It’s Thanksgiving, which means it’s time for the American Farm Bureau Federation’s report on the cost of the average Thanksgiving dinner, an annual tradition celebrated by press release rewriters (and media critics) across the land.
This year the “news” is that the cost of Thanksgiving dinner will be essentially flat, rising just 0.8 percent. Which means it should be extra hard for even math-challenged press types to screw up their coverage by warning about rising prices.
Ha!
ABC News finds a way, and how:
The price of Thanksgiving dinner might be going up, but that doesn’t mean you have to break the bank to get turkey and all the fixings on the table.
This year, various foodstuffs popular around the holiday are more expensive–including sweet potatoes, cream, milk and pumpkin pie mix. Cooking Thanksgiving dinner for 10 people will cost $49.41, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, up 37 cents from last year.
The price of Thanksgiving dinner is going up, all right—by 4 cents a head. Brother, can you spare a nickel? Because that enormous feast of turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes, green peas, cranberries, pumpkin pie, rolls, veggie sticks, and milk, will set you back $4.94 a person this year instead of $4.90.
Even that’s not really correct, though, because it doesn’t factor in the overall rate of inflation. If turkey and sides had kept up with the consumer price index, the cost would be about $49.98 this year instead of $49.41. That means the real price of Thanksgiving dinner fell 1.1 percent from a year ago.
Even wages significantly outpaced the 0.8 percent nominal rise in T-day dinner prices. Average hourly earnings were up 2 percent in October from the previous year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and average weekly earnings were up even more, at 2.6 percent.
Thankfully for ABC, it wasn’t alone. Tech Times dropped this, um, turkey:
Unfortunately for food-lovers everywhere, it seems that the cost of Thanksgiving is going up. As food costs more to distribute, the price for consumers goes up, and 2014 will see an overall higher cost-per-item compared to last year’s holiday…
Hopefully, everyone around the country has been saving their quarters…they’re going to need them.
NBC’s Today Money went service-y with “Price of Thanksgiving dinner rises—how to split the cost.”
And The Atlantic‘s entry, whose headline Google recorded as “Price of Thanksgiving Dinner Rises,” includes this sentence:
The greater trend though, it adds, snaps the wishbone less in favor of the consumer: In 10 years, the per-pound price of turkey has risen 50 cents.
Talking about increases over long periods of time is misleading unless you put them in real terms, adjusted for inflation. Turkey has, in fact, risen 28 cents a pound in real terms over the last decade.
More broadly, focusing on one price makes no sense, particularly when it’s a stand-in for overall prices. Food prices are volatile, with frequent spikes and tumbles caused by droughts, bumper crops, changes in consumer demand, fuel costs, and many other factors.
Even looking at a dozen or so prices is more misleading than helpful. The BLS tracks hundreds of food prices, and this year’s T-day price increase significantly trails overall food inflation, which is up 3.1 percent from last year. Despite that, overall inflation is still very low (too low!), at 1.7 percent.
The farm bureau’s own chart shows that the real price of the iconic American Thanksgiving dinner has actually decreased over the last two decades and is about 20 percent cheaper than it was in 1986, when it first conducted the survey.
But press fascination with the cost of Thanksgiving dinner goes back much further than the Iran-Contra days. See this New York Times piece from 1932, which reported that “Turkey Dinner for Five Planned for $5.42; Same Repast Cost $7.09 Last Thanksgiving.”
That’s $94 and $111, respectively, in today’s money, if you’re wondering.
Ryan Chittum is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and deputy editor of The Audit, CJR’s business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanchittum.