An Egg Story

If your gasoline expenses are busting your budget and the oil price hike is getting to you, take it out first on the eggs. This story will tell you how.

A man eats two eggs each morning for breakfast. Since a dozen eggs won’t last a week, he normally buys two dozens at a time. One day while buying eggs, he notices that the price has gone up. The next time he buys, the price has risen even more. When asked to explain the price of eggs, the store owner says, “The price has gone up and I have to raise my price accordingly.” This store buys 100 dozen eggs a day.

He checked around for a better price and all the distributors have raised their prices. The distributors have begun to buy from the huge egg farms. The small egg farms have been driven out of business. The huge egg farms sell 100,000 dozen eggs a day to distributors. With no competition, they can set the price as they see fit. The distributors then have to raise their prices to the grocery stores. And on and on and on.

As the man kept buying eggs, the price kept going up. He saw the big egg trucks delivering 100 dozen eggs each day. Nothing changed there. He checked out the huge egg farms and found they were selling 100,000 dozen eggs to the distributors daily.

Nothing had changed but the price of eggs.

Then, on the week before Christmas, the price of eggs shot up even higher. Again he asked the grocery owner why and was told, “Cakes and baking for the holidays!” The huge egg farmers know there will be a lot of baking going on and more eggs will be used. The man says, “There must be something we can do about the price of eggs.”

He starts talking to all the people in his town and they decide to stop buying eggs. But this didn’t work because everyone needed eggs. Finally, the man suggested only buying what you need. He ate two eggs a day. On the way home from work, he would stop at the grocery and buy two eggs. Everyone in town started buying 2 or 3 eggs a day.

The grocery store owner began complaining that he had too many eggs on stock. He told the distributor that he didn’t need any eggs. Maybe wouldn’t need any all week. The distributor had eggs piling up at his warehouse. He told the huge egg farms that he didn’t have any room for eggs would not need any for at least two weeks.

At the egg farm, the chickens just kept on laying eggs! To relieve the pressure, the huge egg farm told the distributor that he could buy the eggs at a lower price. The distributor said, “I don’t have the room for the f*%$&^*&%* eggs even if they were free!”

The distributor told the grocery store owner that he would lower the price of the eggs if the store would start buying again. The grocery store owner said, “I don’t have room for more eggs. The customers are only buying 2 or 3 eggs at a time. Now, if you were to drop the price of eggs back down to the original price, the customers would start buying by the dozens again.” The distributors sent that proposal to the huge egg farmers, but the egg farmers liked the price they were getting for their eggs. Unfortunately, the chickens just kept on laying!

Finally, the egg farmers lowered the price of their eggs, though only slightly. The customers still bought 2 or 3 eggs at a time. They said, “When the price of eggs gets down to where it was before, we will start buying by the dozen.”

Slowly, the price of eggs started dropping. The distributors had to slash their prices to make room for the eggs coming from the egg farmers. The egg farmers cut their prices because the distributors wouldn’t buy at a higher price than they were selling eggs for. They had full warehouses and wouldn’t need eggs for quite a while. And those chickens kept on laying! Eventually, the egg farmers cut their prices because they were throwing away eggs they couldn’t sell. The distributors started buying again because the eggs were priced to where the stores could afford to sell them at the lower price. And the customers started buying by the dozens again.

Now, change the eggs to gasoline.

What if everyone only bought enough gasoline needed for a period of time, each time they pulled up to the pump? The dealer’s tanks would stay semi-full all the time. The dealers wouldn’t have room for the gas coming from the huge tanks. The tank depots wouldn’t have room for the petrol coming from the refining plants. And the refining plants wouldn’t have room for the oil being off-loaded from the huge tankers coming from the oil fields.

So, the moral of this egg tale is: don’t fill up the tank of your car! You may have to stop for gas thrice a week, but the price should come down. Think about it!

Consumers must learn that they have power in numbers. If we want to cripple those who fleece us of our hard-earned money, we must do it together.

But what this long story about eggs really wants to convince you on is for you not to lessen your consumption of eggs but to cut as much gasoline as you can from your life.