[xyzzyz]

It is expensive precisely because it’s not profitable. Imagine if you were a builder, selling artisanal houses built without use of any power tools, only with organic manual labor, using materials prepared with organic manual labor only. You’d be building one deck in the same time it takes normal builders to build an entire house. The only way you could make a living this way would be if you charged multiples of what normal construction costs. But, even then, you’d still complain about your business not being profitable, as you’d have troubles finding people who will pay as much.

Myself, I like good eggs, but I’m not paying $1/egg.

[biztos]

> I like good eggs, but I’m not paying $1/egg

It looks like Whole Foods charges about half that for fancy organic eggs.

However, if you sold them at the Ferry Building in San Francisco and had a good story about why your eggs were special, I think you could get $12 a dozen.

How many of us are going to balk at $1/egg after we just paid $5 for an espresso and are ogling the $50 bottles of olive oil? Especially if we've been conditioned to not eat too many eggs because "cholesterol."

[xyzzyz]

The point here is that if Starbucks was buying as expensive coffee as are those organic $1 eggs, it would be $10-15 espresso. I’m happy to pay $1 for egg, if it comes with the rest of the breakfast in form of a sit down restaurant service. But paying $12 just for a carton of dozen eggs? No way.

[jdavis703]

I’m not sure that’s true. One of the cafes near me uses Strauss Milk (pastured cows, methane digesters, the works) and of course fair trade coffee. It adds maybe $1.50 to the price of a latte, for about $5.50. Commercial buyers can buy in bulk, so I imagine it’s a bit cheaper than buying retail from the kind of upscale groceries that sell sustainable foods.

[jdavis703]

Exactly, scrambled eggs or an omelette at a restaurant easily costs more than $1/egg. Obviously restaurants have all other costs. But in the grand scheme of things, if you’re living in an expensive place like NYC or SF, it doesn’t seem like that much.

[xyzzyz]

How much would the restaurant breakfast cost, if the restaurant was buying $1 eggs and other similarly expensive ingredients?