No Eggs On Shelves At Popular PA Store Chain

PENNSYLVANIA— Shoppers in Pennsylvania looking for a break on egg prices will have one fewer place to go, as a popular chain of discount stores is pulling them off the shelves.

Earlier this week, Dollar Tree announced it will stop selling eggs until later this fall.The news comes before Easter and Passover, a popular time to buy eggs for decorating or Seder meals.

Egg prices have more than doubled from this time last year while farmers try to stop another avian flu outbreak.

Prices fell 6.7 percent last month, after months of increases, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Nationally, a dozen grade A large eggs were $4.21 on average last month, data shows.

Reuters reports the chain has about 8,000 stores across the United States, and there are more than 200 in Pennsylvania.

A spokesperson for Dollar Tree told Reuters that it will not remove eggs from the Family Dollar stores that the company operates.

Avian flu has been ravaging poultry populations across the U.S., the biggest outbreak of the disease since 2015. The flu outbreak and continued supply chain issues have been driving up the price of eggs.

"Shoppers are finding few price breaks in the dairy case," the U.S. Department of Agriculture wrote in last week's egg markets overview.

According to industry members and the USDA, a record-setting outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza, combined with inflation, drove egg prices higher. The virus killed more than 58 million birds since the beginning of last year, resulting in U.S. egg inventories declining 29 percent to end 2022.