Tell me this please?? You take one chicken that roaming free and laying eggs. You take another chicken that inhumany cooped up and laying eggs. How come the free-range are sooo much more expensive??? It doesn't take anymore overhead to raise free-range chickens does it??? Or am I that ignorant....
It does take more overhead per egg. A big operation sells umpteen thousands of eggs per day, everything runs like a smooth assembly line. The lights come on, the chicken lays an egg, the eggs rolls down a shute, is washed, checked, put in the carton by machines. The lights go out a couple hours later. An hour later the lights come on. Repeat process. With thousands upon thousands of chickens per day. Very efficient, very cheap, very cruel. Economies of scale. Just like buying a widget a Walmart is usually cheaper than buying the widget a the mom and pop speciality store downtown, because Walmart buys, handles, markets and sells 10,000,000,000 widgets per year, and mom and pop buy 100.

Here a dozen regular eggs is about 30 cents less than a dozen free-range eggs.