Americans will be paying the second-highest costs on record for their Thanksgiving dinners, even though turkeys are cheaper.
Higher prices for sweet potatoes, whipping cream, and pumpkin-pie mix are driving the gains.
A feast for 10 will come in at $49.41 this year, a modest 37-cent increase from 2013, while just shy of the all-time high of $49.48 set in 2012, according to a price survey by the American Farm Bureau Federation.
“It was striking to me how stable prices were compared to a year ago,” John Anderson, AFBF’s deputy chief economist, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “That’s a 10-serving meal for a little under $5 a serving, so that remains a very affordable deal for Americans.”
Turkeys prices fell because retailers offered discounts to lure customers, even though US grocers are paying the highest prices ever at the wholesale level. Americans eat about 46 million of the birds at the holiday.
“It’s attractive to feature turkey around Thanksgiving to get people in the store,” Anderson said. “Part of what’s allowing them to do this is energy costs have been down quite a bit, and that helps them maintain their margins.”
The 0.8 per cent gain for the cost of the Thanksgiving meal is in line with broader measures of inflation, which have stayed tame. Bigger supplies of crude oil and crops are holding down food and energy costs. The personal consumption expenditures index, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, rose 1.4 per cent in September from a year earlier and has been short of the Fed officials’ 2 per cent goal since April 2012.
Bloomberg News, edited by ESM
