How Many Turkeys Are Needed for Thanksgiving?

Nobody knows, but nobody has to know, because of markets.

O ne day each year, millions more Americans eat turkey than they do on any other day. This presents all sorts of challenges — including how to cook turkey well — but it might seem like one basic question comes first: How many turkeys are needed for Thanksgiving?

Let’s think about it at the level of a city, just to keep things a little simpler. You could count the number of people in the city as a starting point. We have Census data for that. Of course, not every individual needs a turkey, so the number of households might be more helpful.

But not every household needs a turkey, either. Some people don’t celebrate Thanksgiving at all. Others celebrate it together with other households. Others travel to different cities to celebrate, so their turkey needs are someone else’s problem. Others go out to eat.

Everyone doesn’t need the same kind of turkey, so even if you could get an accurate count of how many turkeys you needed, it wouldn’t satisfy most people. Some people need a small turkey, others a large turkey, others just turkey breast. Some people might want more than one turkey.

You could send out a survey ahead of time to ask people what their turkey needs are. But you can’t just create new turkeys overnight. They need to be born and raised well in advance. Most people don’t make Thanksgiving plans early enough to be able to answer such a survey confidently or accurately. Plus, most people don’t respond to surveys, and surveys are really expensive.

For sake of argument, though, let’s say you were able to get a good enough survey to be statistically accurate and could surmise the rough number of turkeys and proportion of each weight that a city needed. How would you know where the turkeys need to go? Remember, most people didn’t answer the survey, so you can’t go back to their responses and see who needs what.

You could have turkey-delivery drivers go door-to-door and ask people if they need a turkey. But when presented with a turkey at the door, some people might say they need one even if they don’t (“Hey, free turkey”), while others might say they don’t need one even if they do (“Yikes . . . free turkey”).

Of course, no part of Thanksgiving actually works this way. This thought experiment starts from the wrong end of the problem, and it ignores one central fact: People want turkeys.

Nobody has to figure out at the national level, or the city level, how many total turkeys are needed ahead of time. It’s an impossible question to answer. That’s why we have markets instead of centrally planned Thanksgiving.

If you start from the point of view that people want turkeys, the problem becomes much easier to solve. If people want turkeys, they’ll make plans on their own to get them. You don’t have to solve the problem of how the turkey gets to their houses. They’ll solve it in the way that makes the most sense to them.

Maybe that means stopping by a store on the way home from work, or on the weekend, or during the day if they work from home or are retired. Maybe that means ordering it by mail. A few people will go out into the woods and shoot their turkey themselves. It doesn’t matter; people will do what suits them.

Which store they decide to go to also doesn’t matter. Each store knows that people will want turkeys around Thanksgiving time, so they place orders from suppliers based on that knowledge. They know roughly how many customers they serve and specialize in getting orders right. From the customer’s perspective, they don’t have to be perfect. If one store runs out, the customer can go to another store. But that competitive aspect means stores have good reason to get their orders as close to perfect as possible.

Suppliers know that stores are going to want turkeys around Thanksgiving, so they deep-freeze them months in advance. There’s not a major turkey slaughter right before Thanksgiving. Suppliers have been preparing all year. When the Thanksgiving orders come in, they can put the turkeys on trucks and deliver them to stores that need them.

Stores and suppliers both have good incentives to get the numbers right, and they have reasons to err on the side of oversupply rather than undersupply. Running out of such a key item for a holiday would be a nightmare for any business’s reputation. After Thanksgiving, stores can put their extra inventory on clearance, and suppliers can use their extra inventory for lunch meat, ground turkey, and other products.

Nothing about this process is perfect, and plenty of problems arise every year. Countless people work very hard in stores, distribution centers, and offices, behind the wheels of trucks and under the roofs of barns, to make Thanksgiving turkeys happen.

And it’s not only the hard work of people supplying turkeys; it’s the hard work of people buying turkeys too. They show up to shop and pay hard-earned money to the store — which pays its workers and suppliers, which pay their workers, etc., all the way up the supply chain.

But how does the store know how much to charge to make sure it has enough money so everyone gets paid? The price system. It seems to work pretty well for turkeys. Last year, turkey prices were higher because of lower supply caused by a turkey disease that killed many birds. This year, inventories are better, and prices are lower. People who want turkeys could plan around those prices, maybe buying less last year and more this year, ensuring there’s enough to go around.

How many turkeys are needed for Thanksgiving? Nobody knows, and nobody has to know. The planning process for Thanksgiving turkeys is decentralized through markets. Millions of people at various points in the process plan small things that are within their power to control, and with the aid of the price system, people get the turkeys they want.

Not everything is like turkeys, but many things are. This Thanksgiving, be grateful for spontaneous order, and for all the people up and down the supply chain who, knowingly or unknowingly, helped to get your holiday meal to you — and make sure to properly honor their efforts by not serving the turkey dry.