With Thanksgiving less than a week 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 recent food price inflation.
Walmart, the nation’s largest food retailer, first bundled the makings of a traditional turkey feast into a meal deal three years ago. 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. That calculates to less than $7 per person.
Rouses is once again offering a deal where shoppers who buy a cooked Hormel ham get a free Butterball turkey of up to 14 pounds.
The supermarket chain, which has 66 locations across the Gulf Coast, has offered the ham and turkey deal for about four years and it has grown in popularity, said James Breuhl, senior vice president of merchandising for Rouses.
“Customers have really responded to this,” he said. While Thanksgiving is a week later this year, Breuhl said the bundled ham and turkey sales are currently running ahead of last year’s pace of sales.
Thanksgiving promotions, introduced earlier than ever and at a time when many households remain put off by higher prices, underscore the importance of Thanksgiving to grocers, analysts said.
While consumer perceptions of grocery prices is based on the cost of staples like eggs and milk, “the Thanksgiving meal has become essentially a new benchmark,” Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe, a global marketing and communications company.
It’s the occasion for the second-largest holiday meal for retailers behind the feasts that accompany the winter holidays. Compared with an average, 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. Shopping for Christmas, Hanukah and New Year’s Day meals gave stores a $5.3 billion sales uplift compared with an average week, Circana said.
Joan Driggs, a Circana vice president, expects shoppers to buy items on sale for half of what they need to prepare Thanksgiving dinner meal. That’s double the amount from 2022, when retailers pulled back on promotions due to limited supplies left over from the coronavirus pandemic.
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.
Rouses has long promoted its private label brands. The Thibodaux-based chain is also promoting its low prices on other Thanksgiving staple items, such as Louisiana-grown sweet potatoes and fresh gulf oysters, Breuhl said.
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.
The Agri-Food Institute’s 10-person Thanksgiving menu includes turkey, stuffing, salad, cranberries, dinner rolls and pumpkin pie. Using all name-brand would cost $90 this year, 0.5% less than last year. Preparing the same meal with store-branded food would cost $73, or 2.7% more than a year ago.
That gives shoppers the option to mix and match, Wenzel said.