Thanksgiving is coming up. Anna Lipin used the opportunity to examine turkey prices:

• Feeding turkeys can make up as much as 70% of a turkey’s production costs.
• This is especially true for pasture turkeys that are free to frolic about. Their increased activity means that they need twice as many calories as their factory farmed brethren.
• Turkey farms also have to pay for freezers. Your turkey may say that it is fresh and was never frozen, but according to industry standards as long as it wasn’t chilled below 10 degrees it wasn’t frozen.
• Despite all this though turkeys are a loss leader for a supermarket – you pay less than what it cost the store to buy it.
• This is because supermarkets know that you’ll also buy items like potatoes, cranberries, stuffing, and butter – and they jack up those prices to increase margins.

Read more here.

Source: Lucky Peach