It’s a Thanksgiving tradition for many families in the United States: heading to retailers like Walmart to stock up on cranberries, sweet potatoes and – la piece de resistance – a cult classic, the Butterball turkey.

But this year, Walmart’s annual Thanksgiving meal kit has become a flashpoint over questions of inflation and economic stability under US President Donald Trump.

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The Trump administration has pointed to the cost of the Walmart kit as a sign that its economic policies are taming inflation. But experts say the story is more complicated than what packages of stuffing and tinned pumpkin can tell.

The retailer is advertising a lower price this year at $4 per person for 10 people compared with $7 per person for 8 people in 2024, a talking point the White House has embraced.

On Friday, Trump once again pointed that out: “We’ve got [prices] way down from last year,” Trump said while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “Walmart said that Thanksgiving this year is exactly 25 percent less than last year.”

But the Bentonville, Arkansas–based retailer’s offer comes with caveats. The kit contains fewer items – 20 compared with 29 last year – and uses more generic products rather than name brands, a switch that typically lowers costs.

Companies like Walmart, Amazon and Kroger that offer Thanksgiving meal kits can shape what goes into their bundles and choose to absorb costs.

But official data actually suggests that prices are going up. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) forecasts suggest turkey prices will be about 40 percent higher than this time last year, largely because of supply shortages tied to avian flu.

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Data, however, on the price of turkey has varied depending on where you look. The American Farm Bureau estimates that the cost of turkey will be 16 percent less than this time last year. But, researchers at Purdue University found that the price will be up 25 percent compared with this time last year.

Prices for other staples have also risen – potatoes by 3.7 percent, rolls by 3.9 percent and apples by 5.3 percent – all outpacing the 3 percent annual inflation rate, government data show.

New analysis from Groundwork Collaborative, The Century Foundation, and AFT found that another Thanksgiving staple, cranberry sauce, is up by 22 percent from this time last year.

CPI data shows wine prices declining due to domestic production, but imported European bottles face 15 percent increase.

Amid tariff-related uncertainty, rising wholesale costs, limited economic data and concerns over future social safety net programmes, Americans have grown more cautious in their spending. Consumer confidence continues to fall hitting its lowest level since April in its most recent reading published on Tuesday.

Why are prices up?

For poultry, the surge has little to do with economic policy. An ongoing strain of avian flu is limiting the supply of turkeys, with more than 2.2 million birds affected so far in 2025 and more than 600,000 confirmed infections in September. Even when only a single bird tests positive, farmers must slaughter the entire flock to contain the spread, further reducing supply.

“The current global H5N1 panzootic is the largest, most geographically widespread outbreak of avian flu ever recorded. The virus has affected more countries, more wild species, and more continents simultaneously than any previous avian influenza event,” Crystal Heath, the executive director of Our Honor, a veterinary advocacy organisation, told Al Jazeera.

“The virus started spreading through commercial poultry operations in the United States in February 2022,” Heath said.

For other staples, however, economic policy is a driving factor for the rise in prices.

Agricultural products, including tomatoes and potatoes, are up in price, driven by both import costs and the rising price of farm inputs – many of which are imported themselves, like the fertiliser needed to grow food and farm equipment like tractors.

“Tariffs on imported materials, including parts, fertiliser and other chemicals, are raising input costs for farmers. Those higher costs then get passed along, driving up the price of each unit and contributing to inflation,” Babak Hafezi, chief executive officer at Hafezi Capital, an international consulting firm, told Al Jazeera.

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Labour shortage drives up costs of agricultural products like apples, potatoes and tomatoes, which have seen a surge in prices, Hafezi said.

“The thing is, when fruit hangs on the trees with no one to pick it, it never makes it into the market. But the demand is still there, so it gets filled by imports. I visited a lemon farm in California and saw fruit everywhere, lemons just dropping to the ground and rotting because there weren’t enough workers to harvest them.”

Tariffs have pushed up the cost of canned goods as well.

Campbell’s, one of the nation’s largest producers of prepared foods, said earlier this year it would need to raise prices because tariffs increased the cost of steel used in its cans.

“The impact of tariffs, and to whatever extent immigration issues are affecting agricultural workers or people in meat-processing plants, is still being felt. There are a lot of exogenous shocks continuing to hit the system. So this isn’t just, ‘Hey, we had this huge run-up in inflation during COVID and prices just haven’t come down’,” Matthew Higgins, professor of management at Tulane University, told Al Jazeera.

Last week, Trump rolled back tariffs on some foods and other consumer goods. While the change immediately affects imports and wholesale goods, experts say that does not mean that consumers may see lower prices this Thanksgiving or even at all.

“The probability of the prices massively decreasing is very low unless there is some major disruption like a recession, and people can no longer consume at the level they were,” Hafezi said.

There is a historical precedent for this. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, producers raised prices because of supply-chain strains, and retailers followed suit. But even after those strains eased, consumers had already shown they would tolerate higher prices, leaving grocery stores with little incentive to reduce them.

That came to light in a 2024 report by the Federal Trade Commission, which outlined elevated prices at grocery stores.

“Some firms seem to have used rising costs as an opportunity to further hike prices to increase their profits, and profits remain elevated even as supply chain pressures have eased,” the report said.

Spending pressures

Regardless of the cause, the strain on consumers preparing for the holidays is intensifying, including on the back of the US government shutdown that ended recently.

City Harvest, a New York City–based organisation that partners with soup kitchens and food distribution centres, told Al Jazeera it has seen an increase in demand in the weeks following the shutdown.

“A lot of federal workers that were visiting the pop-up distributions were people seeking food assistance for the first time, so that was definitely a new population of people that were looking for support,” Jenna Harris, associate director of donor relations at City Harvest, told Al Jazeera.

City Harvest also noted that the city’s soup kitchens and food pantries are experiencing their highest number of visitors on record.

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“We do see that about 67 percent of New Yorkers that visit food pantries have a job, sometimes multiple jobs, so it’s really just showing that the rising cost of food is an issue,” Harris added.

This trend is not new – visits have risen 85 percent since 2019, according to FeedNYC, but new challenges are compounding the pressure. Families are navigating looming changes to the SNAP programme and uncertainty about healthcare costs in 2026. Across the country, states have begun notifying recipients of new requirements and giving them three months to comply, or they could lose benefits altogether.

Similarly, with Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies still up for debate, approximately 2.2 million Americans could lose their health insurance premiums if they are not extended, according to the Congressional Budget Office, leaving low- and middle-income families struggling to maintain coverage.

“There’s tremendous uncertainty, and as you move down the socioeconomic ladder, that uncertainty only increases. To some extent, you’d expect people to be more cautious with holiday spending,” Higgins added.

“What we’re seeing is a massive bifurcation of the American economy. The ultra-wealthy, with access to inflation-adjusted and future-oriented assets, are doing extremely well, while the middle and lower classes are struggling. Companies serving the upper and upper-middle classes are likely to thrive, whereas those catering to the rest of the market will have to focus on value-oriented products,” Hafezi said.