The Paradox of the Chicken and the Egg pricing
What is going on? People are raiding Costco and other big stores for the eggs. Prices are sky high on eggs. The news blames the Bird Flu, which has caused millions of chickens to be, as they say inside SMERSH, liquidated. Add in villainous flowery prolixity, and end with a head thrown back and joyful laughter!
The paradox is KFC prices haven't budged. Pub buffalo wings have not gone up in price either. No one is making a run on fresh or frozen chicken. Heck, you can buy an actual live chicken at the same price you could in 2019. People are pounding at my door demanding answers to this. "You are a data scientist! You have the answer! We need to know!" These are good people, smart people. They tell me all the time how smart I am. I tell them, listen, I don't give this information out for free, but maybe if you are good and follow me on Linkedin, I will throw you a chicken bone and you can read my article about it.
So here comes the truth bomb that will blow your mind. There isn't one whole chicken industry. Eggs are their own thing. 'Broiler' chickens is another industry that sells the meat you eat. I know what you are thinking. Confusion, dismay, disbelief, how is this possible, but trust me, its totally a thing. You see its all about business cycles. To make eggs, you need two chickens, a male and a female, and no matter how they identify, if those chickens love each other, they make an egg. If they love the farmer, they will keep making those eggs. Now add in the fact that the US market alone supports the creation and sale of 92+ billion eggs per year, and that's a lot of chickens. This whole cycle takes time. Courtship, honeymoon, first egg, followed by successive egg production and you have a very long exposure time to any potential bird flu.
In that scenario the birds are kept alive to keep producing eggs. Broiler birds though, that is a different story. From hatching to harvesting, it is a shocking 6 weeks. Modern food, drugs, and controlled conditions means the meat farmers' chickens have almost no time to become infected, then incubate, and spread bird flu. It's a completely separate industry. They even have their own smaller population of egg layers which is easier to protect from bird flu.
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When I was actually asked this question this morning, I had no idea that poultry and egg farming were completely different industries. Once I dove into the shady world of chickens and the mad science they do, I could see this surprising truth. I am sure, as fellow smart people, you will eventually get asked the same questions by similarly demanding people. Paradox solved; may it serve you well.
Guidance for profitable analytics
2 周This is a really nice illustration of the limitations of isolated datasets for understanding and prediction. In a similar example, a student of mine once encountered a professor confidently showing off an analysis of dairy production, convinced of his own expertise. The student, who just happened to have grown up on a dairy farm, asked the age of the cows and the details of their calving cycles. The professor evidently did not realize that these were things.