Inflation and the Price of Your Thanksgiving Dinner
Every year around this time, the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner. Their estimate include enough turkey, stuffing, cranberries, pumpkin pie, and trimmings to feed a family of ten.
This year’s estimate comes in at $49.48, or just under $5/person. Compared to last year, than an increase of just $0.28 or less than 1%. Not surprisingly, the turkey (a 16 pounder in this case) is the biggest contributor to the total price and it also showed the largest absolute and relative price increase, going up $0.66 or 3%.
Interestingly, a number of items including whipped cream, stuffing, sweet potatoes, milk, cranberries, peas, pumpkin pie mix, and pie shells actually cost less this year.
Is this further evidence that people tend to overestimate the effects the inflation? Or is this an outlier? I’ll leave that up to you guys to decide… 
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Filed under: Consumer, Economy
About the author: Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!
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November 21st, 2012 at 9:47 am
1986 Prices for the same meal were $28.74, according to the linked article. Using the BLS inflation calculator, that meal should cost $60.22 today. That indicates that the official BLS inflation numbers are too high (overstating inflation) for this particular basket of goods.
Shadowstats fanbois would have you believe that the meal actually costs $210.00 (give or take), instead of the true price of $49.48…or the meal in 1986 was actually purchased for $6.
November 21st, 2012 at 12:01 pm
Since I didn’t want to eat a sick turkey (antibiotics, hormones, herbicide/pesticide residues in feed) I bought a 16 lb organic turkey which cost me $80 just for the turkey alone.
November 24th, 2012 at 6:22 pm
Haha, poultry in the US isn’t given hormones. Antibiotics help keep turkeys well! And who wants to eat feed covered in bugs?