The inquiries start casually. “Hey, I haven’t seen you in a while. How have you been?” But when Alex LaMond’s phone lights up with texts from her Brooklyn neighbors, she knows what’s coming.
Quickly, the conversations turn to chickens.
They ask after Agnes and Charlene and the other hens that jut across the brightly colored coop in the community garden where Ms. LaMond volunteers. And then comes the real point of the texts: eggs.
“Do you have any extra?” she said the neighbors ask. “People try anything they can to get the eggs.”
Across the United States, the spread of bird flu has sent egg prices that were already high soaring. The culling of flocks and subsequent grocery store and restaurant price markups on eggs have exasperated shoppers. In New York City, the egg shortage has injected a particular kind of chaos among the miles of sidewalks where supply is unreliable and prices vary wildly block to block.
In a city that values local knowledge and exclusivity, a new kind of power structure is emerging for anyone who has eggs or knows where to get them cheap, or even at all.
Signs of this dynamic were evident on a recent day at one Manhattan grocery store, where a worker passed the empty egg shelves, reached into her smock and handed a favorite customer a full carton.
Elsewhere in the city, shoppers faced a more hectic scene.
Many grocery stores have posted handwritten signs explaining the limits they have put on the number of cartons a shopper can buy: three per customer at some; just one each at others. Cartons that are stocked early in the morning on shelves at the Trader Joe’s in Chelsea are sold out by the afternoon. A sign at the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn chides customers to stop cutting cartons in half to avoid paying for a full dozen. Some bodegas and food trucks are charging an extra dollar for a New York staple, the egg sandwich.
In Manhattan’s Chinatown last week, a vendor was selling eggs from crates stacked inside a shopping cart. At Imani Community Gardens in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, four eggs were on a shelf in the coop, up for grabs for the last volunteer of the day to snatch.
Elmarcia Knight was delighted with her find at Pamela’s Green Deli in the Bronx on a recent afternoon. On the counter were plastic bags, each stuffed with three eggs, on sale for $2.99 a baggie.
“You try to buy a half-carton, but this is way better,” Ms. Knight said.
The deli started selling the “loosies,” a term usually reserved for the individual cigarettes some bodegas sell under the counter, after the manager saw customers suffering sticker shock.
“They come in buy a loaf of bread and gallon of milk, and it’s nearly $13,” the manager, Luis Colon, said. “Every day, it’s getting more expensive.”
At Mr. Colon’s deli, where Christmas lights twinkle over the counter and shelves are stuffed with potato chips and canned vegetables, a $12.99 carton of a dozen eggs is one of the most expensive items, topped only by cat litter and a pack of cigarettes. The price had gone up $2 in a month, Mr. Colon said.
That’s a bargain compared to prices in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, where a carton of eggs was going for $18.99 late last week, according to Sanora Thompson.
“Price-gouging,” Ms. Thompson called it as she shopped in Harlem. She had gone there for a $7.99 carton so that after a month of avoiding cooking with eggs, she could finally make honey cornbread.
At a Whole Foods in Harlem, a few dozen cartons of eggs remained on shelves normally loaded with hundreds on a recent afternoon. Customers had quickly cleared out the eggs that arrived that morning, a worker said as he scanned bar codes to prevent online customers from ordering eggs the store did not have.
Mike Belson, a construction worker, grabbed the last dozen for $8.99, but set the container down as he hesitated at the price. While he paused, a woman snagged the eggs and walked away.
His face wrinkled in disappointment.
The community garden where Ms. LaMond and other volunteers tend 14 hens is called Tranquility Farm. They clean the coop and make sure the chickens’ water isn’t frozen (they call themselves “chicken tenders”). The waiting list for eggs has grown so long that they no longer take names for it.
There is no set price; neighbors lucky enough to get eggs pay what they can. One who sits with the hens and feeds them blueberries every Sunday pays $10 for a dozen.
“It’s never been about getting a deal on eggs,” she said. “It is a way for us to divest from an industrial system so people don’t have to worry about the market going up and down.”
Farm to People, an online farmers market grocery-delivery service with customers in New York City and New Jersey, offers local, pasture-raised eggs for $7.49 a dozen. Michael Ray Robinov, the chief executive, said he had to limit customers to four dozen apiece after he started to get orders for 12 or even 15 dozen eggs.
“New customers are coming in, and they are like panic-buying,” he said.
An array of eggs — large, jumbo, brown and white — were on the shelves at Compare Foods, on Boston Road near 166th Street in the Bronx last week, selling for up to $15.99 a dozen. One brand of white eggs priced at $7.95 was marked “limit one per family.”
“I do the best I can,” Luis Hernandez, the general manager, said. “I want to make money, but if people stop buying eggs it hurts my business.”
There are 16 screens at the front of the store to watch for shoplifting. If employees catch anyone stealing eggs, they have a tested method for discouraging future thefts, Mr. Hernandez explained, before telling a story about how he and his brother had once caught an egg thief who happened to be a family friend.
Mr. Hernandez’s brother spotted the theft on camera and approached the man, giving him a giant, egg-smashing bear hug.
“They broke all over his body,” Mr. Hernandez said, giggling so hard he could barely talk. “We still laugh about that.”
The post For Savvy New Yorkers, It’s All About Cheap Eggs and Where to Find Them appeared first on New York Times.
