Planet Money - A very Planet Money Thanksgiving

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

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. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Always free at these links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Find more Planet Money: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Me too. And I'm not just talking about food. Here at Planet Money, Thanksgiving is also about feasting on... Economics! Starting right here at the supermarket. Okay, let's see if we can find a shopping cart without a noisy wheel. Alright, let's see.

How's that one? Amazing. Alright. Got your shopping list? I got my shopping list. This year, we wanted to share our love of Thanksgiving, so we hatched a plan to make an entire Thanksgiving feast and have all of our Planet Money colleagues join us, or at least all of them who are available on a random Monday evening. Let's see, what are we gonna get? Russet potatoes. Those are the kind you want for your mashed potatoes, right? Yeah, extra starchy. We got everything you could possibly need for a full-on Thanksgiving dinner. Butter. We need four pounds of butter.

Look what I found. Cranberry sauce. Oh wait, hang on, I gotta get my secret ingredient. Wait, what's your secret ingredient? I can't tell you, it's not gonna be a secret anymore. Turn around, turn around. You can't look at this part. But of course, no Thanksgiving is complete without the main event. I think we're close.

I think we're close. Oh, oh, oh, oh. A baster. We have the oven bags. The turkey. It's the turkey. And voila. Whoa.

Look at all these turkeys. Look, there's a lot of turkeys here. And right there in the middle of the meat section, we encountered an economic mystery. It's on sale. It's only $1.99 a pound. Look at all this other stuff. It's like $7, $8, $20 a pound. Erica, turkeys are always on sale at Thanksgiving. Yeah, okay, compared to beef or lamb, turkey is always pretty cheap. It doesn't cost that much per pound.

But around Thanksgiving, tur is always pretty cheap. It doesn't cost that much per pound. But around Thanksgiving, turkeys get even cheaper. The average retail price of turkey actually goes down during the holidays, which is odd because right when everyone's loading up their shopping carts with their Thanksgiving turkey, right when turkey demand is the highest, you might think that the price of turkey would go up. But that is not what happens. And it gets weirder. The price that supermarkets pay, the wholesale price of turkey, that does go up during the holidays. But for some reason, the price that consumers pay that we're paying, that goes down. It's a mystery, an economic mystery, with some surprising new answers. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Jeff Guo.

And I'm Erika Barris. Thanksgiving is the very best time of the year. There's pie, there's stuffing, there's Brussels sprouts. The only thing that could make it better, economics. Today on the show, a very Planet Money Thanksgiving. We're going to get to the bottom of this turkey mystery. We're going to see what this cooking adventure reveals about an overlooked corner of the economy. And we are going to use economics to help us solve one of the biggest problems of the holidays. The seating arrangement.

Planet Money is getting together for Thanksgiving. And you are invited too. Thank you so much. All right, it's time to go cook. Does this all fit in this cart? Is there a can opener in this house? Yes. Oh, beautiful.

We are back from the grocery store. Okay so I'm gonna get these onions chopped for the gravy. You know it's not a meal if you don't drop three things. That's why you always buy the extra onion. And we're cooking up a feast for our very Planet Money Thanksgiving. Starting with the turkey. Look at this guy. Beautiful. Oh, you're so beautiful. All right, turkey going in the oven. Here we go. There you go.

See? Timer. How long do we wanna cook this turkey? We're gonna go by feel. No, no, no timer. No timer? Okay, I guess we're just gonna wing it with the turkey. Erica, I had a thermometer.

Right, right, you had a thermometer. And this 14 pound turkey only cost us like $25. And it's going to feed eight people, which brings us to the first part of our very Planet Money Thanksgiving, the economic mystery we found in the grocery store. Every year during the holidays, during a time of peak turkey demand, the price of turkey actually goes down. And that's really surprising in a lot of ways. Xiao Dong is an economist who spent a few years at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He is a food economist.

He's looked at the data and he found that during the holidays, turkey demand spikes 750 percent. But the price of all those turkeys actually goes down by an average of about 20 percent. Schaus says there's a whole body of research looking at this phenomenon. When the demand for something goes up, but the price goes down. Economists call this phenomenon counter-cyclical pricing. And Schaus says economists, they've analyzed this problem in basically two ways. Number one is what's going on with the stores. Like maybe there's a reason that supermarkets want to charge less during times of high demand. The theory I'd always thought was the reason why turkeys are cheaper is because they're a loss leader.

Yeah, so this loss leader is probably the most popular theory. A store can discount a popular item to draw in more consumers, and then they would buy a cart full or basket full of products too. Does that hold weight? That is an empirical question that a lot of economists have been trying to answer. Xiao says, yeah, that is one possibility. Some stores could be using turkeys as a loss leader. But Xiao says the second way to look at this mystery is through demand. What's going on with customers?

He says, yes, a lot of people during Thanksgiving are buying turkey, but that demand might be special. Meaning those customers might be more price sensitive. Like maybe they're buying a lot of other stuff during the holidays, so they're more conscious of prices. Or maybe they just don't really care about turkey. They only buy it once a year for the sake of tradition. So they just want the cheapest turkey they can find. If customers are price sensitive, that means they're willing to shop around.

They're going to flock to whatever store offers the lowest price on turkey. So because they're more price sensitive, stores will lower the prices a little bit. Aha. The idea is that if stores don't lower their prices, they might lose out on a lot of those price sensitive customers. Now, Schaus says these theories about stores or price sensitive customers aren't just ways to explain counter-cyclical pricing for turkeys. Actually, these theories were developed when economists observed counter-cyclical pricing for a lot of other products. For instance, the price of champagne drops right around New Year's. The price of canned tuna goes down during Lent.

And avocados, they get discounted right around Cinco de Mayo. Economists have even seen this phenomenon for ice cream during the summer and like soup during the winter. But when Xiao looked at all this past research on countercyclical pricing, he realized that all these theories missed something when it came to turkeys. He has a new theory that helps explain countercyclical pricing, particularly for turkeys. He has a new theory that helps explain counter-cyclical pricing, particularly for turkeys. One day I was shopping, it was like in July. So I actually asked the store manager, I was like, do you have full-brewed turkeys? He's like, no, that's only a holiday season thing for us. Oh, wow. Okay. And then were you like, why? No, I felt a little awkward asking him why,

so I didn't continue. Well, he's an economist, Erica. He's not going to ask questions. He's going to go into the data. He's going to prove it. Standing there in the aisle at the supermarket, Xiao realized that, yeah, not all stores carry whole turkeys year-round. And this was a lightbulb moment because it got Xiao thinking about how stores compete with each other. Turkeys, they are basically, let's call them a hyper-seasonal food.

Demand for turkey peaks during the holidays. And according to Xiao's theory, that seasonal demand is really attractive to a lot of supermarkets that don't normally sell turkeys. Maybe they think they can make money off of turkeys or that they can use turkeys as loss leaders. Whatever the reason, right around Thanksgiving, a bunch of supermarkets swoop into the game. These stores can just, you know, free up some freezer space and start offering turkeys because it's probably

profitable to do so. And if there's more stores that come in, that puts downward competitive pressure on prices. And to confirm this theory, Xiao analyzed data from more than 5,000 grocery stores, dozens of chains across the country. And he found that during the holidays, the number of stores selling turkeys increased by 16 percent. Which might not sound like a lot, but that can be enough to create competition and drive down prices. And this may help to explain the mystery of why turkeys are priced 20% lower during the holidays. So I think it's a complementary theory. As one of my economist friends says, this is probably like an economic hot take of what is going on and supported by some data. Okay, that was the turkey mystery, but Thanksgiving is not just about turkey.

No, no, no, no. Some people would say that Thanksgiving is really all about these side dishes. This stuff might not all fit in the same oven. Is there only one rack in here? No, no, there's two. So let me take the turkey out first. Gotta squish them in there. So while we wait for the turkey to finish cooking, we gotta start preparing the sides. And that is gonna lead us to the second part of our very Planet Money Thanksgiving. A lesson about what is counted, and not counted, in the ways we measure the economy. Because making all these sides, it is a lot of work.

I'll wash, you peel. Let's go. I love this. Assembly line. Assembly line. Starting with the mashed potatoes. That's what the four pounds of butter were for, obviously. Do you want a full peel or do you like a rustic peel? I honestly would eat them unpeeled.

Oh, really? Okay, then a rustic peel it is. Rustic peel. We also got sweet potatoes, homemade gravy, the green bean casserole, and cranberry sauce. Oh, oh, it's time for my secret ingredient. Oh, okay. And of course, Erica, you made your famous pumpkin pie. This is looking good.

This looks pumpkin pie-y. No lumps. We are clearly working to make this meal. And the thing about all this work, all the time that goes into making an entire feast, the shopping, the cooking, the endless cleaning. Oh my God, the cleaning. None of this is included in official ways we measure the economy, like the gross domestic product, GDP.

That only counts the goods and services that people buy and sell. But obviously all this stuff is still real work. Macroeconomists, they study this kind of work. They call it home production. And Thanksgiving, well, I would say it's kind of the Super Bowl of home production. I am wondering if you have a favorite Thanksgiving dish. Turkey. Actually, I grew up in China.

So usually we prefer to get some awesome Chinese food. And combining with turkey as Thanksgiving, so I can have a wonderful dinner with friends. When she isn't eating turkey with a lot of awesome Chinese food, Jixiu Yu teaches economics at Louisiana State University. And we went to Jixiu for our second Thanksgiving mystery, which is how much home production actually happens in our economy. Tishu says to answer that, economists have to resort to asking people. Every year, the government asks thousands of Americans to complete what are called time diaries.

Time diaries. Time diaries. So in each time intervals during these 24 hours, what are you doing? So what is your primary activities? What is your secondary activities? So like a log of how you spend your day. Yes. Economists use those time diaries to estimate all the home production that people are doing. How much housework, cooking, shopping, child care, etc. And then they try to put a price

tag on that labor. Essentially, they try to estimate the market value of that labor by looking at the average wages for jobs that do similar kinds of work. So they take those estimated wages, the number of hours, the number of people, and they add it all up and get a big price tag. If the value of the home production were included in GDP, the value would add trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy. Trillions of dollars? Yes, yes. Trillions of dollars. Yeah, trillions of dollars. Like maybe increase the GDP by about 20 percent, 25 percent. Oh yeah, home production is a huge part of the economy. And quantifying home production is key to understanding the real state of the economy.

Like, if you're only looking at GDP, you are missing out on the big picture. Jishu studied the most recent recession, the one during the pandemic. She estimated that while lots of people were staying at home, home production went up a lot. So the picture is not as bad when you add GDP and home production together. Yes. It's not as bad as we only see the GDP drops. Look, I'm telling you, it was the power of all those sourdough starters.

And for us at our Thanksgiving feast, it has been a lot of home production. We've been cooking for seven straight hours, and the turkey is almost done. Stop, stop. The alarm just keeps going off. Make it stop. How do you make it stop?

You gotta fan it. Fan it with a coat or something. Ah. All right, guys, I'm gonna check on the turkey. Super excited. Please don't be over. Oh, yeah, guys, we're done. The turkey's done.

The turkey was done. Maybe too done. Man, I can't believe I overcooked the turkey. This is deeply embarrassing. Overdone turkey aside, the biggest challenge of Thanksgiving still awaits. People were about to arrive, and we still needed to figure out where to seat everyone. Luckily, economics can help us out with that.

That's after the break. Hey, it's Mary Childs. We know you value fun stories that help you understand the economy. And your financial support is what makes those stories possible. Because even though our journalism is freely available, it is not free to produce. So a big huge shout out to our Planet Money Plus supporters and anyone listening who currently donates to public media. You are making a real difference. You're part of the community of listeners who make this work possible. And if you're listening to this and that's not you yet, Giving Tuesday is almost here. And maybe that's the little push you needed to finally join Planet Money Plus.

You get to hear the regular show sponsor free and get bonus episodes that our supporters enjoy. Again, if you already support us, you're the best. And you can also participate in Giving Tuesday Thank you, and back to the episode. Okay, we have been cooking all day. We have our turkey, we have our sides, we have three pumpkin pies, courtesy of Erica. The sun is setting, and our guests have finally started to arrive. Let us in, Let us in. We're coming. We're coming. Happy Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving. Look at this view. Hey, friends. So good to see you. Hi. Welcome to Thanksgiving. I'm totally distracted by the view. The view is pretty, pretty awesome. Be careful. There is a hot oven. Our guests are Planet Money colleagues Amanda Aronchik, Mary Childs, Keith Romer, James Sneed, Willa Rubin, and former host Robert Smith.

They come in and they admire the feast we spent all day making. Oh, it smells good in here. It smells like, oh my gosh, it smells good. Oh, guys, you want to see the proteins? Sure. Check this out. Oh my gosh, it smells good. Oh, guys, you want to see the proteins? Sure. Check this out. Oh my goodness. Holy moly.

Everyone is here. We have a table overflowing with food and a problem. Where should each dinner guest sit? Who should sit next to whom? This is the final part of our very Planet Money Thanksgiving. A challenge. The seating arrangement. And we didn't want to just throw people together randomly. We wanted to find the optimal seating arrangement.

And this, this is actually a really tough challenge. It's related to a whole field of economics called matching theory. Economics at its heart is all about matching people with the things they want. That usually happens through prices. But there are some markets where you can't put a price on things. Yeah, maybe you are trying to match kidney donors with people who need kidney transplants. Or you're trying to match medical students to residency programs. Or public school students to high schools in their area. programs or public school students to high schools in their area. These are all real world instances where it would be immoral or unethical to use prices to match people. So instead, economists

have used matching theory to come up with solutions. Matching theory even won the Nobel Prize in 2012. And the way that matching starts is by asking people what their preferences are. that matching starts is by asking people what their preferences are. So to make our optimal table seating arrangement, several days before our Thanksgiving feast, I called our guests, each one individually. Can you rank from one to 10, like one being amazing, great, and 10 being like no, terrible, bad, who you want to sit next to? You want me to choose who I want to sit beside? Yeah. Like rank them.

No. That is like the rudest thing ever. I would never. I work with these people. This sounds really uncomfortable. Who I'd like to sit next to? Yeah. Oh, gosh.

And this is recorded for podcast? We are always recording, Willa. We are always recording. Yesa. We are always recording. Yes, a very awkward question to ask your colleagues. But we had to make them do it for the sake of economics. And people started sharing some answers.

So I'm seeing Amanda on Friday. So in terms of scarcity, that downvotes her, but I love her. Well, I can give you a top two. No, no, now I'm second-guessing it. I've never met Jeff Guo in person. So Jeff Guo is number one.

Okay. Can I revise my list? I want to revise my list. Okay, revise your list. And after we got a sense of people's preferences, that's when we got to work on figuring out how to make this optimal seating arrangement. And economists, they say there are actually two ways to think about what an optimal match even means. The first way to make matches is to optimize for overall

happiness. In other words, what match will maximize the group's overall utility? Another way to make matches is to optimize for stability. Having a stable match means that there isn't any pair or group of people who could make themselves better off by trading seats with each other. Economists have found that in a lot of situations, you can't really achieve both goals. You can't maximize utility and have stability. In the real world, in a lot of situations, people have chosen to optimize for stability, like for matching medical students with residency programs or public school students with high schools. the total amount of everyone's happiness, you can end up with situations that feel unfair, where maybe a few people are really unhappy so that they can make the whole group happier.

Matches that are optimized for stability, they are the ones that tend to feel more fair. So for our Thanksgiving table conundrum, what we decided to do was to optimize the table arrangement for stability. We wanted to create a stable table. Is there an appetizer snack? Would you like to eat a whole sweet potato? Yes. Mary, here, have a Parmesan crisp.

Thanks. And this stable table question and questions like it, they're on the frontier of this field of matching theory. Just this year, two new papers have come out about it. And unlike with the matching problem for kidneys, medical residents, and for public schools, which can all be solved with a clever algorithm, economists haven't figured out an algorithm to reliably produce stable table arrangements. So to solve this problem, the only thing we could do was to use brute force because we only had eight guests and that's only 5,040 possible seating arrangements. For those who

remember from math class, that is seven factorial. So we, meaning Jeff, wrote a computer program that simulated every single seating arrangement possible. And for each arrangement, it calculated every person's utility by looking at who was sitting on their left and who was sitting on their right and how that matched that person's preferences. And then it checked to see if that person might be happier if they could switch seats with someone else at the table. And after looking at all of this, the computer gave us a seating arrangement, a supposedly stable table.

And it was time to put this stable table to the test. So Willa, you're going to sit here. Next to Willa is going to be, oh, me. I'm going to sit next to you. All right. And then Keith is going to sit to my left. So everyone is in their seats just looking at the heaping plates of food on the table. But before we let anybody touch the food... Well, because this is Planet Money, we're going to quantify how good this seating arrangement really was. Everyone's going to get a piece of paper.

You get a paper. You get a paper. We had to see if there were any trades that people wanted to make. If someone else's seat might make them happier. So we asked everyone to look around the table. Is there anybody's seat you would rather be sitting in right now? Please write down those seats on this piece of paper right now. That was the test. Have we optimized this table for stability? We collected all the slips of paper.

And there were a couple folks who were interested in sitting in a different seat. We won't disclose who. You guys know who you are. But none of those people who wanted different seats matched up. There are no possible trades within this group that would make anybody happier. We have achieved a stable seating arrangement. Cheers. Cheers. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy stable seating arrangement. Cheers. Cheers, happy Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving. Cheers. Cheers. Stability. Cheers. Stability. Stability. Stability.

Stability. Wait, now that we're all seated optimally, does that mean we get to eat? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We finally got to dig into the feast in front of us. Okay, so at the center of the table, of course, is our turkey.

I also did a sundae roast. Beautiful. Roast beef. Oh my gosh. Mashed potatoes, of course. Don't ask how much butter's in them. It's a lot of butter. More than a pound.

The sweet potatoes are gorgeous. Tell us about the sweet potatoes. We did some Hasselbeck sweet potatoes with a brown butter caramel. We had done it. We had pulled off a very Planet Money Thanksgiving. I think that's it. Oh, and we have our cranberry sauce, which has a very special ingredient. Secret ingredient. Secret ingredient. Taste it. Let us know what you think is inside it. You know, the whole reason we put ourselves through this is because Thanksgiving is a special holiday.

It's a chance to reflect on what really matters in life. The thing is, the turkey's a little bit over. I thought it was pretty good. No, it was good. Ugh, that overcooked turkey is still haunting me. Jeff, the turkey was fine. You gotta stop beating yourself up over it. Coming up next time on Planet Money, there is too much marijuana in the state of Oregon.

It was like it was being stuffed in closets and garages and everywhere. Why was that? Because there's just nowhere for it. But it is illegal for growers there to sell it anywhere but inside the state. Now, one weed dealer and his lawyer are trying to change that. And before we reveal the secret ingredient in my cranberry sauce, we are thankful for James Sneed, who produced the show with an assist from Emma Peasley. We're thankful for Sam Yellow Horse Kessler and his clutch turkey help,

and also his amazing green bean casserole. And we're thankful for Josh Newell, who engineered this episode. We are also thankful for Jess Chang, our who engineered this episode. We are also thankful for Jess Chang, our editor for this episode. We are always thankful for Sierra Juarez, our fact checker. And we are thankful for Alex Goldmark, who helped us clean up. He's also our executive producer. I'm Erika Barris. I'm Jeff Guo.

This is NPR. Thanks for listening. So the cranberry sauce has something spicy in it? A spicy pepper of some kind? Yeah. Like not Chipotle. Not a Chipotle. But like a Mexican pepper? No.

Because it's like the bite's at the front of the mouth. Oh. I think it's ginger. You're close. Oh, ginger. There's no. Oh, no, ginger. There's no ginger. All right, what's in the cranberry sauce, guys? Okay, I'll just tell you guys.

So, what is cranberry sauce if not American chutney? And so I thought, what could take it to the next level? Ginger. A little bit of spicy mango chutney. So what you're tasting is a little mango, a little garam masala, a little cayenne. So there is ginger in there. It's really good.

And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.