With less than a week until Thanksgiving, grocery stores like Walmart, Target and Aldi are offering turkey dinner deals and other promotions to lure Americans who haven’t recovered from recent food price hikes. are competing for a seat at the holiday table.
Walmart, the nation’s largest food retailer, first rolled out the traditional turkey feast in a meal deal three years ago. This year, 29 items will be available for less than $55, including frozen turkey and side dish ingredients, and will serve eight people. This equates to less than $7 per person.
Rouse is once again offering a deal where shoppers who purchase a cooked Hormel ham will receive a free Butterball turkey weighing up to 14 pounds.
The supermarket chain, which has 66 stores across the Gulf Coast, has been offering the ham and turkey deal for about four years and is seeing it grow in popularity, said James Bruhl, Rouse’s senior vice president of merchandising. That’s what it means.
“Customers are very responsive to this,” he said. Thanksgiving is a week away this year, but Brühl said ham and turkey package sales are currently outpacing last year’s sales pace.
Analysts said the Thanksgiving promotions were introduced earlier than in previous years and come at a time when many households are still hesitant about soaring prices, highlighting the importance of Thanksgiving for grocery stores. It is said that it has become.
Consumers’ perceptions of grocery prices are based on the prices of staples like eggs and milk, but “Thanksgiving meals have essentially become the new benchmark,” said the global marketing and communications firm. says Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe.
For retailers, it’s the second biggest holiday meal occasion, after the feasts associated with the winter holidays. According to market research firm Sarkana, shopping for Thanksgiving meals during the week before and after Thanksgiving last year generated $2.4 billion in increased sales compared to the average. Sarcana said shopping for Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year’s Day meals increased store sales by $5.3 billion compared to an average week.
Joan Driggs, Circana’s vice president, expects shoppers to buy sale items for half the price of what they need to prepare Thanksgiving dinner. That’s twice as many as in 2022, when retailers canceled promotions due to limited supply remaining due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Over the past two years, stores like Walmart and Target have seen price-conscious shoppers move more merchandise to store-label brands. In response, retailers are improving their assortments and creating new food brands.
Rouse has been promoting its private label brands for many years. Bruhl said the Thibodaux-based chain also promotes lower prices on other Thanksgiving staples, such as Louisiana sweet potatoes and fresh Gulf oysters.
Robin Wenzel, director of the Wells Fargo Research Institute, believes manufacturers of some familiar brands are realizing that some of the post-pandemic price increases have been “excessive” and are cutting prices.
The Agri-Food Institute’s Thanksgiving menu, limited to 10 people, includes turkey, stuffing, salad, cranberries, dinner rolls and pumpkin pie. With all the big brands, it will cost you $90 this year, 0.5% less than last year. Cooking the same meal with store brand food costs $73, 2.7% more than a year ago.
This gives shoppers the freedom to mix and match, Wenzel said.
