One forgotten dubious moment from the US presidential election campaign trail was JD Vance castigating Kamala Harris for a dozen eggs costing $4 €3.78) while standing in front of a supermarket display that was clearly selling them for $2.99.
Logic-scrambling though this may have been, there was a solid reason why Donald Trump and his vice-presidential pick wanted to talk about the price of consumer staples, and why, after Trump won, the Republican focus on “eggflation” was said to have helped the party poach voters.
As economist Austin Hughes points out in his commentary on November’s Credit Union consumer sentiment index, the average cost of a dozen eggs in the US rose from $1.82 in October 2021 to $4.82 in January 2023. Prices then fell back, dropping to $3.32 in October 2024, but this still represents a cumulative increase of 82 per cent over the past three years – a leap exacerbated by bird flu.
Such increases tend to “exert an outsized impact on consumer thinking as to how severe the cost-of-living pressures they face may be”, says Hughes in his analysis of the “eggonomy”.
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In other words, dramatic price movements for just one frequently bought consumer staple can deepen the “feel-bad” factor among consumers. This is especially likely if inflation for the product in question was stable for much of the previous decade.
“Although economists may rightly pay more attention to broader-based and statistically robust measures of inflation, for the average consumer, and particularly for lower-income and cash-constrained households, the change in the price of staples such as eggs probably does more to capture the nature and degree of the cost pressures they currently face,” writes Hughes.
Over the same three-year period, the average price of dozen eggs in Ireland rose by a more modest 25.8 per cent, from €3.56 to €4.48.
Overall food inflation, however, was slightly sharper in the Irish economy, reaching 6.4 per cent compared with 6.2 per cent in the US. Food inflation was lower here than in the US during the 2010-2019 period, suggesting “a correspondingly larger shock to household budgeting”.
When it comes to the electorate’s support for Government parties on Friday, it would not be unprecedented if this shock was to leave something of a crack.
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