IN SEASON : The Bargain Bird

How cheap are turkeys this year? They’re giving them away.

Of course, that’s nothing new. At Thanksgiving, almost every grocery store offers some kind of a promotion on turkeys. This year, it seems, you practically have to work to pay more than 69 cents a pound--a remarkable bargain for any kind of meat.

Despite the fact that turkey consumption has increased 70% over the last 10 years, turkey prices are 3% lower than last year, driven down by record inventories and a general oversupply of all meats.

Basically 10 companies control the turkey production for the entire country, with Butterball being predominant. In fact, this year Butterball will sell roughly 760 million pounds of turkey to second-place Carolina Turkeys’ 420 million pounds. And the industry is, in economic parlance, vertically integrated--meaning that the big companies own everything from the farms on which the birds are raised to the processing plants.

Most of those plants are in four states--North Carolina, Minnesota, Arkansas and California, where Louis Rich, the fourth-largest turkey processor is located.

* Turkeys aren’t the only Thanksgiving staple being sold at bargain prices. A survey by The Packer, a produce industry journal, shows an 8% reduction in wholesale prices of selected seasonal fruits and vegetables from last year.

The biggest bargains? Washington Red Delicious apples and California navel oranges, both down roughly 30% from last year.

* And, according to the Department of Agriculture, fresh fruit prices in general are nearly half the level of a year ago, offsetting a similar increase in vegetable prices. The drop in apple prices accounts for most of the difference in fruit costs; the huge increase in tomato prices (they more than doubled from September to October alone) pushed vegetable prices up.