If you did the shopping for Thanksgiving dinner this year, you might have noticed similar price tags to last year. Experts say that, overall, the cost to make this year's meal may have gone down.
This year's holiday meals will be less expensive than those in recent memory according to Patrick Penfield, professor of supply chain practice at Syracuse University.
"I think that's what consumers are going to start seeing now is because wages have been going up now, the supermarkets, grocery stores, retailers, they're all including that now into the price of goods," Penfield said. "So overall Thanksgiving should be good, should be lower than what it was last year. But, there's always going to be sales issues, those ingredients or those products that always seem to go up in price."
Some items that have gone up in price are eggs, which have been increasingly expensive this year, stuffing and dinner rolls. One thing Penfield said consumers won't get "sticker shock" with is the traditional Thanksgiving turkey.
"Your prices will be anywhere from 6-10% less than what they were last year from a turkey standpoint, which is unusual because you would normally think that because of bird flu and the turkey flocks being decimated that prices would go up -- but it seems like consumers are eating less turkey," Penfield said.
As the holiday season continues Penfield said consumers can expect to see some good discounts and bargains, in part because retailers are looking to get more people in the door.
"I think it'll be hopefully a normal holiday season," Penfield said. "If anything, I think the big issue is going to be, that retailers are going to be trying to get consumers to come into their stores. So I think there definitely will be some bargains, especially for, you know, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I think that's really the big worry for a lot of retailers is I don't know if they'll see the demand that they saw last year."
Penfield said he expects that this holiday season there will be few disruptions especially to food and product supply chains.
