Every time you spend $8 on a carton of eggs, you also decide not to buy something else that might be more useful.
In February, egg prices in the US reached an all-time high of $7.86 per dozen, according to the USDA. And that’s for regular eggs – not even cage-free ones, which will cost extra.
Those 900 calories, including 72 grams of protein, might be tempting, but you can get more bang for your buck with lentils, or even chicken breast. The same money would buy more calories and nutrients. But we at Cybernews don’t care about food, we love tech.
Here are some of the opportunity costs to consider when buying a carton of eggs:
1. You can grab a cheap egg boiler, though you’ll have nothing to boil with.
2. Netflix with ads costs $7.99, so you can binge-watch while reducing your calorie-burning rate.
3. You might embrace your inner egghead and buy a book, which will help crack the code of egg-sploding expenses. Or even better, get a library card for unlimited knowledge.
4. Snag a domain name (URL) for your blog or website, or use it with your Cloudflare tunnel.
5. Get a cheap cloud plan for a month or two.
6. Acquire an Arduino clone board that will collect dust and remind you that you won’t be an electronics engineer. But hey, at least you tried.
7. Get a basic toolkit or a multitool for your electronics or other DIY projects.
8. Buy a 20W USB wall charger for your phone or Arduino.
9. Or power it from a small power bank (5,000-10,000 mAh).
10. Cheap soldering iron? Yes, you can get it. Even if it won’t be any good.
11. Get a hot glue gun instead.
12. You can also plug in a USB fan for less than ten bucks.
13. Or get a Basic USB LED light strip if you’re feeling festive.
14. You won’t afford a computer at Newegg for the price of a dozen eggs, but you can buy a cheap computer mouse.
15. Or buy a pad for that mouse.
16. For a similar price I even found cheap wireless earbuds to silence your stomach growling.
17. Apple Arcade will keep you busy for a month for even cheaper.
18. You can direct the savings to some basic courses on Udemy when they’re on sale.
19. You can even afford furniture: buy a LACK coffee table from Ikea during a sale to store all your new gadgets.
20. You can also buy something from Apple, even if it's just a USB-C to 3.5 mm headphone jack adapter.
21. So many times in my life, I’ve found myself in situations where a carabiner would have been useful. If only I hadn’t bought those eggs.
22. Protect your privacy with a VPN for a month or choose an antivirus subscription.
23. Get Stardew Valley or Minecraft game on sale and raise your own digital chicken.
24. Buy a recorder (musical instrument) and learn to play it. Everyone will know you’re fun at parties.
I could keep going with this list, but the average American only consumes 284 eggs per year. That’s equivalent to 24 cartons of eggs or almost 200 greenbacks, which is enough to cover the entire list above. You could also spend it on something entirely different.
Or even invest and grow your money.
But wait, maybe eggs themselves are a worthwhile investment?
Three years ago, one bitcoin would buy you over 32,000 dozens of eggs. Today, it gets you only 12,000 cartons. While humanity spent thousands of years advancing technology, and building high-tech devices, services, and blockchains, chickens simply laid eggs. And somehow, eggs hold their value better.
Hatcheries sell baby chicks for as low as $3. You could get three for the price of a dozen eggs. One egg-laying hen produces 200-300 eggs per year. So you might see your portfolio of chicken growing exponentially.
This is not nutritional, medical, or investment advice. This story is about opportunity cost.
And Oxford Reference might themselves made a notable oversight by not including eggs in its definition of opportunity costs.
“The cost of something in terms of an opportunity forgone. Opportunity cost is given by the benefits that could have been obtained by choosing the best alternative opportunity. For example, for a farmer the opportunity cost of growing wheat is given by what they would have earned if they had grown barley, assuming barley is the best alternative.”
Whenever something seems expensive, it is time to look for other alternatives. Maybe we’re just choosing wrong, preferring eggs over everything else.
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