Thanksgiving? In This Economy?
Crunching the numbers on how inflation will affect the price of a holiday meal
Jayson Lusk’s Thanksgiving tradition, if you could call it that, is to talk with reporters about the prices of Americans’ holiday groceries. The media requests “seemed to start even earlier this year than usual,” Lusk, an agricultural economist at Purdue University, told me recently. “But it’s a more interesting story this year.”
That’s because the ingredients for Thanksgiving dinner are significantly more expensive than they were 12 months ago. In this regard, they’re similar to many other basic things that people buy: The prices of cars, clothing, and other everyday goods have risen substantially over the past year.
To conceptualize how inflation is affecting grocery bills, I put
