How much for that egg

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Recently, one of our NPR colleagues wrote a message to all of NPR saying he had extra eggs to sell for cheap, but needed a fair way to distribute them during a shortage. What is Planet Money here for if not to get OVERLY involved in this kind of situation?

Our colleague didn't want to charge more than $5, so we couldn't just auction the eggs off. A lottery? Too boring, he said.

Okay! A very Planet Money puzzle to solve.

Today on the show, we go in search of novel systems to help our colleague decide who gets his scarce resource: cheap, farm-fresh eggs. We steal from the world of new product development to try and secretly test for egg love, and we discover a pricing method used in development economics that may be America's next great gameshow.

This episode of Planet Money was produced by Emma Peaslee and it was edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:05.6	All right, Sam, you posted a thing in Slack.
0:09.1	Do you just want to, like, read that message to start?
0:12.7	Sure, bring it up right now.
0:14.9	A couple of weeks ago, our NPR colleague, Sam Merton, wrote something in our shared company messaging system.
0:21.2	We called him up and asked him to read his message.
0:24.5	Today, I successfully delivered a dozen farm fresh eggs to a coworker at HQ for $5.
0:30.3	HQ, meaning NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C.
0:33.1	And $5 meaning $5 for a dozen farm fresh eggs in this egg economy.
0:41.3	Yeah, coming out of this nationwide egg shortage where farm fresh eggs have been selling for as much as $12, Sam has eggs and sold them for just $5.
0:52.0	I would be willing to do this again, but I expect demand to far exceed supplies.
0:57.0	I'm sure I could jack up the price, but I'm not in the mood to price gouge.
1:01.2	Any suggestions for a fair and equitable system?
1:04.1	Okay.
1:05.0	Now, I mean, I'll just say, this caught fire in the planet money slack.
1:09.5	Like, we just saw it as a bat signal for us.
1:11.4	We're like, we can help.
1:13.6	Sure.
1:14.7	Sam, clearly wanted our help, or at least that is what I'm hearing.
1:18.3	Because look, we've got a scarce commodity with a dramatically low price ceiling
1:23.4	in need of an optimized system of fair distribution.
1:26.5	I mean, what is Planet Money here for, if not to get overly involved in this very situation?
	...

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