so it becomes impossible to even train people
for compliance when so much of what they do is fully integrated, especially if you are in a client-facing job and there's a social component to what you do. Just relying on people individually to make those decisions about what fits where I think is not really feasible. Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why playing golf has always been such an important part of what
Wall Street bankers do. And it's all about hanging out and having conversations. And maybe some of those conversations are work related, but certainly many of those conversations are not, you know, like making friends and getting trusted. And all of that is part of the job. I think Elizabeth, you're absolutely right. They're trying to draw lines about what is and what isn't. It's very hard. What the SEC has been doing when it's been finding people is it's been finding certain text messages, certain signal messages,
which are very clearly deal-related and saying, oh, this is very clearly deal-related. That particular message had to go through the Bloomberg Messenger or whatever. But yeah, if you have a running text thread about GoNyx or something, and then somewhere on the thread you're like, oh, you know, I owe you a pitch deck, then, you know, suddenly you're open to a million fans. I guess the question long-term that I think about a lot is,
beyond just bankers and deal-making and war plans or attack plans, if you want to be very precise, is what happens to history when you have all these disparate means of communicating and how do you record history or what has happened? Because in the past, you know, you could look at some very specific things. You could look at letters and that's like all you had or maybe some memos. But now you have all these channels, some of which like those signal chats,
disappear in a few days. So like, I mean, to bring it back to the administration, like how do you record history if history is like literally like disappearing into the internet? Well, I would say the other way, like most of history disappeared. And I think the percentage that is disappearing is actually going down rather than up.
The problem isn't really that messages and conversations have disappeared. Like most letters that have been sent in history have disappeared. It's just some very self-important people would like keep copies of their correspondence. But most people don't do that, right? Yeah. So the sheer tonnage of stuff...
is greater than ever. And yeah, I think what happens to history is you just set an AI on the tonnage of stuff and you say like, find me the juicy bits. Oh, there you go. So maybe the solution for the SEC is to use AI and tell AI to find me the juicy bits. Find fraud. Go. In order for the AI to do that, that's the whole point. The AI needs access to it. And right now the AI does not have access to the signal chats and the text messages, which is why the SEC is saying, can you please be using the work Slack or whatever?
Right. But then there are some, one of the stories we read in the prep said some banks are trying to get access to more personal communications. Like if you're using a phone at work, they want access to all the stuff you have on the phone. So some banks,
finance guys and ladies I'm sure too are leaving their firms because they feel like that's too much of a privacy encroachment and Matt Levine talks about jokingly being recorded everywhere you go etc etc like that's also a place we're moving towards your privacy is an illusion yeah so Emily tell me like one of the big trends in work over the past five years or so maybe 10 years
is this BYOD thing, bring your own device. Like we're not going to give you a work phone. You're just going to use your own phone. You're going to install work apps on your personal phone and you're going to use your personal phone as a work device. And that is easier in many ways for you than walking around with two phones, one for personal and one for work and trying to keep them separate. Is this a positive development or is this negative development? I think it
I think about this a lot and I'd love to hear what you guys think too. I don't know. I had a work phone at HuffPost and I only had a work phone. So I would use my work phone for personal stuff. And that's always how I had had it because I'm kind of old. So my first BlackBerry was through work. My first iPhone was through work. And I was like, yeah, I don't really need a phone, but now I have this one from work. So make it personal. And then towards the end at HuffPost, I was like,
I don't know how much longer this is going to last. So then I went and got my own iPhone and I was really happy to have my own personal device that like no one could take from me. But I've never had two devices that said,
I feel like I'm being taken advantage of sometimes because I'm using my personal device to do work. Like I literally cannot do my job without my own personal iPhone. I mean, have you ever tried to like expense the cost of a phone call? Oh, not for some time. It's yeah. I mean, no one bothers, right? And like, if you're calling people abroad, like it can actually be a non-judgmental expense. And like, no one ever tries to expense that because it's like, you know, who even has the time?
Right. And I have to pay for extra storage and stuff like that. And I don't expense that either. I don't know. There's no good answer. Like for as long as we've had communication tech at the office, we've used it for personal and professional all mixed up together. Right. Do you remember Cyber Monday? Like the idea behind Cyber Monday was that you would come into the office where your tech was. And then because your tech was there, that's where you do your internet shopping. Of course. Yeah.
So, Elizabeth, Hester Pierce has laid down the gauntlet here. She's asked Elizabeth Spires to come up with a better way of regulating this shit because simply fining banks obviously isn't working. So do you have a better way? Not really, other than I think it should be more narrowly defined what people need to keep and what they need to look through. Because right now, if any sort of communication is considered an inter-office memoranda, then
I don't even know how the SEC would really sort through that, even with AI. That seems like overkill. There's nothing you can't do with AI. It's amazing. No, I mean, this is actually, to be fair, something the SEC is actually very good at because their job for decades has been to look through literally billions of stock trades and find the ones that look really suspicious. They say, oh, look, you've made a massive...
buy, you bought a massive amount of stock or short dated out of the money call options just before this merger was announced or something. And then you made a bunch of profit that's suspicious on its face, we're going to investigate it and see whether it might be insider trading. Like that, that's more of a needle in the haystack than the communications problem. And they I'm not saying they've solved that problem. But it's a known problem that they've become increasingly good at. And this is just an extension of that problem, really.
What should the government do? Probably not use Signal. They have it all worked out. That's the thing that like, it's not the same problem. Well, no, so the government is actually kind of similar in some ways to Wall Street in that there's consumer facing apps that are very easy to use, like Signal, that people just use on a day to day basis because they...
they have product people who care about usability. And then there are professional apps that often exist on completely separate devices that are much harder to use because they've been designed by people who care about security more than they care about usability. And so,
You know that what you should be doing is using the professional apps. And the professional apps have been getting a bit better. You know, it's easier to use Bloomberg messaging now than it was a few years ago. But it's still harder to use Bloomberg messaging than it is to use the SMS app that you're using on your phone. So yeah, like that's the constant tension is do you use the thing that's secure or do you use the thing that's easy? And as we have said many times on this show, like, you know, humans are lazy. They're always going to do the thing that's easiest.
That's true. Although I don't think that's why the war plans, attack plans, whatever we're calling them now, were leaked on Signal.
No. I think that was a sort of avoidance of accountability. That's why Hillary did the emailing on her personal server. Because it was easier, right? It was too hard to do this. Yeah, it was too hard to email in the State Department, something I think Colin Powell had agreed with her about. And she was just like, let me just do it this way. Barack Obama kept on moaning about how he couldn't use his BlackBerry in the White House. Yeah. So it's a perennial problem and no one has solved it. Yay. Next. Next. Next.
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an election where the libs didn't say, this is the most important election of our lifetimes. And if the Republicans win, then I'm leaving the country. So this is another perennial thing that always happens. But in this case, I've done a little bit of reporting and
And it looks like certainly at least among the rich and the high net worth individuals, the plans to leave the country to get foreign residency, to get foreign passports are really genuinely ramping up significantly. I've been talking to the kind of people who help them do that. And their volume of incoming requests is through the roof and unprecedented. And similarly, you have been looking at flight out of red states.
Yeah, I recently wrote about this new report. Well, I focused on states with abortion bans, which typically are red states. So after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision, there was a lot of people saying like, oh, there's going to be a lot of women and families moving out of these states with abortion bans because blah, blah, blah. They don't want to be there. It's not safe for them. But we didn't know if that was going to be true or not. So this paper I wrote about
Yeah, it's true. People started moving out of these abortion ban states to states that protect abortion rights. It's a real phenomenon. And the way they tracked it is they looked at change of address data from the U.S. post office and they compared change of address data before and after. And yeah, it's real and it's confirmed. And I spoke to someone who actually had moved. This woman is a co-founder of IHR.
an app or a tech company that's deals with women's health. And she's like, I can't stay in a state. She was in Texas. That doesn't really protect women's health. I want to be somewhere better. It's going to cost me to move. Like taxes are very low. If you're a business owner in Texas versus she moved to Boston, it's more expensive. But, but despite that, she doesn't
feel really safe in that state. So she's moved and there's surprising lot of people who feel the same way, especially, you know, young adults, professionals, a lot of doctors have moved out of these states as well. It's kind of like a brain drain situation. Although these states are still...
growing faster. Yeah. Yeah, they are also growing. And then the New York Times had also this piece talking about migration patterns within the United States and the increasing polarization that's happening. And you could look at the, so in other words, Republicans are moving to more Republican places and Democrats are moving to more Democratic places. Also, the Democrats want to live near Trader Joe's. Just a side note.
Wait, Republicans don't want to live near Trader Joe's? Well, no, because the Times had a list of factors leading to people moving and Trader Joe's was just, I don't know why. It was a democratic factor, but not a Republican one. Anyways, so I think the migration out of the abortion ban states is sort of related to the political polarization migration as well. So yeah, there's a migration, I guess you could say, of liberals to liberal places. And there's
also a parallel migration of conservatives to conservative places. America is becoming more and more polarized. And this just seems depressing, really. The parties have become more ideologically aligned in a sort of extreme way. There is no middle where everybody kind of agrees on everything. And so people look at it as a values choice. You know, do I want to be in a neighborhood with people who share similar values? It's not just about politics nominally.
Yeah, it's uncomfortable to be in a neighborhood where everyone kind of disagrees with your point of view, right? Whereas historically, the idea was that you would live in a city or a town and there would be a range of views in that town. But now it is increasingly easy to find a city or a town or a state where broadly people agree with you. I guess it's hard to move to a city if you're a Republican and find a place where everyone in the city agrees.
is a Republican. But in that case, you just moved to a red suburb. One of my favorite examples of this has always been Virginia versus Maryland for like the suburbanites in DC, like all of the Republicans live in Virginia and all of the Democrats, Democrats live in Maryland for just weird historical reasons. So if you're a Democrat, you moved to Maryland. If you're a Republican, you moved to Virginia and then they just become more and more polarized.
So wait, I just want to follow up because I'm now looking at the New York Times article and its characteristics of places Democrats were more likely to move to. 31% of Democrats were more likely to move to a place within five miles of a Trader Joe's. Only 10% of Republicans. Republicans had no list of a store on their characteristics. Theirs were property tax below 0.5% within five miles of a forest.
Ask ProShop. Rural or small town. They're twice as likely to move to a rural or small town than Democrats. Well, another way to look at it is the way the administration is treating marginalized communities is a big factor, too, if you have a kid who's trans or you're an immigrant.
you may not feel safe in a neighborhood that's super red. So that was definitely like one of the guys I talked to who does foreign residency and foreign passports. He was like, I had nine families with trans kids who contacted him within a week after Trump signed one of his anti-trans executive orders. They were just like, we have a kid who is, who has, who's undergoing medical care for which they need
drugs and they need to take the drugs continuously. And we're very worried that those drugs are not going to be available to us in the United States. We want to make sure that we're living somewhere where those drugs are available. Well, relatedly, I talked to a guy last night who has HIV and has been treated for it for the last 15 years. And he said, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get the drugs that I need this time next year. And he said, if I don't have them, I have two years to live.
So it's really existential for a lot of people. Why would it be difficult to get HIV drugs? Because the Trump administration is cutting funding and programming. And they're not just available on health insurance, so it's too expensive. No, I mean, they're cutting treatment. You know, a lot of the clinics that provide HIV drugs, and particularly at low cost to people, are having their funding cut off by the administration. And it seems to be, you know, a political issue. I had a friend who would
come who was not american who had come to america every so often and was hiv positive and had to lie about it every day because for decades like up until like well into the obama era i think the official um stance of america was like you were not allowed to enter the country if you're hiv positive and you know if you came to an airport and they discovered antiretroviral drugs in your hand baggage then they would just like boot you out
Oh, my God. Yeah. America's a crazy place. I don't think Americans realize how crazy America can be sometimes. But yeah, this is all stuff that is either going on or will continue to go on or might get worse. And you can see why people would be like, I just want to move to Portugal.
Well, you had a great point in your piece, Felix, about there was a lot of migration within the US during COVID. People got used to moving. So now it's sort of like has shaken things up to the point where people are more willing to do it to do it now, which I thought was a good point. Yeah, people like to do it now, which I thought was a good point. Yeah, people like people didn't even really appreciate how actually possible it was.
until COVID and then everyone did it. And they're like, oh, I guess it is actually possible. And now I guess the Trump administration adds a little new juice to the mix. You know, I read a story in the Times Morning newsletter on Friday about people who are now self-deporting, for example, because they are afraid to live here and have decided to leave. So there's like a lot of things going on, red to blue, blue to Europe. Yeah.
Elizabeth, do you have an escape plan for if things go terrible? I don't. I'm just here. I've put down my stake, not leaving. It's my country too. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's the only sort of foreign-born slate money host. I always have the idea that I don't need to live here. I can live somewhere else. You're still a citizen of the UK. I'm still a UK citizen, which allows me to live in the British Isles. There you go. Yeah.
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What's next?
The dollar store? I can't keep them straight. I'm just going to say that at the outset. There's Family Tree. No, Family Dollar, Dollar Tree, and something else. A third one. Dollar General. Dollar General. Okay. And so Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar, but now is selling Family Dollar. And they bought Family Dollar, Dollar Tree did, to compete with Dollar General. Correct? Correct. The difference being that...
Dollar Tree is a store where you buy things for 99 cents, cheap things. Family Dollar is more of a grocery store. And, you know, it's where you buy cheap groceries, which might be more than a dollar. It's like, you know, a low-end grocery store. And it was historically quite, I believe the technical term is a bit of a shit show in terms of just like how it was run.
It got bought by Dollar Tree in order to, as you say, to beef up on scale and be able to compete against Family Dollar. Compete against Dollar General. Yeah, exactly. In order to be able to compete against Dollar General, not to be confused with General Motors or Grand Egg. Grand Egg. But yeah, it turns out that even Dollar Tree, for all that it's okay at running Dollar Tree stores,
is not good at corporate turnarounds. And so this $9 billion acquisition that they made of Family Dollar has now turned into a $1 billion exit to a couple of hyena-like private equity firms who are like, well, you don't have the nous to be able to do a corporate turnaround of a shitty supermarket, but we do. We can do it. So all power to them. I think that's exactly, Emily, though, I think that's exactly why...
This feels to me much more
corporate finance slash turnaround slash can you turn a badly run business into a well-run business kind of story than it is the story that people want it to be, which is about how demand for cheap goods is going up or down because of something, something in the economy. Another factor is just that those two chains serve different markets. The dollar tree is really more in suburban areas and the family dollars are in cities.
And the sort of grocery market in cities is just very different than it is in the suburban areas. Also, Dollar Tree now should really be called Buck 25 Tree because they've had to raise their usual 99 cent prices. I think it's just because you can get cheap stuff everywhere. You don't have to go to the dollar store. Like, have you guys ever been to Five Below? Yeah. It's cheap as heck. It's the cheapest store ever. And every time I go into it around where I live, it is awesome.
So I just feel like the dollar store concept is kind of like tired. Well, have you ever been to Timu? I have. I mean, that's the other thing, you know, like if you want like cheap as shit stuff and you're willing to wait a little while for it.
You can get anything for nothing on Tmoo. Or Amazon, you could go to Walmart. Walmart is competing aggressively in this space. And I think this is part of the story as well about Family Dollar. I mean, as Elizabeth says, Family Dollar is more urban. And again, Walmart is more suburban. So they don't directly compete against each other. But if you want really great values, Walmart has always been the place you go first. And it still is. And it's been getting better. It's a well-run company.
Also, when I was a kid, you would go to Dollar Tree because everything really was a dollar. And so if you were a child and you had $5, that was very exciting that you could get five things at the Dollar Tree. And for a long time, the stores have never been really... You go to any 99 cent store in New York, it's just a name now. And so I think people really don't assume anymore that if they want cheap shit, they're going to walk into Dollar Tree and find stuff that's less expensive.
than what they would get at Walmart or Target because very often it's not. Yeah, and very often it's more expensive. It's the classic shrinkflation play. You buy an egg for a dollar and that's expensive for an egg, but at least you can only spend one dollar and you get one egg or two eggs or something.
Maybe it's as simple as what you were getting at, Elizabeth, like nothing costs a dollar anymore at any of the dollar stores and everyone knows it. And so their specialness has been eroded. No one calls them five and dime stores anymore. At one point, things were a nickel and a dime and then inflation happens. And that's the end of that business strategy.
That was Woolworths, right? It was the original Five and Dime Store? Yes. Also, Family Dollar had a rat problem in 2021. One of their giant warehouses was just completely infested with rats. Oh, my God. And they entered into a plea deal where the way it was described was that rats had established a presence in the warehouses in 2021, and they seemingly just...
Their population exploded and somehow this was not taken care of for a couple of years. Taking care of an exploding rat population is non-trivial. The rats used an abandoned conveyor system to get around the warehouse. So can you just, I was just like in my head picturing like this like perverse Willy Wonka with like rats going up and down and kind of like maze, you know, ratatouille, but not with a happy ending. No, no.
I hope the PE guys can really turn it around. Because, yeah, low-end retail is something. It's all American. We need people to make these places shiny and welcoming and cheap. Unless the era of cheap goods is over now. Who knows with the tariffs? We'll find out. ♪♪♪
Eggwatch, Eggwatch, welcome back.
Shayna Roth. Hello, hello. Oh my God, massive news on the egg front this week. Huge news. Egg prices are down. Now, don't get too excited because they could go back up, but U.S. egg prices have hit a five-month low. We are seeing them in places for as low as $2.92 a dozen. OMG. Wow. A two-handle. Yes. I mean...
Well done, President Trump. You said you would bring egg prices down, and you did. Not quite. I don't think that he can for sure be patted on the back for this one. It seems to be a combination of demand going down as well as no more major influxes of bird flu. That's great. Shana?
possibly even bigger than this, what is happening on the... I know that you are really an M&A reporter at heart. So what is happening on the M&A beef? The egg king wants to buy a chickenery. I don't think that's what they're actually called. He wants to buy Hillandale Farms, which is one of the largest US chicken egg suppliers. Yeah, I tried to look into this. Elizabeth Warren says it's the second biggest egg producer in the country, but I think it's actually the fourth. I think she might have been wrong about that. It's still...
It's pretty big. It's not small. It's definitely big. It's called a global eggs, which sounds like a severance egg.
Name. So that, yeah, I love that, right? So this Brazilian company that is buying Hill and Dale is called Global Egg. I mean, it should be called Global Egg, right? It's actually called Global Eggs, which isn't quite as funny. You know, General Motors, General Dynamics, Global Eggs is, you know, it's just big egg. He says the egg king or someone in this piece from the FT says that over the last 15 years, higher income classes have been eating eggs. C'est moi.
It's me. It's you. It's me. It's become high class. Single-handedly. I've been making money and eating eggs. It's because the New York Times always talk about jammy eggs or putting eggs on pizza. Onsen eggs. We're putting eggs on everything now. Yeah, eggs are on everything. The first thing you do when you get one of those swanky sous vide immersion heater things is start making amazing eggs. Leave it to the rich people to mess up eggs for everyone else. Is that what's really happening?
And then if you can afford sugar, you can make Zablioni and that's the best thing ever. I don't know what that is. Well, from what I've heard, all the kids are really into basting eggs now where you can essentially get a nice runny yolk without having to flip your egg. You just sort of add a little bit of water and put a lid on it. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I've been doing for a while. See, there's no coincidences here. Eggs are getting more expensive and the Felix's of the world are like fancifying the eggs. Yeah.
Right? This is a thing altogether. There was also a long debate in the Financial Times this week on the subject of eggs and specifically whether you should ever patronize an establishment that serves caviar on scrambled eggs. What are the eggs on eggs? Pros and cons of this. I don't understand. Eggs on eggs. The pros of caviar on eggs is it's a good combination that tastes delicious.
The bad is it's just a way of expensive shit and it's a cheap gimmick. It's an expensive gimmick, I suppose. Is caviar ever worth it? Always. So good. Oh, my God. I love that caviar is the one thing where Emily is like, now that expensive luxury good is totally worth it.
I love caviar. Give me a fish egg any day. I'm into it. Is the FT's recommendation that you go to the restaurant that only serves caviar or you go to the restaurant that only serves eggs and doesn't put caviar on it? I think that, well, there is no singular FT recommendation because they got a whole panel together and there was dispute. There was a dispute.
within this panel about whether caviar on eggs is a good sign or a bad sign. Caviar is always put on something cheap, like those blinis that people put it on. That's just flour. You need some kind of a delivery device for the caviar, although it can be a mother of pearl spoon and you just eat it straight. But you need some cheap thing to put the caviar on. So just make sure this is the one thing we need to know when talking about fish eggs rather than hen eggs.
Don't use stainless steel cutlery. That's a very bad move. Why? It ruins the taste. That's why everyone uses either the sterling silver or mother of pearl to eat their caviar. My knowledge of caviar comes from watching Below Deck, so I really don't know anything. Is it just like it gives it like a metallic taste for some reason? Yeah, there's some weird chemistry that happens with the egg and the spoon and you have to beware.
But back to this deal, $1.1 billion. The family what owns Hillandale Farm is making a billion bucks from this deal. And you have to wonder whether the newfound profitability of the U.S. egg industry, thanks to all of these high egg prices, has helped to give them a little bit more money. And that's why they're selling. Well, that was going to be my question to you guys is would some Brazilian bajillionaire have even cared about buying an egg farm?
business from the US if it wasn't for the last, I don't know, year of egg prices going nuts. Well, I think if your nickname is the egg king, you might have a perennial interest in buying an egg business. Yeah. There was another, JBS, the meatpacker, also purchased some egg thing in January. So the egg M&A business is booming.
You see, Emily, you managed to say that without making an egg pun. She cracked it. I could see Emily searching for like an egg pun for booming and then failing and then just having to say, oh, I guess I'm just going to have to use English here. Yeah. Oh, well, I guess the time of egg puns is over now that they're back down to earth. They could still go back up, especially given that Easter is coming and all of the Easter people like to get those eggs. So the demand could go back up.
Does egg consumption really go up meaningfully during Easter? I feel like the amount of eggs that you can paint is not that big relative to the number of eggs that everyone just eats as a matter of course. We buy more eggs for Easter, always. We buy a dozen to paint. So if every household is like the Pecs, then yeah. Also, I think there's data.
Also, I wanted to raise that Axios had a piece that suggested the practice of egging has declined with the increase in egg prices. Just throwing that out there. I don't know if any of you have thoughts. Egging being where you throw eggs at people? Correct. Where you throw eggs at people, houses, mailboxes, cars, etc. Big thing when I was a kid, but.
I don't know what the kids today are throwing. I think they are. They're just doing it virtually on their computers. I don't think this is because the price of eggs has gone down. I like that. Yeah, it's a good theory. I feel like sub $3 eggs. And by the way, because I live on planet La La Land, like this is normal, right? If you can get like your horrible caged eggs for $2.92, like that feels like a perfectly normal price. This is not like they have further to fall. Yeah, we've settled in a new place just a little higher than before.
Because $2.92 is higher. Is it? That's what I'm asking. I think I used to see eggs for like $1.99 a dozen, but that's like in the Midwest. They're still, at least at my local Meijer, they're still about $4.99 a dozen. The wholesale prices come down before the retail prices. So the fact that retail is already coming down is kind of startling, given how rapidly the
wholesale prices have come down, you'd think that the retailers were still having to, you know, get out of the inventory they bought when prices were high. Okay, now I'm looking at CPI data. And in like 2021, egg prices were well below $2 a dozen. And the highest they had ever gotten was briefly spiking in 2015 at $2.80.
But then they came way, way, way, way down. So if we settled at like 270, like we're saying, that would be much higher than it had been historically. Maybe that's why the egg king is like, you know, this is a good profitable business, which I can invest a billion dollars in and make money. They said it themselves in the FT. They've become, if not a luxury good, then like a higher end item.
So more worth buying into. Egg yolks are amazing things. They're rich and golden and full of protein and unctuous and umami. And like if they cost $100, people would pay money for them. We wouldn't buy as many as we currently buy. They wouldn't be like an everyday good that you have for breakfast every day. But like
There is something magical about an egg. There really is. People would just start putting eggs on their caviar instead of the reverse. Exactly. Shaina, thank you so much for watching Eggs With Us. Thank you so much.
Numbers round. Elizabeth, do you have a number? My number is 250, and that's the approximate number of Hooters restaurants still left in the U.S. It's down from 400 in 2008. They have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and their turnaround plan is to make their restaurant, as they call it, more family-friendly by getting rid of Bikini Nights. There is incidentally a great essay in GQ this week by Lauren Bonds that's kind of a nostalgic piece for Hooters.
which she describes as a restaurant dedicated to boobs.
the googly eyes of the torso. And it's worth reading just for that. When we were on the prep call, I was recalling, I managed to find a story from, what was it, 2014, talking about how Hooters was trying to reinvent itself as a family restaurant. I feel like if you're going to be doing the turnaround play and it didn't work in 2014, it's probably not going to work in 2025. They're also adding fresh ingredients, which is definitely what people go to Hooters for. They didn't have fresh ingredients before? Guys. Guys.
Guys, my number is 178,549, which is the number of places you can charge your EV in California, which is significantly higher than the 120,000 gas pumps in California. Oh, wow. Yeah.
So California now officially has way more EV charging stations than it does gas pumps. And if you include all of the places where people just charge their cars at home, it's like seven times as many.
What share of cars in California are EVs? Last time I looked, I think it was like 25%. Wow. Why do they get such special treatment? Well, it does take longer to charge your car. Oh, yeah. Of course. You need more. Interesting. But like the you can't find the charger argument for not buying an EV, that one doesn't really fly anymore in California. At my house, it's closer to the EV charging station than to the gas station. This is why you should buy an EV.
Yeah, maybe. So Emily, you told us you had a great number this week.
I'm so excited. Okay. My number is 2,229. That is the number of linguistic breaches a man named Mike O'Brien has cracked up. Is this the Ford guy? He is the Ford guy. He just retired after 32 years at Ford. And towards the end of his tenure, he started tracking the malapropisms from colleagues and himself and others on whiteboards.
such as let's not reinvent the ocean or too many cooks in the soup. And why don't you read between the tea leaves? And my favorite, we need to talk about the elephant in the closet. Yeah.
And it's this delightful Wall Street Journal A-head, like the best kind of Wall Street Journal story. They have a picture of his whiteboards. It's like multiple whiteboards with all the malapropisms on them. He's said them. And he said even the CEO got dinged a few times because he writes the malapropism and then he gives the person credit on the whiteboard. And people get all nervous in meetings with him. They would say something like, I'm not trying to beat a dead horse to death. And then they'd be like, look at him and be like, damn it, O'Brien.
It just sounds so fun and delightful. And everyone should go read this great story. Do you think that being in a room with this guy does make you more likely to say one of these things? It would make me want to say more incorrect things, wouldn't it? Or like if you said something correctly, you'd look at him and be like, huh? Yeah.
There are a lot of just unthinking cliches there. There's just so many good ones in this piece. I love it so much. We're dancing on thin ice. I know these are swing for the moon opportunities. We need to make sure dealers have some skin in the teeth. I love it. Send us your favorite thing that someone has said to you in an ongoing Zoom call and you're like, what? On SlateMoneyAtSlate.com.
We have a kind of unusual and special and longer than normal Slate Plus segment this week. It's me talking to the great Mary Harris of What Next about Satoshi Nakamoto. And one of the reasons I am talking about Satoshi Nakamoto is that What Next TBD, the expansion kit of the What Next universe hosted by the unique and fabulous Lizzie O'Leary,
has made their own meme coins.
So if you want to get rich, maybe you should be listening to What Next TBD rather than Slate Money because they will tell you how to buy the What Next meme coin. Do we have a meme coin? No, we do not, Emily. I guess we should. Do you know what What Next TBD's meme coin is called? I'm just going to have to listen to the show to find out. Stay tuned. TBD. We have to thank the amazing Shaina Roth, obviously, for coming on for Egg Watch and also Merit Jacob and Jessamyn Mollie for producing.
And we will be back next week with even more Slate Money.