Egg Stabilization

In Manhattan last week the retail price of eggs dropped suddenly 5-c- to 6-c- a dozen. Same time, in Ohio, the hastily organized flood relief committee (see p. 12) learned that thousands of dozens of eggs were at its disposal for feeding the destitute. These two items of good news for egg-eaters were the complementary results of a single Government action to stabilize the egg market. Responsible for both was Henry Agard Wallace's Surplus Commodities Corp., an AAAffiliate. Most important natural factor in determining the price of eggs is the laying behavior of the hen. In spring, the big egg-laying season, eggs are ordinarily plentiful and cheap. In autumn and winter, hens are less productive, more storage eggs are sold, egg prices rise.

Because a hen can recognize winter or spring only by the way she feels, unseasonable weather may disturb this rhythm.

To hens in the East, the mild, muddy winter of 1936-37 has seemed enough like spring to stimulate prodigious, pre-seasonal laying. Not long after Christmas farmers found themselves with more pails of fresh eggs than they could sell. Early last month the New York egg market was glutted, wholesale prices were abnormally low, farmers were beginning to reduce chicken feed and to slaughter too-productive pullets. Meanwhile the great chain grocery stores which sell New Yorkers about one billion eggs a year were making about 11-c- a dozen on the spread between wholesale and retail prices. Upon this scene moved Surplus Commodities Corp. To strengthen the wholesale market it recommended, and Secretary Wallace approved, purchase of 179,000 dozen eggs on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Though the immediate effect of this was to attract an even larger number of egg-sellers to the New York market than before, by week's end wholesale prices had steadied, moved up a little. Surplus Commodities Corp. hoped that this would dissuade poultry farmers from cutting down on feed and hatchings, thereby causing an egg shortage next autumn.

Eggs bought in New York and later in the West were routed to relief agencies in the flood area. Over SCC's second objective--getting retail prices down so that greater egg consumption would reduce the surplus--pre-sided the angel of publicity. Spotting government concern over eggs, the vigilant New York World-Telegram announced with three-column headlines that chain grocers whose eggs cost them 34-c- a dozen were selling them for 45-c-, making three times as much profit as they made in 1935. "There is no known method," said the World-Telegram blandly, "of forcing the chains to reduce their retail price ... so that consumers can use and farmers sell more eggs." Four days later almost every large chain in New York City had cut its egg profits in half.

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