Ok, so maybe a controversial opinion:
I've been buying local, pasture raised chickens for the last 10 years. I am very fortunate to have had the income to allow me to do so. I also don't eat that many eggs (roughly a dozen a month - so it hasn't been that expensive).
The price of my eggs was always between $8-$12 / dozen (including this weekend when I easily found and bought another 2 dozen). I get that I was buying "already expensive eggs", because apparently other people were buying eggs $2 / dozen.
However, to be frank, I'm not sure how people expect eggs to be so cheap. Taking into account the land, the water, the feed, the labor, the transportation all to create a dozen eggs, it must cost more than $2.
Clearly paying a little more for the eggs has allowed me to support farms which are robust to large shocks like this (both in terms of input costs and in terms of health of chickens). I really hope as a society we can all move away from the unsustainable farms and improve the economics of sustainable farming so that everyone can afford locally grown, healthy eggs for centuries to come.
In the meanwhile, there will be people who have to buy fewer eggs (either because of health regulations - or because reality checks will always exist like with market shocks right now).
Hopefully, after this crisis, through graduated health regulation we can cause a controlled increase to the floor price of unsustainably grown eggs, while also (through technology and economies of scale) reducing the floor price of locally sourced, sustainably grown eggs.
Feed at a large scale operation is a lot cheaper than you’d think. The bulk of the food is soybean meal left over from oil production and distillers dried grains with solubles left over from ethanol production. The feed manufacturers make deals with those producers for their left over product for very cheap. They supplement the feed with some other stuff like oyster shells for calcium. Bone meal from meat producers, bakery meal from stale or expired bread, wheat middles from milling flour, and so on. None of them are expensive primary products but whatever the cheapest local sources are producing as waste in huge quantities. Some places will even give the stuff away because the cost of transporting is less than its worth in compost. Since the input ingredients are variable and the feed manufacturers have to plan for that, they offer the big farms steep discounts on long term contracts that fix their costs.
A chicken lays a few hundred eggs per year so they’re very economically productive and you can house hundreds or thousands of them per coop somewhere the land, water, and labor are cheap.
Although we’ve sacrificed animal welfare, sanitation, and quality to get those prices.
Until the past few years $1 was normal here, often less when they went on sale. Also, most eggs in the supermarket are locally grown. Transporting them is a PITA both due to fragility and spoilability.
The store is happy to lose a dollar on the eggs to get you to stop there, it's not just about the production.