And lo, Jesus said unto his disciples: “Verily, I say unto ye, hereafter ye shall celebrate my birthday by trying to eat a whole turkey.” And also to his brethren he spake: “And when ye remembreth my death and resurrection, do so by eating what appeareth to be an ostrich egg, but made out of chocolate. Ideally a mug will be included in the box.”
These verses come from the lesser-known Poundstretcher Extended Value Edition of the Bible, which takes a fairly specific interpretation of the traditions expected of the congregation. What it doesn’t say is that Easter eggs – valuable as they are for celebrating Jesus, or indeed Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring – are a rip-off, and likely to become even more so.
The Easter egg occupies an interesting point in the retail market in that most of us know full well that it is a rip-off, but we’re prepared to tolerate it because it’s a once-a-year purchase that doesn’t involve a huge outlay. Weddings – which most people assume, at least at the time, to be one-off events – are the ultimate expression of the rule that consumers will tolerate higher prices the less often they have to pay them. Still, the mark-up on Easter eggs relative to regular chocolate is eye-opening.
To pick on one example: this year’s Toblerone egg, which retails at £15 and has a net contents weight of 286g. This is more than three times the price per gram of a 360g Toblerone bar at the full retail price of £6. The same chocolate (but slightly harder to eat) is being sold at a 213 per cent hike. Hotel Chocolat’s milk chocolate is 46 per cent more expensive in egg form (or, for that matter, rabbit form). Of these, the rabbit is probably the front-runner: it combines an amusing persona (the rabbit is wearing a bow tie, which a real rabbit would obviously never do) with a shape that is easily devoured. The egg is just a big egg. You either have to break it, or gnaw fruitlessly at it, like a dog trying to ruin a football.
That said, the retailer does have an excuse to charge you more for an Easter egg than a chocolate bar. What you’re really paying for is petrol and plastic: the extra space eggs take up in a lorry, and the extra packaging needed to contain them. You are paying, as is often the case in the modern economy, for the amount of oil used.
On top of that, there’s the price of cocoa, which has recently become unstable. Around this time last year, prices became more volatile than they have been for half a century. In April 2023 it traded at less than $3,000 a tonne; a year later it peaked at over $12,000 per tonne. This is partly the result of poor harvests: some analysts suggest production is falling behind demand by about half a million tonnes. The highly unpredictable market has driven out many investors in cocoa futures, who provide capital to the industry. At the same time, low pay for farmers and depressed profits for growers (who face tighter environmental regulation) mean an already troubled industry doesn’t look as if it is likely to rebound soon. You can’t quickly ramp up production of a commodity that is made using several years’ worth of sunlight and water.
There is also the prospect of a global trade war, in which products like cocoa – which does not grow in the US, but of which the US is the biggest global consumer – might become subject to tariffs. Even if that doesn’t happen, economic shocks are used by retailers to increase prices when they don’t necessarily need to, either because they want to ensure their margins are protected in advance or because they think consumers, seeing headlines about inflation on a daily basis, will grudgingly accept higher prices. There have been plenty of examples of this “sellers’ inflation”, as it was called by the economist Isabella Weber, during the recent spike in energy prices; not every company needed to mark up their products, but most did. I wouldn’t be surprised if some companies use Trumpflation to justify doing so.
That said, I’ve been avoiding sweet treats since the start of the year, so I will be tucking in. It might not be great economics, but I’m fairly sure it’s what Jesus would have wanted.
[See also: The slow death of the Royal Mail is a parable of the modern British state]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025