Eggs hatch more bad news: They're expensive, hard to find — and their shells are going to start chipping more, too.

• We all know eggs are expensive — probably forever. And they're missing from grocery shelves, too.
• As if that weren't enough, there's other egg-related bad news: Their shells chip more often.
• When will this nightmare end? (I asked an eggspert: Probably never!)

Sorry to stress you out, but the egg situation is getting worse and worse.

According to eggsperts — no, I will not apologize for that — not only are there super-high prices and empty shelves: But we're also looking at a return to eggs with weak and unusually chippy shells.

You already know egg prices went up. They're on everyone's mind — at least egg-eating minds. A dozen eggs cost an average of $4.15 in December, according to federal statistics — up from $2.51 the previous December.

And in a true sign of the eggpocalypse: Waffle House is now adding a 50-cent surcharge for eggs — for each egg, that is!

On TikTok, Magda S. has been tracking egg prices in a spreadsheet that's online and open to the public. She didn't want to reveal her last name, but her full identity is known to BI.

Magda has gone viral for the stunt and said she plans to continue to update her spreadsheet for the next four years — to mark whether egg prices decline during Donald Trump's presidency.

"Everyone wants to talk about eggs," she told me.

If you haven't been to a grocery store lately, you might not know another part of the egg emergency: Shelves have started to run bare.

A worsening avian influenza outbreak has caused an egg shortage across the US. Viral videos of customers swarming the egg pallets at Costco are all over social media. Last weekend, thieves made off with 100,000 eggs from the Pete & Gerry's distribution center in Pennsylvania.

My local grocery store in Connecticut has put a limit on the number of cartons per customer (two). A friend who's a workout enthusiast who used to eat five protein-rich eggs every morning lamented to me that his "macros" were in disarray.

Egg prices aren't the worst of it — the chips are back

Now, things are probably going to get even worse. Because the eggs — if you can even find them, not to mention afford them — are going to start getting chippy again.

More than a year ago, I had noticed that it seemed like eggshells were chipping into the bowl or pan more often when I was cracking them. My cracking technique hadn't changed, but it seemed like I was suddenly having to fish out little bits of shell all the time — something that was previously a rare occurrence.

It turned out that I wasn't wrong — something about the quality of eggshells at the time had made them chippier than before.

So last March, I spoke to Sheila Purdum, professor of animal science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who specializes in poultry. She explained that the 2022 bird flu outbreak had a lingering effect on egg production. Because so many hens had to be destroyed, the remaining healthy hens were kept laying eggs past the typical age of their, uh, "retirement."

Hens are typically considered past their laying prime by age 2 or 3. By this age, hens can still lay eggs, but there are downsides: The eggs tend to have thinner shells, which are more prone to breaking in the container or chipping into the bowl when you crack them.

Thankfully, over the past year, I've anecdotally noticed that eggs seemed back to normal, cracking like they used to. This made sense, as chicken flocks rebounded, even if prices were going up.

But the current shortage of eggs and the avian influenza continuing have me worried. So I reached back out to Professor Purdum to see if we're in for another round of weak shells.

Unfortunately, probably so. Purdum told me she predicts that 15% to 20% of the US flock will be made up of older hens to make up for lost younger ones that were culled because of the flu.

Still, things aren't all doom and gloom.

"Scientists and nutritionists like myself are already conducting research about how to keep 'old' hens healthy and producing good eggshells!" Purdum said. "Work is being done. There is hope."

In the future, we might still be shelling out the big clucks for eggs, but we can hope that they at least won't be too chippy.