The line started forming at 7:40 a.m., forty minutes before the doors opened.
Not for eggs, whose prices have become their own national psychodrama.
A small one, in colors that evoke a particular coastal grandmother aesthetic, priced at $2.99, limit four per customer, while supplies last.
By noon, the bags were gone in most stores.
By evening, they were listed online at forty, sixty, ninety dollars.
By the next morning, grown adults were posting videos of themselves sprinting through parking lots, elbowing past retirees, and negotiating with store managers like they were bidding at Sotheby's.
Let's be precise about what happened here.
The chain has built an entire brand on scarcity — the frozen item that vanishes, the seasoning that returns once a year, the snack your neighbor swears exists but your store never carries.
It simply did what it always does, and the rest of us supplied the horror.
It was a bidding war conducted with bodies.
A woman in one viral clip tells a cashier she drove two hours.
A man in another grabs a stack off a display while a stranger films him, narrating his greed in real time.
Somewhere in the background, a child asks why everyone is yelling about a bag.
Within hours, listings appeared with language borrowed from stock offerings — "rare," "sold out," "investment piece." We have decided that a cotton sack produced in unknown quantities by a grocery chain is an asset class.
We have decided that owning it before your neighbor does is a form of status.
And we have decided, collectively and without much debate, that this is worth behaving badly in public over.
This is the same reflex that emptied shelves of toilet paper in 2020, that turned a children's toy into a black-market currency, that sends people stampeding toward anything the internet has labeled limited.
The mechanism is the point: a corporation creates artificial scarcity, the algorithm amplifies it, and ordinary Americans — tired, anxious, desperate for one small win in a week that has offered none — trample each other for the privilege of paying three dollars for a bag that will sit in a closet until it, too, is forgotten.
Final Thoughts
We keep mistaking acquisition for meaning, and every few months the culture offers us a fresh, brightly colored object to prove it.