Egg costs soar 15% in a month with grocery shelves empty across US
The Peninsula
The great American egg shortage is getting worse. With bird flu killing millions of egg laying chickens, prices surged more than 15% in January fro...
The great American egg shortage is getting worse.
With bird flu killing millions of egg-laying chickens, prices surged more than 15% in January from a month earlier - the biggest advance since 2015 - and 55% from a year before, according to a US Bureau of Labor Statistics report on Wednesday. The jump helped push overall US inflation up by the most since August 2023.
That’s bad news for American consumers already contending with higher costs of everything from food to gas. Grocery stores from New York to Chicago and Los Angeles have already limited purchases, while Waffle House added a temporary egg surcharge of 50 cents per unit.
The situation has gotten so dire that at a busy Whole Foods in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, the egg shelves were entirely empty on Tuesday evening, rendering purchase-limit signs redundant.
