Because they can. I don’t think it is so much the grain and corn, because we have been at 10% biofuel for years now for cars. The price of gas in general is right now is rather high, so it is expensive to transport eggs and everything else, but it has been this price for months. The upside is maybe local growers will gain more and more traction.
More than anything I think they price things higher and see if customers still purchase, if they do, yippie, profit bonanza, if they slow down, they lower the price again. There is no way a sudden increase of such a high amount is simply suddenly their prices increased like crazy. Several years ago when gas first reached the $4 mark pretty much all food prices skyrocketed in the supermarkets, then when gas prices went back down to the $2’s it took about 2 years for the food prices to come all the way back down. During that time they were probably making hand over fist.
Pricing has to do usually with what the market will bear.
Possibly with some of the massive flooding grain crop supplies are very low this year, but I don’t see why that would affect pricing this past week in particular. The flooding was months ago.