Grocery chains are discounting Thanksgiving meals to earn your loyalty

Grocery chains have a hot new trick to win your loyalty: slashing turkey prices. Despite inflation ripping through every grocery aisle like a group of unsupervised teens with a motorized scooter cart, retailers are offering huge savings on Thanksgiving Day meal deals.

It’s mainly marketing. The cost of shopping cart staples has risen nearly 29% since before the pandemic. But big grocery stores hope a brief holiday inflation break will earn faithful shoppers—and some are eating the cost to make it happen. While the wholesale price of a frozen turkey clocks in at $1.73 per pound right now, it’s retailing at places like Walmart for $0.97 per pound:

• Aldi announced a $40 bundle that includes a 14-pound turkey and traditional fixings to feed 10 people, a $7 drop from what it offered last year.
• Walmart, which bundled its first holiday dinner four years ago, is keeping its deal at the same price as last year—around $4 per person for a table of 10—but has removed some items from its 2024 meal.

Big picture: The American Farm Bureau Federation priced the classic dinner at $55.18 for a party of 10 this year (based on wholesale prices, not retail bundles). That’s about $5.52 a person, which is down 5% from last year, but still about 13% higher than it was in 2019.