This week’s topic: Egg prices
The covid-19 pandemic has caused all sorts of economic chaos over the last few years. Supply chains have been upended, millions of people have switched (or lost) their jobs, and inflation has been a topic of conversation for the first time in decades. And yes, central banks around the world have been raising rates, and yes, inflation seems to be slowing down. But prices are still higher than they were a few years ago.
One product whose prices have skyrocketed over the last few years are eggs. I don’t know about you; I tend not to think much about the price of eggs when I do my family’s shopping. (And yes, I’ve done the supermarket shopping for a very long time.) But for many people, the rise in egg prices has been pretty dramatic. And if you’re a business that depends on egg prices? Then it has started to affect your bottom line.
Here’s a story from the San Francisco Standard (a publication I know nothing else about, but whose article seems to explain things pretty well): https://sfstandard.com/arts-culture/food/san-francisco-donut-shop-reveals-insane-new-price-of-eggs/
This week, we’re going to look at egg data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Here are the questions I’d like you to answer:
- Given URLs for each of the last five years of egg prices, create a single data frame.
- What was the average low price for eggs in each of the years of data?