For months, President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that egg prices are tumbling. It wasn’t true then, but it’s true now.
Egg prices fell 12.7% last month, the biggest monthly decline since 1984, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. And they could continue to fall this month, too: The USDA reported last week that a dozen large white-shell eggs now cost $3.30 on average, down a whopping 69 cents from a week before.
It’s a remarkable reversal after egg prices surged in each of the past five months – and 17 of the past 19 months – because of a deadly avian flu epidemic that necessitated the mass culling of egg-laying hens.
“Maybe the worst of EggGate has passed,” Tyler Schipper, associate professor in economics and data analysis at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, told CNN.
Nevertheless, egg prices remain significantly higher now than before the latest bird flu outbreak, and they cost 49.3% more last month than they did a year earlier. Eggs are still more expensive than when Trump took office, according to the BLS. Egg prices this past Easter, which typically rise in the run-up to the holiday, were the highest for any Easter on record, the USDA reported.
Well before last month’s decline, Trump had been touting falling egg prices as a sign that his administration’s plan to lower prices for consumers has been working. In February, the USDA announced an initiative to lower egg prices, including increased biosecurity on egg-laying farms, aid to farmers who have lost flocks and temporary lifting of restrictions on egg imports.
Despite Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ far more conservative estimate that egg prices would normalize in the summer, Trump last month said, “as you know, the cost of eggs has come down like 93, 94% since we took office.” Those percentage declines Trump stated are not close to accurate – but we now know that consumer egg prices were, indeed, falling sharply when Trump made those remarks (the Consumer Price Index data wasn’t out yet to confirm or deny Trump’s claims).
It appears as though Trump may have been talking about wholesale prices, which had been tumbling throughout March before normalizing in recent weeks. Nevertheless, wholesale prices fell by half – not close to the 90%+ figures Trump was citing.
Wholesale prices are the costs distributors pay to farmers or middlemen. Consumer prices are what customers pay at grocery stores. Those costs typically make their way through the supply chain at a slower pace, because grocery stores may decide to keep prices at a certain price, even when wholesale prices change, to try to recoup lost profits from prior weeks, according to Kevin Bergquist, sector manager at Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute.
The USDA says consumer prices finally fell as demand for eggs decreased and avian flu cases have fallen. Many groceries, including large chains like Costco, had limited customers’ purchases because of egg shortages.
So Trump’s claim that consumer egg prices are down is finally true – even if the timing of his claim and the wild percentages he threw around were grossly inaccurate.