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NEW YORK — With Thanksgiving less than two weeks away, Walmart, Target, Aldi and other grocers are competing for a place on holiday tables with turkey dinner deals and other promotions to tempt Americans who haven't recovered from inflation.
Walmart, the nation's largest food retailer, first bundled the traditional turkey feast into a meal deal a year before inflation hit the U.S. the hardest. This year, the 29-item offer, which includes a frozen turkey and ingredients for side dishes, costs less than $55 and is intended to serve eight, which is less than $7 per person.
Target's version for four people costs $20, $5 less than the company's 2023 Thanksgiving meal, and includes a frozen turkey, stuffing mix and canned green beans and canned jellied cranberry sauce.
Even in Utah, Maceys is offering a Thanksgiving dinner bundle of its own, the grocer announced Tuesday.
Comparing the respective menus to determine which represents the best value is difficult, but the promotions underscore the importance of Thanksgiving to grocers, analysts said.
'The new benchmark'
Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe, a global marketing and communications company, called the Thanksgiving meal "the new benchmark."
It's the occasion for the second-largest holiday meal for retailers behind the winter holidays. Thanksgiving meal shopping delivered a $2.4 billion sales lift during the week before and after the holiday last year, market research firm Circana said.
Walmart launched its offer on Oct. 14, two weeks earlier than last year, and plans to make it available through Dec. 24. While the two bundles the retailer offered last year contained different items, Walmart said this year's selected products cost 3.5% less.
Joan Driggs, vice president at Circana, expects shoppers to buy items on sale for half of what they need to prepare Thanksgiving dinner, double the amount from 2022 when retailers pulled back on promotions due to limited supplies left over from the coronavirus pandemic.
Consumers still aren't seeing discounts as deep as the ones in 2019, so retailers are creating strategies like meal bundles, which may "lessen the stress" for shoppers since they show the cost per person, she said.
Angel Rosario-Sanchez, 24, a New Jersey resident who was at a Walmart store in Secaucus on Wednesday, said he planned to have Thanksgiving with his friends but had not shopped for groceries yet. Seeing the big displays of Thanksgiving products in the store made him want to return to buy some, adding he can always count on Walmart for deals.
Purchase or pass?
For the past two years, Walmart, Target and others have seen price-conscious shoppers shift more of their purchases to store label brands. In response, retailers have improved their selections or created new food lines' brands, but store brands aren't necessarily cheaper.
Wells Fargo's Agri-Food Institute, a team of national industry advisers that provides economic insights and research, compared the costs of store brands and national name brands for a typical Thanksgiving dinner. The name-brand versions of cranberry sauce were less expensive than the store brands, while the name brand pumpkin pies versus store brand versions were the same price.
The Agri-Food Institute's 10-person Thanksgiving menu, which includes turkey, stuffing, salad, cranberries, dinner rolls and pumpkin pie, using all name-brand items, would cost $90 this year, 0.5% less than last year. Preparing the same meal with store-branded food? That costs $73, or 2.7% more than a year ago.
Robin Wenzel, the head of the Wells Fargo institute, thinks the makers of some familiar brands realized they "overshot" with some of their post-pandemic price increases and are retrenching, which means shoppers have the option to mix and match.
Walmart did just that, like many food retailers: Its meal deal includes Ocean Spray canned jellied cranberry sauce, green beans and dinner rolls from the in-house Great Value line, with a white whole frozen turkey from the national brand Shady Brook Farms, and fresh items like a 5-pound bag of russet potatoes.
But here's the bottom-line: The latest government snapshot on inflation showed grocery prices rose just 0.1% from September to October and are up just 1.1% over the past year, leading retailers to slash prices. The cost of a 15-item Thanksgiving meal is down nearly 3% from last year, as well, retail intelligence provider Datasembly said.
That's providing some relief to consumers after food costs surged roughly 23% over the past three years.
And some may not feel it: Datasembly reports Thanksgiving meals overall cost 42% more than in 2019. And prices for some products are still going up: A 30-ounce box of pumpkin pie mix now costs an average of $5.56, up 6% compared with a year ago and nearly 70% more than five years ago.
That means plenty will bypass the bundles at Walmart and elsewhere, even as prices for things like turkeys continue to drop from last year.
While visiting the Walmart in Secaucus, New Jersey, Nadia Rivest, 70, said she already had shopped at the discounter to buy turkey, fish, and chicken for her Thanksgiving meal. But she was only interested in buying fresh items, not canned goods.
"I like red pepper, red tomatoes, something fresh," she said.
