Why Restaurants Doubled Down on Thanksgiving Promotions This Year

Restaurants pushed for a seat at the table for this year’s Thanksgiving dinner with Thanksgiving promotions, convenience, and lower prices for families.

As grocery store prices rise and convenience becomes more valuable to consumers, restaurants across the country are seeing an opportunity to put on their own Thanksgiving promotions for Thanksgiving dinner. Businesses like Bob Evans, steak houses and even Chipotle have created Thanksgiving specials to feed a family while undercutting the cost and labor of cooking your own meal this year.

Barbara Castiglia, host of The Main Course, says that consumers this year might be more willing to take up restaurants on their Thanksgiving promotions dinner offer to help save money around the holidays.

Barbara’s Thoughts

This time of year is a great time for restaurants. People want to go out, they wanna celebrate the holidays with families and friends. And people might be thinking about inflation and looking at their pocketbooks a little more carefully this year, but they still want to celebrate and they still want to do these things. So they’ll actually be more willing to spend more money because they want to have that experience.

So there are a lot of things that restaurants can do at this time of year. They could kind of go with that value message. If you are a restaurant that it makes sense that you can execute holiday meals and kind of offer them that way, we can do a holiday roast or a holiday ham with the sides and serve it for four to eight people, and make it so it’s actually cheaper than it would take for somebody to get everything at the grocery store and put everything together and kind of work into that value and convenience factor. That kind of lets people enjoy the holidays more because they know that they’re going to be taken care of.

If a restaurant makes really good food, that you’re known for, different kinds of sides like a cream spinach or that you do really well. You can even promote those kind of things because people may come in just for that.”