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Comments (200)

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  autoexec
  I've known about Cal-Maine's scammy practices for years. It's difficult to know which brands are associated with a group like Cal-Maine, but I did my best at one point to get a list which I still check before buying eggs.The brands I've been avoiding are: 4Grain Cage Free Egglands Best Farmhouse Eggs Land O'Lakes Fassio Egg Farms Southwest Specialty Eggs LLC Rocky Mountain Eggs Meadowcreek Foods Specialty Eggs LLC Red River Valley Egg Farm ProEgg Inc. Dixie Egg Co. American Egg Products LLC Texas Egg Products LLC Wharton County foods Benton County Foods Sunups Sunny Meadow Mahard Egg Farm Maine Egg Farms Other Cal-Maine associated brands: Ralston-Purina, Pilgram's Pride, Adams Foods, Dairy Fresh Products, Foodonics Int'l,Versova is new to me, but I'll try to avoid them too. It looks like their brands include: Center Fresh Group Centrum Valley Farms Iowa Cage FRee Hawkeye pride Ovation Farms Trillium Farms Willamette Egg Farms
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  CGMthrowaway
  I did not realize the egg crisis was found to be price fixing operation.As I recall during the whole thing the news was non-stop about how it was related to broad-based inflation, chicken culling for avian flu, etc. Seems like all that was a lie, or at least merely a half-truth.
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  arjie
  Wow, well I have egg on my face. I have frequently used this as an example of the "oh so the egg guys got greedy and then got saintly" to parody the idea that price is primarily determined by greed. Welp! Now to see if I can eke out some pride by finding out what percentage of the price fluctuations was due to coordination.> During the 2024 campaign, when Kamala Harris meekly suggested price gouging to tame inflation,...Haha, she suggested going after price gouging. Though the idea of someone meekly suggesting price gouging is funny.
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  Taronar
  Things like this mainly occur in markets with little competition, killing of small business causes issues like this. Much of our grievances are caused by our high level of market concentration.
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  jklinger410
  It's so fun how corporations are protected from individual liability but also their money is treated a speech.
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  declan_roberts
  We really need to bring back corporal punishment, both for petty crimes and white collar crimes. The prison sentences don't make sense for the petty crimes, and the fines don't make sense for the white collar crimes.We need to legalize public caning and the stocks.
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  abeppu
  Ok here's maybe a dumb or maybe a crazy question or maybe not:- the Fed has price stability as part of its dual mandate, and in its normal operation does this at the level of manipulating the money supply for everyone, through changing the interest rates given to large banks (IIUC, I'm def not an expert here)- the FTC has as its primary mission anti-trust enforcement and consumer protection. During the last administration, the FTC tried to be more aggressive largely through legal action with specific firms.Price stability and anti-trust enforcement are related. Would both goals be better served if a single public body with high independence could use both tools and levels of targeting? E.g. rather than being hit with a small-ish fine, should firms that collude to manipulate prices, or firms that consolidate to the point of approaching monopoly, be penalized with higher interest rates on all their financing?
• khriss
  We really need an FTC with teeth. Capitalism cannot easily survive monopolies as the first thing monopolies do it fight tooth and nail to shut out competitors.Sadly, we seem to be going in the opposite direction. First with the appointment of industry aligned FTC chairs (with the notable exception of Lina Khan) and now with the supreme court judgement that the president can fire heads of agencies at will. It makes it much easier for moneyed interests to buy the outcomes they want as there are no real job protections for the FTC commissioners.
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  carimura
  Please invest in some happy backyard chickens if you are able. We did, and it's amazing.
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  Varelion
  The United Monopolies of America
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  WarmWash
  Seems ripe for civil litigation at least.Even if criminal charges are a slap on the wrist, civil damages could easily get into the billions. And good luck finding a jury that doesn't remember the national outcry about egg prices back then.I think the craziest part of the story is how brazen the execs were. Although what they were doing (price steering in an illiquid market) might well not be illegal, it pretty blatantly is in a grey (dark grey) area and they themselves obviously knew they were exploiting the system for themselves.
• toomuchtodo
  Related:Egg Libor Was Also Manipulated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48756256 - July 2026Justice Department Requires Egg Producers to End Coordinated Benchmark Manipulation that Artificially Inflated Prices Across the Country - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734081 - July 2026
• xgulfie
  Same thing keeps happening with DRAM, bread, electricity...
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  pstuart
  That'll show em! (that they should continue with the price fixing).I look forward to the day when we no longer have a pro-corruption government.
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  cucumber3732842
  > Basically, consolidation had created concentrated power, and the shock of <whatever> let them exploit it.Once you see this pattern, you see it everywhere.>While most normal people at the time thought someone was likely scamming them, that is not the message you heard from the industry, elite media, or economists. Throughout the alleged conspiracy, industry executives and analysts were saying that there was nothing to see except a supply shock of a disease killing lots of hensThe idea that something more nefarious than the bird flue was going on was very unpopular on HN at the time
• croes
  Business as usual.BP, Shell etc. make more profit from ignoring safety and environmental standards than they have to pay in fines for oil spills.Same is true for FB & Co.How about the possibility of a death penalty for companies like for people because companies are people, aren’t they?
• snootypoot
  im reminded of the old documentary food inc. pretty good stuff, it points out that the centralization of the american food supply into the hands of ever fewer companies is going to harm us at some point.
• snootypoot
  thankfully the scamming egg companies are at least able to admit voter fraud takes place, and when attempting to emulate it get leniency from the administration who makes its biggest gripe about voter fraud
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  BrenBarn
  This is the perennial problem in our society with regulation. We're not willing to set the penalties high enough. The penalties need to be absolutely ruinous.
• metalman
  now I understand why it's called a "fine", because it's way more than ok, it's just fine indeed.
• mannanj
  So isn't this how all major US capitalist companies function now? They look at unethical behavior and fines as a cost-benefits equation. Hardly new that when people make lots of money from something, they pay off your leaders to let them off with a small fine.
• alwa
  Related: “Good News: Egg Prices Are Down. Bad News: They’re Hurting Farmers.”https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/business/egg-prices-down....And Levine’s column, which Stoller links to (with rather less color commentary):https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-07-01/egg...It feels like Mr. Stoller spends a lot of time here insinuating that because price manipulation happened on the margins of this supply crunch, there was no supply crunch, and everything’s just moustache-twirling tycoon conspiracies:> While most normal people at the time thought someone was likely scamming them, that is not the message you heard from the industry, elite media, or economists.> In 2025, egg prices dropped dramatically […] these price declines suggested that supply and demand were doing their magical work. Populists were mocked as ignoring natural market forces. […but…] It turns out, when [these conspirators] felt threatened by legal action, the alleged price-fixing stopped. Suddenly, the avian flu epidemic was no longer pushing up prices.I mean… it can very much be both. Slaughtering all the chickens really can reduce the number of eggs in the world, people really can be willing to pay more for the few that are left, you really will get more eggs again when you make enough new chickens and wait til they grow to egg-pooping age. Even as it was also true that some greedy people’s unfair play magnified the dynamics that were already happening.But like—even at the higher prices, eggs weren’t going unsold at the end of the day.To me this whole thing still feels like things working the way the dastardly elite theorists suggest it does: the reason we treat collusion like this as bad and illegal in the first place—besides the casual sense of grossness and unfair play—is that the misleading signal provokes overproduction and therefore a price collapse.The price did indeed go on to collapse by 93% to pennies a dozen; that’s squeezing farmers brutally.The investigators investigated, the prosecutors prosecuted, the manipulative behavior stopped, the contracts got adjusted, the price index mechanism got revisited…I feel like the error is similar to what bothers me listening to day-trader types: conflating raw synthetic-price-index movements with the underlying physical reality they represent.
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  yieldcrv
  > Trump let big egg producers off the hook for what looks like a brazen multi-year conspiracy. Still, egg prices did drop as a result of the investigation.I honestly hate how Presidents are attributed to market functionsI hate how partisans do that pretty religiouslywhile the state functions pretty autonomously in parallel, the investigation and multi agency actions helped crater the price of eggs very quicklyBut even that summary is trying so hard to appease rabid partisan’s feelings so they'll stick around for the parts that don't add power to their cause
• anon
  undefined
• josefritzishere
  Crime is legal now if you can get rich fast enough.
• xbar
  Why is capital punishment for society-level-harming white collar crime never considered in Western countries?
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  MarkusQ
  Reminds me of the Egg Greed Graph.https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFa2bQlWcAARYNB.jpgWhy is it people have such a hard time understanding that this is what we want markets to do? If there is a scarcity of some resource, the prices rise and this motivates producers to produce more and consumers to consume less, until an equilibrium is found. On net, this means that we can have more of what we want for less effort over time. Yes, the people doing this profit from it. That's why they do it.