There was once a time when clients on the Sandwich Spot Deli in Flatbush would purchase a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich simply to save lots of a few bucks.
It was a budget-friendly choice to the roast beef and cheddar, or the favored turkey and Swiss. Not anymore, not since the price of eggs has soared past the value of the golden ones {that a} sure goose as soon as laid.
“A carton of eggs right now is like $12,” stated Abod Ali, 22, who makes sandwiches on the Flatbush Ave. Sandwich Spot. “It’s going up like crazy. I can’t even make bacon, egg and cheese; sausage, egg and cheese, omelets; all that.”
Beforehand, a bacon egg and cheese sandwich on the deli would price $4 or $5, he stated. Ali stated he used to promote about 100 of the sandwiches every single day. Now he’s solely promoting about 30.
Eggs are displayed on the market in a Manhattan grocery retailer on Tuesday in New York Metropolis. (Spencer Platt/Getty Photographs)
“It dropped like crazy,” he stated. “If they don’t find a solution to this, I’ll just buy a whole bunch of chickens and put them in the basement, figure something out.”
The egg worth disaster, introduced on by the chook flu epidemic, has cooked up some artistic options. To boil down the sticker shock, a number of bodegas within the Bronx began promoting eggs “loosie” fashion — a number of eggs at a time — the identical means they do with cigarettes.
When clients on the nook shops balked at paying $12 or extra for a dozen eggs, retailer homeowners started promoting them in smaller portions. At Pamela’s Inexperienced Deli in Morrisania, proprietor Radhames Rodriguez is promoting three eggs in a plastic bag for $2.99.
“I’ve been in business for 40 years and I’ve never seen the eggs so high like that,” Rodriguez advised CBS.
He stated the concept got here to him after seeing clients depart full cartons of eggs on the counter.
“If you have $20 and you want to make breakfast for two or three people, and you’re already spending $12 for one item, something,” he stated, “how are they going to buy the bread, the milk, the butter and all that stuff?”
Supervisor Abod Ali, 22, who makes sandwiches at The Sandwich Spot Deli on Flatbush Ave. in Flatbush, Brooklyn, stated, “It’s worth more than gold now, eggs, right now.” (Julian Roberts-Grmela / New York Each day Information)
The nationwide common for egg costs isn’t as excessive as it’s in New York, however shoppers throughout the nation are nonetheless reeling from sticker shock.
Information from the latest client worth index present that costs for a dozen grade A eggs in U.S. cities jumped 15% within the month of January alone to a median of $4.95, shattering the earlier file of $4.82 from two years in the past.
Over the previous 12 months, egg costs have elevated 53% and have greater than doubled from a low reached in August 2023.
The value bounce has not gone unnoticed on the White Home, the place President Trump talked about the rise throughout his first cupboard assembly.
“Eggs are a disaster,” Trump stated. “The secretary of agriculture is going to be showing you a chart that’s actually mind-boggling what’s happened. How low they were with us [in the first Trump term], how high they are now. I think we can do something about it.”
With the value of eggs reaching file highs, the Trump administration is wanting into importing extra eggs from different nations and rising funding for efforts to battle the unfold of avian flu, based on the U.S. Division of Agriculture.
Chickens feed from their cages at Aytekin hen farm on Friday in Bandirma, Turkey. The US plans to import roughly 420 million eggs from Turkey this 12 months after being struck by outbreaks of avian flu that killed greater than 17 million egg-laying birds in November and December 2024 alone. (Chris McGrath/Getty Photographs)
“I’m still eating the same amount,” she stated. “I eat them on the weekends, scrambled, sometimes hard-boiled. It bothers me because prices are high and I’m on a fixed income. But it’s still not inhibiting me from buying it. I just eat it on the weekends because it’s like a luxury.”
She stated she purchased a dozen eggs just lately for about $10.
A buyer buys a bag of three eggs in a bodega within the Bronx on Feb. 27, 2025. (Photograph by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP by way of Getty Photographs)
That’s a greenback greater than they had been going for on the Smoke Store Deli and Grocery in Flatbush Clients there have been paying about half that worth simply three months in the past, stated deli clerk Jordy Ortiz.
“Everybody’s struggling. I’m just hoping that it comes down,” Ortiz stated. “Sometimes the customers look at the pricing of the eggs, and they’ll leave it there. But sometimes they ask us, ‘Why is it so high?’ So I have to explain the best that I can that it’s not us. I mean, obviously we do set the pricing, but it’s because the market also has increased the pricing on us.”
He stated a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich there’s nonetheless 5 bucks.
