Massachusetts turkey farm keeping prices down for Thanksgiving
BOLTON - Thanksgiving is only two weeks away which means many people are scrambling to buy turkey, stuffing and all kinds of side dishes. But how much will that cost you?
Family-run Bob's Turkey Farm in Lancaster is gearing up for their biggest day of the year.
"We just recommend that you get your order in as soon as you can," said Jenn Miner Brezniak, Bob's granddaughter.
"We will have a line Thanksgiving week," said Bob's daughter Susan Miner. The family is prepping more than 2,000 orders for turkeys, which their farm has grown, raised and processed all on their own.
"We try to keep a healthy bird," said Miner. But it's not cheap, as their operational costs are rising across the board. "A turkey diet is mostly consisting of corn and soy bean. They've been very high since 2020, so that gets passed on to us from the feed company."
But still the family vowed to keep turkey prices the same as last year.
"It's great, everything else has gone up," said loyal customer Mike Giunta.
"It's going to be much tougher for people to put the same Thanksgiving dinner on the table as they otherwise would have done in 2019, for example," said Boston University Professor of Economics Laurence Kotlikof. He said since the onset of the pandemic, workers, wages have not kept up with the rise in prices of goods and services. "Your wage these days is roughly 7% lower than it was in February 2020 when Covid hit. Many, many American working households are feeling the pinch."
So as Brezniak prepares for the holiday rush, they're making sure to put customers first.
"Every once in a while, we get husbands whose wives have passed who are trying to, sort of, fill their shoes and I don't want to fail my kids. So you, sort of, have to walk people through that. And people appreciate that and that's why you don't give up. You do it for your family and you do it for other people's families," says Brezniack.
