Monday's Aldi receipt had eggs on it twice, $4.67 each. I did the math in the parking lot before I even buckled Rosie into her car seat: two dozen a week at that price is $9.34, or about $486 a year if nothing changes. This time last spring I was paying a little over two dollars a dozen at the same store, and the spreadsheet says we spent about $4.30 a week on eggs.
I'm not going to pretend eggs are what's breaking our budget. We spend about $250 a week on groceries for five people, and five extra dollars won't sink it. But eggs show up at almost every breakfast in this house, and when one line item doubles, I want to know where it's going before I decide whether to fight it.
Where two dozen eggs a week actually go
I tracked it for a week in March, which is the kind of thing that makes Matt shake his head at me. Twenty-four eggs went roughly like this:
- Weekday scrambled eggs for the boys: about 10. Wyatt eats three at a time now that he's nine and playing Little League three days a week.
- Matt's breakfast: about 6. He eats two hard-boiled eggs standing at the counter with his coffee before he leaves for his 5:30 shift, three mornings a week.
- Weekend breakfast tacos and migas: about 6.
- Pancakes, meatballs and baking: 2 or so.
Eli, who is six and suspicious of most foods, eats exactly one scrambled egg with ketchup on the side, never on top. Rosie eats whatever falls off Wyatt's plate, and Biscuit eats whatever falls off Rosie's.
The Costco flat math
Costco had the five-dozen flat for $11.99 on our March trip. That's $2.40 a dozen, about half of Aldi's price, and I bought one. The catch is timing. We go to the Costco in Plano every four or five weeks, and sixty eggs lasts us about two and a half weeks. Covering a whole cycle would take two flats, 120 eggs taking up most of a fridge shelf. On our February trip the flats were gone by ten in the morning anyway.
So the Costco flat helps when we're there and they have it. It doesn't fix the other two weeks. I also go by the USDA's guidance on how long eggs keep in the fridge rather than my own optimism, so stockpiling past that wasn't on the table.
What changed at breakfast
Here's what we actually did, starting the second week of March.
Oatmeal on school mornings. A canister of old-fashioned oats from Aldi makes about 30 half-cup servings for around $3.29. With brown sugar, cinnamon and a handful of frozen blueberries, a bowl costs about 18 cents. Wyatt was not thrilled until I let him stir in a spoonful of peanut butter. Rosie eats the blueberries out of hers one at a time and leaves the oats for last. Eli eats his plain with butter, which counts.
Breakfast tacos stretched with potatoes and beans. At the Tex-Mex place in Denton where I worked the line at eighteen, the breakfast menu had potato and egg tacos, and the potato was doing a lot of the work. Same idea here: a half batch on Wednesdays is three eggs, one diced russet browned in the cast iron, half a can of refried beans warmed with a pinch of cumin and a handful of cheddar. That makes five tacos, which used to take six eggs.
Eggs for weekends. Migas on Saturday, pancakes on Sunday. The boys noticed, and it made Saturday breakfast feel a little more like an event.
Matt kept his hard-boiled eggs. Some things you don't touch at five in the morning.
What it saved (not much)
We've settled at about fifteen eggs a week instead of twenty-four. At Aldi's price that's $5.84 instead of $9.34. The oats, extra potatoes and beans cost about $1.60 a week, so the real savings is roughly $1.90 a week. Since we started in mid-March, that's maybe six dollars. I wrote it in the spreadsheet anyway, because six dollars is six dollars.
I could have cut harder, but I didn't want breakfast to turn into a fight, and eggs are still one of the cheaper proteins in the cart. Even at $4.67 a dozen, an egg is 39 cents, and the breakfast sausage I'd swap in isn't cheaper per serving.
What I didn't expect is that the oatmeal is sticking. Eli asks for it now, which almost never happens with anything new, and Rosie, at twenty months, has figured out how to say "boo-berry" with her mouth full. When eggs come back down, the Wednesday tacos will go back to a full batch. The oatmeal stays.
