The frozen turkey is 79 cents a pound this year, and the butchers of America have begun, independently of one another, to pray.
Target announced this week that its Thanksgiving meal for six tops out at $30, and that its store-brand frozen turkey returns at 79 cents a pound, for the third consecutive year, on sale November 8 through the 22nd, while supplies last. That price — lower than most Thanksgiving side dishes manage per pound — has reached the level of a public event. Families are doing the math on napkins. Meat markets are holding staff meetings.
At a third-generation meat counter in Dayton, Ohio, counter manager Wayne Prosser has been cutting birds for thirty-one years and has decided to adapt rather than perish.
“The bird has always been the expensive part. That was the whole deal. You paid for the bird, you bragged about the bird,” Prosser said, gesturing at his own case, which contains birds that are now, by his own admission, “competing with a parking meter.” His shop has posted a new service: customers may bring in a 79-cent supermarket turkey, and the shop will brine, roast, and carve it professionally, for a fee. “We can’t beat the price. So we’re selling the hands. It’s honest. I cried in the walk-in, then I priced it. That’s the business.”
The service is called Second Chance Turkey. It has booked forty-two birds in its first week.
Homes are rearranging themselves around the number. Dana Whitlock, a mother of three outside Columbus, has run the calculation twice and invites people accordingly. “Thirty dollars feeds six. Do you understand? That’s a pizza and a tip. So I’ve started inviting more people. I’ve invited people I don’t especially like. The math requires a full table, and I respect the math.” Her eleven-year-old has one question, which he has asked four days running: does the turkey know it’s 79 cents. His mother says no. He is not sure that’s a good thing.
Grocery employees report the freezer sets are being built early, the turkey wall growing week by week, and shoppers photographing the price shelf the way tourists photograph monuments. A store manager in Indianapolis, who asked not to be quoted on the price because “my district manager would hear this and start a speech,” said only: “People are touching the packages. Everyone’s touching them.”
The 4-H kids who raised birds all year — hand-fed, show-groomed, priced at fair with a calculator and a dream — have entered the season facing a bird cheaper than a car tire. At the Hendricks County fair, a fourteen-year-old exhibitor named Colton, who has spent six months with a turkey he named Cashew, was asked how he feels about the 79-cent bird.
“They’re frozen,” Colton said. “Mine gets around. It knows my voice. You can’t put a price on a turkey that knows your voice, and honestly I think that’s why the frozen ones are cheap, because nobody’s been known by them.”
Colton’s bird, raised by hand and answering to Cashew, will sell at the fair for more than the cost of the entire thirty-dollar dinner. The frozen ones will have fed eleven thousand tables by then. At 79 cents a pound, a 22-pound turkey comes to $17.38, which is now officially the least controversial number in November.