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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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This is hitting Arrested Development levels out here people.

Eggs are not $11/doz because of price gouging or bird flu or operating costs or any other reason, they just aren't $11! Go to Target.com, search for a dozen eggs. Here's the large cage free ones: $2.59. Price fairly consistent across multiple locations.

Seriously. What are we even talking about here?

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Yeah, ‘eggs are $11/dozen’ is clearly false to me; I’d believe that the Whole Foods in San Francisco is selling free range organic brown eggs for that price, but not much else.

Seriously. What are we even talking about here?

There was a period of time where, among a certain set, "high egg prices" was a synecdoche for high inflation and rising prices more generally. Tucker's reference here is probably not to convey that he literally pays $11/dozen for eggs but something closer to "prices high, economy bad."

Damn those are some cheap eggs. Here in the UK they're like 50% more expensive.

It was a thing earlier in the year when prices spiked because of bird flu, but they seem to have come down now. Presumably Tucker doesn’t regularly buy eggs and so remembered some headline rather than commenting on the actual situation.

Tucker was probably just using irresponsible hyperbole. But I've been buying eggs every week for years. I've never paid more than $5 a dozen. There may be weird parts of the country where there were shortages, but that just wasn't a thing in most of the country, for ANY reason.

The use of "$11" suggests to me that it wasn't intended as a literal claim. Unfortunately, egg prices were actually high enough at one point that you probably could have spent $11 if you insisted on Whole Foods eggs at the height of localized shortages, so the claim could be taken literally. Realistically, this seems more like me saying, "with Joe Biden as President, ground beef is now $37/pound". I don't know, maybe it's just that Tucker's completely out of touch with grocery store pricing, that wouldn't surprise me all that much.

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