Key Takeaways
- The cost of Thanksgiving dinner became a point of dispute last week after President Donald Trump used a Walmart special as evidence that his economic policies are pushing down prices.
- Walmart has reduced the price of its holiday bundle, but also decreased the number of items in it, making it virtually meaningless to compare prices from year to year.
A controversy over Thanksgiving dinner highlights why inflation is typically measured using broad-based indexes rather than individual prices.
The dustup began last month when Walmart announced the pricing of its Thanksgiving meal deal, which allowed customers to buy the ingredients for an entire holiday dinner for 10 for under $4 per person—the lowest since the retailer began offering the bundle in 2021. (Many of the items are currently sold out.) That was cheaper per person than in 2024 when the deal fed eight for under $7 each.
President Donald Trump used the deal to make his case to voters that his administration is reducing the cost of living. Widespread dissatisfaction with inflation during former President Joe Biden’s term in office contributed to Trump’s win in the 2020 election. However, the tables have turned now, with Democratic politicians criticizing the administration’s economic policies for pushing prices higher.
Both sides have been able to use price tags to make their case, illustrating why economists instead use carefully compiled statistics such as the Consumer Price Index to get a clear idea of how the cost of living is changing over time.
What This Means For The Economy
To get more signal and less noise about the actual cost of living, experts look at broad-based indexes of consumer prices instead of tracking prices on individual items.
Feast or Famine
Trump touted the Walmart price reduction last week, speaking to reporters at a press conference.
“Thanksgiving this year will cost 25% less than Thanksgiving last year under Sleepy Joe Biden. So that’s a big difference,” He said. “25% less Thanksgiving.”
Trump’s comments provoked a barrage of fact-checking from journalists and economists. An Associated Press article noted that the 2025 meal deal included fewer items and, in some cases, replaced name-brand selections with discount store brands. In other words, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Later, Trump roasted an NBC reporter who asked him about the discrepancy, calling the network “fake news.”
The White House found reinforcements in its food fight Monday when meal delivery service DoorDash released its own report on food prices showing the cost of a “breakfast basics index” of three eggs, a glass of milk, a bagel, and an avocado had fallen 14% since March. The White House highlighted the findings in a press release.
The report, however, also showed the pitfalls of cherry-picking individual prices. The breakfast index was only down 1.7% over the 12 months ending in September, rather than the six-month time frame, mainly due to fluctuations in egg prices stemming from last year’s bird flu outbreak.
Basket Case
Economists and policymakers typically rely on measures of inflation, such as the Consumer Price Index, when assessing how the cost of living is changing, to cut through the noise of individual prices rising and falling. To calculate the CPI, statisticians at the Bureau of Labor Statistics gather thousands of prices each month by calling businesses, looking at websites, and visiting stores.
The prices represent a “basket” of goods and services purchased by a typical consumer, and are given different statistical weights according to their importance in household budgets. For instance, housing makes up about a third of the CPI since it is by far the largest expense most people pay each month.
The overall CPI is up 3% over the past year. The CPI for groceries, specifically, was up 2.7% over the year in September. That’s higher than the Federal Reserve’s goal of 2% inflation but far lower than the recent peak of inflation in 2022, when the CPI for groceries was up 13.6% in a single year.
