To hear Walmart tell it, food prices for Thanksgiving are way down.
Every year Walmart posts a shopping list of common groceries that one would buy to prepare a full Thanksgiving meal for a large family. For 2025, they are touting a dinner for 10 will cost less than $4 a person, for turkey, cranberry sauce, and all the fixings.
Last year, the price was close to $7 a person. Wow, are we living in a world of grocery prices crashing all of a sudden?
Not quite.
*MOUSE PRINT:
Here is Walmart’s grocery list for their 2024 and 2025 Thanksgiving dinner side by side.
Walmart Thanksgiving Dinner
Shopping List
For 2025, Walmart dropped a net total of six items from their shopping list, including a number of fresh vegetables, and a large southern pecan pie. In their press release FAQ section, they clue you in to the little trick they pulled.
*MOUSE PRINT:
Of course, most people don’t design their Thanksgiving dinner around Walmart’s suggested menu, so your costs are likely to be much higher.
Not only are some high dollar items missing from this year’s meal but many of the items are the same size/quantity or smaller yet are being divided by 10 people rather than 8.
Bending over for the administration again!
It’s not even that they’re “Bending over the for administration…” Walmart doesn’t need the government as an excuse to lie to you about costs. They’re primary image as a store is being as the cheapest place to shop. They have every motivation to lie about how much a Thanksgiving dinner costs to encourage you to shop there.
And if you think you’re hungry after eating this pared-down Walmart Thanksgiving meal, that’s just your stomach lying to you with fake rumblings.
Of all the sleazy, misleading and deceptive advertising/promotion scams you’ve identified, this one takes the cake. I’d boycott Walmart’s for this (if I shopped there).
They can take their turkey and stuff it…
What Walmart could do (and probably should do) would be to duplicate the 2024 recipe. Use the same brands and sizes for every item. Then show the results for for 2025.
Yes, it was sneaky to change the ingredients. It is a lot more work to fix cranberries from the beans. You need time to cook them, a lot of sugar to make them palatable and time to cool them down. It’s a lot easier to open a can of cranberry sauce. Just to pick one item on the list
I just looked at the Walmart website and added up the cost of the 2024 items today and came up with no more than $51.39 (less if less than 16 lbs of turkey).
But this includes some very significant price drops, and is an online price without tax. If I look at the prices before the discounts, I get a cost of $65.30 for the 2024 shopping list.
Could we ask MrConsumer to verify if the prices listed by Walmart in 2024 were before or after discounts? And also to generally verify my calculations?
PS. This website is very important!
Sorry, W… I do not have access to 2024 prices.
Dear MrConsumer,
I think I found the relevant piece of information for last year’s calculation: “Comparison based on the average price charged for the featured items from Nov. 1 – Dec. 26, 2023 vs. our national or highest regional price to be charged for the same items from Nov.1 – Dec. 26, 2024. Excludes AK, HI and PR.”
So all one needs to do is to figure out what is the meaning of the phrase “national or highest regional price to be charged for the same items from Nov.1 – Dec. 26”. They certainly try to make it easy for a comparative analysis 🙂
But, assuming they’ll keep the discounted prices till Christmas, it does look like they actually lowered the cost of last year’s meal by over $4. I am thus curious why they decided to change the menu and go for that shocking and misleading $4pp.
We all know we will shop different stores to cut down on costs…
Where is the stuffing in the 2024 list??? You can’t have a proper Thanksgiving feast without it.
Richard… I think it was corn bread stuffing… hence the two boxes of corn muffin mix.
Why not make the calculations for the same size family? Smoke and mirrors!
Walmart lies, and lies, and lies, and LIES.