By Miranda Davis, Augusta Saraiva and Michael Hirtzer | Bloomberg
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.
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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.
“This doesn’t only impact at-home bakers and breakfast makers, but the restaurants that depend on eggs too,” said Elizabeth Renter, a senior economist at NerdWallet. “We saw last week that Waffle House, a bastion of inexpensive late night and morning meals, is adding an egg surcharge to cope with the impact of bird flu.”
Egg prices have broken record after record in recent months, with the cost of a dozen averaging $7.34 nationally as of Feb. 7, data from the US Department of Agriculture showed. That represents an increase of 10% from a week earlier and another all-time high.
More than 100 million egg-laying hens have been lost since the bird flu outbreak started in 2022, according farmer group United Egg Producers. That’s resulted in shortages that forced a number of grocery stores including Trader Joe’s and Costco Wholesale Corp. to limit purchases to one, two or three cartons per customer.
Overall inflation rose 0.5% in January from a month earlier, the BLS report showed.
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