Thanksgiving and Black Friday After-Math
How much turkey do Americans eat on Thanksgiving? How fast can a turkey run? (Not fast enough!) And how much money do Americans spend in the days following their big feast? Keep on reading to learn all about the math behind Thanksgiving and the annual Black Friday shopping extravaganza.
Jason Marshall, PhD
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Thanksgiving and Black Friday After-Math
If you live in the United States, you probably just participated in the annual celebration of the big beautiful bird known as a turkey. Of course, Thanksgiving is about a lot more than just turkey—it’s about shopping…er, I mean, it’s about being thankful. And shopping.
Exactly how much shopping? How much turkey? And how much fun—or not, as the case may be—is had by all over this holiday weekend? Those are exactly the questions we’ll be talking about today as we delve into the strange and often tasty world of Thanksgiving weekend math..
Turkeys by the Numbers
According to a survey by the National Turkey Federation (which, sadly, is a federation of turkey farmers and not actual turkeys), a rather remarkable 88% of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day. Furthermore, according to that same federation (which, by the way, is the group that presents a pair of lucky turkeys to be pardoned each year at the White House), those 88% of Americans gobble up somewhere around 46 million turkeys on Thanksgiving Day. Which means that of the 242 million turkeys that the US Census Bureau says are raised in the US each year, nearly 20% are eaten on Thanksgiving Day.
88% of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
As the folks at livescience.com have noted, if you do the math with these numbers, you can find some interesting (or perhaps disturbing) facts about what we eat on turkey day. Namely, since an average turkey weighs 16 pounds, and since there are approximately 320 million people in the US, we can figure out that 88% of 320 million – or around 281 million people – eat a total of 16 x 42 million or 672 million pounds of turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
That comes out to a total of just under 2.4 pounds of turkey per person—which, obviously, is a lot. Although it’s probably not quite as bad as it sounds, since that total amount will usually be consumed over the course of a few days.
Lest I leave you with the impression that turkeys are just for eating, the National Turkey Federation’s web site lists quite a few entirely non-culinary numerical fun facts about turkeys, too. For example, did you know that turkeys can fly short distances at up to 55 miles per hour, and can run up to 20 miles per hour? Well, actually, the domesticated turkey you loaded onto your dinner plate couldn’t do either of those things, but wild turkeys certainly can. Also, it turns out that only tom turkeys (those would be the boys) actually gobble—hens cluck.
How Much Food Do We Eat on Thanksgiving?
But Americans don’t each just eat our 2.4 pounds of turkey on Thanksgiving Day – we also eat lots of other carbolicious side dishes. According to the US Census Bureau, 856 million pounds of cranberries are forecast to be produced in the US in 2014—63% of which come from Wisconsin. As reported by livescience.com, 20% of all the cranberries eaten by a typical American in a year are consumed in their Thanksgiving Day cranberry sauce. Yum.
What else do we eat? More than 2.4 billion pounds of sweet potatoes, 1.5 billion pounds of pumpkins made into delicious pumpkin pies, and lots and lots more to make up a total of around 4,500 calories per person on Thanksgiving Day. Typically, according to the Calorie Control Council, these 4,500 calories are broken up into 3,000 calories for the main meal, topped off by an additional 1,500 or so calories for all of those pre and post-dinner snacks.
Black Friday Shopping Extravaganza
And just in case you were thinking that the Thanksgiving weekend is entirely about food, I’d like to remind you that it’s also about spending money—lots and lots (and lots) of money. Just how much?
92.1 million people shopped on Black Friday in 2013.
According to the National Retail Federation, 92.1 million people shopped on Black Friday in 2013. And 248.7 million people shopped in stores or online over the four day Thanksgiving weekend.
The National Retail Federation reports that the average amount spent by a shopper over the course of the holiday weekend was $407. So, a bit of simple math tells us that the total amount spent over the Thanksgiving weekend was well in excess of $100 billion.
People are whole-heartedly committed to their Black Friday shopping missions, so much so that 37% of all people who went shopping over the holiday weekend in 2013 arrived at stores before 12:01 a.m. on Black Friday.
Personally, that sounds nuts to me—come midnight after Thanksgiving, I plan to be sleeping soundly. Maybe that’s because I have a toddler in the house, or maybe it’s because I’m one of the 43% of shoppers who find the in-store experience on Black Friday to be “annoying.” As noted in the Christian Science Monitor, the remarkable thing about this statistic is that 57% of the 460 consumers polled apparently enjoy the Black Friday shopping experience! What can I say? I’m happy for them—but I’m still looking forward to my good night’s sleep.
Wrap Up
Okay, that’s all the math we have time for today.
For more fun with math, please check out my book The Math Dude’s Quick and Dirty Guide to Algebra. And remember to become a fan of The Math Dude on Facebook, where you’ll find lots of great math posted throughout the week. If you’re on Twitter, please follow me there, too.
Until next time, this is Jason Marshall with The Math Dude’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Make Math Easier. Thanks for reading, math fans!
Wild turkey image courtesy of Shutterstock.