The numbers are in, and they speak of a quiet, feathery massacre happening just beyond the stockyard gates, a bloodless crime against the American table. This is not mere economics; this is a pre-holiday mugging, a calculated assault on the one ritual that still pretends to hold this fractured nation together.
The official word, delivered with all the passion of an autopsy report, is that the price of a frozen turkey has been catapulted into the stratosphere, with wholesale figures hitting a staggering $1.32 per pound. That’s a forty percent increase from last year.
Forty percent. Let that number sink in. It is a silent scream in the freezer aisle.
The reason, they tell us, is supply.
A bland, harmless word for a brutal reality. The supply has been choked off, not by some abstract market force, but by a plague. A vicious, unforgiving strain of avian influenza has swept through the coops and the barns, leaving a trail of three million feathered corpses in its wake this year alone. Half a million of those birds were wiped out just this month.
“From the day I take the oath of office, we’ll rapidly drive prices down and make America affordable again,” Donald Trump promised Americans in the summer of 2024 as he ran for president. “Prices will come down. You just watch. They’ll come down fast.”
Ten months into this administration, the cost of living remains stubbornly high. The president’s promise of relief has not materialized. Instead, groceries, utilities, and new cars continue to drain wallets, with the inflation rate holding steady at 3%—virtually unchanged since Inauguration Day.
This failure was foreseeable. A broad decline in prices across the entire economy is a historical anomaly, typically signaling a severe crisis like the Great Depression.
The president’s culpability runs deeper than a broken promise. Through policies like sweeping tariffs, he has actively made life less affordable, choosing to worsen the very problem he pledged to solve.
The math is as simple as it is grotesque: fewer turkeys means higher prices.
The USDA forecasts a flock of 195 million this year, down from 200 million last year, and a staggering fifty million fewer than the bounty of 2016.
We are witnessing the great thinning, a deliberate starvation of the national larder.
And while the bird flu does the dirty work of culling the herd, the human vultures are circling.
Do not be fooled by the carnival barkers at the mega-marts, the ones waving Butterball banners at 97 cents a pound.
Americans stocking up for this year’s Thanksgiving dinner may see a dip in their grocery bills for the second year in a row, down 5% from last year. However, the cost for a classic Thanksgiving dinner feast is still 19% higher than it was five years ago.
This is not generosity; it is a tactical strike, a loss leader designed to lure you into the store with the promise of a cheap bird so they can bleed you dry on the sweet potatoes and the veggie tray.
Those items, the supporting cast of the Thanksgiving feast, have been hit even harder—up sixty-one percent, thirty-seven percent—thanks to hurricanes in North Carolina that battered the very earth where they grow.
According to USDA’s Turkeys Raised report, farmers raised 205 million turkeys in 2024, down 6% from last year and the lowest since 1985. Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza is responsible for the decline in turkeys raised.
Typically, fewer turkeys would mean an increase in price, but demand for turkey fell in 2024, and once again, demand for turkey is down. Thanksgiving dinner for many American families will not include a big bird on the table, just as home ownership and health insurance are climbing out of reach.
The entire meal is under siege, from the centerpiece to the sides.
So we are left with a schizophrenic market, a hall of mirrors where the wholesale price is a raging inferno and the retail price is a controlled burn, for now.
The economists, those high priests of the status quo, chirp soothingly from their ivory perches. They tell us not to worry, that the increase we see will be “smaller than what’s happening upstream.” They ask us to trust the pipeline. But the pipeline is infected.
The pipeline is bleeding. The promise of a ten-person meal for under forty dollars is not a victory; it is a distraction, a magician’s trick while the real robbery takes place just offstage.
This is more than inflation.
This is a failure of the system, a direct result of a food industry so concentrated and so fragile that a single virus or a single hurricane can send it into a tailspin.
It is a system where the farmer is strangled by cost, the consumer is panicked by price, and the corporate middlemen continue to feast.
The truth is on the label, in the bar code, in the empty space where fifty million turkeys used to be.
The great American Thanksgiving is being carved up, and the portions are getting smaller and more expensive for everyone but the people holding the knife.