A very Planet Money Thanksgiving

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Here at Planet Money, Thanksgiving is not just a time to feast on turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casseroles and pie(s). It's also a time to feast on economics. Today, we host a very Planet Money Thanksgiving feast, and solve a few economic questions along the way.

First: a turkey mystery. Around the holidays, demand for turkey at grocery stores goes up by as much as 750%. And when turkey demand is so high, you might think that the price of turkey would also go up. But data shows, the price of whole turkeys actually falls around the holidays; it goes down by around 20%. So what's going on? The answer has to do what might be special about supply and demand around the holidays.

We also reveal what is counted (and not counted) in the ways we measure the economy.

And we look to economics to help solve the perennial Thanksgiving dilemma: Where should each dinner guest sit? Who should sit next to whom?

This episode was hosted by Erika Beras and Jeff Guo. It was produced by James Sneed with an assist from Emma Peaslee and edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Josh Newell.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from NPR sponsor, Barclay's Corporate and Investment Bank,
0:04.4	Powering Sustainable Growth in a Changing World,
0:07.2	Powering Financial Solutions that Transform Industries.
0:10.6	Barclay's Corporate and Investment Bank, powering possible.
0:15.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:20.0	Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Me too. And I'm not just talking about food
0:25.6	here at Planet Money Thanksgiving is also about feasting on economics. Starting right
0:31.0	here at the supermarket. Okay let's see if we can find a shopping cart without a noisy wheel.
0:35.0	All right, let's see.
0:38.0	How's that one?
0:40.0	Amazing?
0:41.0	All right.
0:42.0	Got your shopping list?
0:43.0	I got my shopping list.
0:45.0	This year, we wanted to share our love of Thanksgiving.
0:48.8	So we hatched a plan to make an entire Thanksgiving feast and have all of our planet money colleagues join us,
0:55.4	or at least all of them who are available on a random Monday evening.
0:58.8	Let's see, what are we gonna get?
1:00.2	Russet potatoes, those are the kind you want for your like mashed potatoes right?
1:04.1	We got everything you could possibly need for a full-on Thanksgiving dinner.
1:08.3	Butter, we need four pounds of butter.
1:10.3	Look what I found.
	...

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