Dear Mr. Kettle:
I returned from my weekly grocery shopping excursion having
found what I thought was a small treasure. I’d purchased a container of eggs
for a mere $2. It was not just a dozen eggs but, rather, eighteen, grade-A
large eggs. They weren’t advertised as being on sale and, once I’d gotten home
and taken a moment to reflect on it, that price nagged at me. A horrible
thought came to me and ran to the fridge to check the expiration date, only to
find that I had weeks to go before they went ripe. Still, I have a suspicious
nature. I remember an experiment that I could perform which would prove unquestioningly
that my purchase was indeed “farm fresh.”
I carefully place all eighteen eggs in a pot of water and, with more
than a little relief, watched them all settle to the bottom. Carefully drying
them and placing them back into their carton, I could not shake the feeling
that something was not quite right with this purchase.
Being just a little infatuated with numbers – and eggs – I
decided I need to know what the going street price was for a dozen eggs.
Knowing of only one all-encompassing source for such information, I turned to
the United States Department of Labor’s Bureau
of Labor and Statistics for the answer. Sixty seconds later, I was more
than a little crestfallen to discover that as recently as last month, the
median price for a dozen grade-A large eggs was, in fact, $2. There was no
conspiracy to peddle inferior eggs off on me as seemingly normal eggs at an
incredible great price. There was no terrorist plot to lull me into a pattern
of eggtravagance. Then the synapses in my head finished chugging, a puff of
smoke escaped my left ear and the “ah-ha” light click on over my head. I’d
failed to normalize my data. I wasn’t doing an apple to apple comparison – I
mean egg to egg comparison. You see my $2 purchase meant that I’d actually paid
only $1.33 per dozen. To put it in the colloquialism of the original 19th
century Sherlock Holmes, the game was afoot.
I pulled the data from BLS on the historical price of eggs,
going back twenty-fives and found some disturbing patterns. The first thing I
noted was that once I averaged out the price increases into a median annual percentage
increase, that percentage rate of 4.17% came within one tenth of one percent of
matching the median annual Consumer Price
Index (CPI) for the same period - a number also maintained by the Bureau of
Labor and Statistics. While not a particularly earth-shattering revelation in
itself, I did feel as if I’d just walked up to a craps table for the first time
in my life and rolled a natural on the come-out. The hackles rose on my neck,
so I looked a little deeper.
My second revelation came when I looked at the standard
deviation on the price of the same dozen eggs over the previous twelve months.
You see my fortuitous purchase of a dozen eggs for a mere $1.33 was eleven
standard deviations below the government recorded norm for the previous year.
Again, to draw upon an analogy, my fortuitous purchase was like tripping through
the desert to discover a collection of pyramids, except that the desert was not
near Cairo, Egypt, but rather Alice, Australia. That phenomenal price was
simply out of place. Not quite as fantastic as finding water on the Moon, but a
distant second. Many things could explain the price spread, until you start
looking too closely to the numbers. Perhaps the top 1% of wage earners in this
country do spend obscene sums for the eggs in some perverse exercise in
trickle-down economics, but I have difficulty with that image.
As such, lots of fantastic possibilities began running
through my mind, in part because the Internet had gone down by this time, there
was nothing worth watching on television and my e-reader needed to be re-charged.
I began imagining a Jetson’s style chicken egg operation, where George J.
Jetson himself oversaw an army of Rosie Robots efficiently harvesting eggs from
broods of contented chickens. I envisioned GMO chickens imbued with opposable
thumbs and sufficient intellect that they collected their eggs under the
direction of a benevolent chicken wrangler, who guided their actions
telepathically, like a scene from a Stephen King novel.
Then my neural synapses clicked again, a puff of smoke
emerged from my right ear and all became clear. It was an alien invasion, a
conspiracy of national – no, international – proportion, meant to lull me and
every other egg-loving, red-blooded American into a false sense of complacency.
I’d been duped!
We’ve known for some time that the backbone of American
agriculture is not our ingenuity or even the rugged individualism of the
American family farmer. While these are important legs on which the American
dinner table is supported, they’re balanced unequivocally by a labor force that
we openly hate and secretly love. That labor force performs those requisite tasks
needed to get that egg from beneath the chicken to atop the table…and some of
those tasks are downright disagreeable. In fact, if more of us voting Americans
had to endure the work conditions necessary to bring us a dozen American
produced eggs from red-blooded, American chickens at the unheard of price of
$1.33 per dozen there would be blood. While that sounds melodramatic, we’ve
conveniently forgotten that the rights and privileges we enjoy as workers in
this country were written in the blood of those who came before us. Little is
spoken in American history classes about the Homestead Strike, of
1892, the Battle
of Blair Mountain, in 1921, or a hundred other such events in our history that
have led to mundane privileges, which we now take for granted, such as the
forty-hour work week, child labor laws, and work safety standards, to name a
few. These were minor civil wars, pitting American against one another, as one
small group sought not equality, but dignity and opportunity in the work they
performed.
Fortunately, we’ve devised a solution for avoiding a repeat
of those bloody chapters, while still providing us with agricultural products
at fantastically affordable prices. We’ve development a second-class workforce,
invisible and silent, stripped of as many rights and privileges as we can
justify, while still calling ourselves civilized. It’s a beautiful system. If
these people care not for the squalid conditions, abysmal pay and abject public
we offer them, we simply replace them with the next batch refuges seeking to
escape even more dire conditions from where they came. We grumble loudly and
publicly at the scourge that we call our illegal immigration problem. Our
politicians jockey for position on one side of the argument or the other, offering
to find a solution, while never quite getting around to doing so. Meanwhile, we
blithely and ignorantly stand in line at the grocer buying eggs, whose sale
price is statistically improbable, whether that be $1.33 or $2 per dozen.
I have no solutions or directions to offer here. The simple fact is that should all those angry Americans seeking an immediate answer to our illegal immigration problem were granted their wish they’d find it a bitter sweet victory. If the estimated 12 million illegal aliens were rounded up and deported overnight, we would face a crisis of epic proportion. In the food industry alone there would be chaos. No one would be there to collect my eggs! Certainly not at the wages and work conditions that currently exist.
Chicken ranchers would eventually find someone to fill that
void. However, if those people have a voice, know their rights, and are willing
stand up for them, there will be blood. At the very least, we’ll likely see is
a return to economic turmoil like
that seen in the early 1970’s, when Federal intervention was necessary to
control inflation and forestall widespread, economically induced famine within
our own borders. What’s more, we won’t be getting our eggs for the phenomenal
price of a mere $2 per dozen, nor will the price increases stay so neatly in
lockstep with inflation overall. My egg fantasy would be over.
Sincerely,
Mr. Pot
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