GRATEFUL FOR TRUCKERS THIS THANKSGIVING
Happy Thanksgiving! At The National Transportation Institute, we can’t wait to spend time with family, reflect on all that we have to be grateful for, and of course, eat an amazing meal.
Everybody knows that Thanksgiving is the day for indulgence. Gathering around the dinner table is the mainstay of the holiday. But have you ever wondered how much food actually gets consumed every year?
Each Thanksgiving, Americans gobble up approximately 46 million turkeys. According to the University of Illinois, the average weight of a turkey purchased for Thanksgiving is 15 pounds. That translates into 690 million pounds of turkey eaten during one holiday alone.
Then there’s the sides. The Agricultural Marketing Resource Center finds that roughly 80 million pounds of cranberries get eaten each Turkey Day.
According to the National Grocers Association, Americans will buy 19 million pies, 214 million pounds of potatoes, 50 million pounds of sweet potatoes, and 32 million bakery rolls. Shoppers will spend $69 million on deli products, $95 million on breading and stuffing, $99 million on baking mixes, $278 million on soup, and $143 million on frozen vegetables. That’s a lot of food.
Just thinking about this makes us want to break out the pants with an elastic waistband. But it doesn’t stop there. Another American tradition follows just after Thanksgiving – holiday shopping.
What was at one time a single-day event has turned into a week-long shopping spree, and the sales keep growing. In 2019, before a pandemic sent most of our lives into a virtual space, Black Friday sales reached $142.4 billion. Last year, that number grew to $188.2 billion, including $9 billion in online sales. Adobe predicts that holiday sales could exceed $200 billion this year.
What all of this has in common is that it is made possible by truck drivers and trucking executives. Not only do drivers bring us the items we need to keep our pantries stocked for Thanksgiving, but they transport all the merchandise that we pick up at our local storefronts and malls. Once Cyber Monday wraps up, truckers will deliver all of that loot from ports and distribution centers to customers’ homes.
And they do all of this while battling traffic, driving through snowy weather, and missing holidays themselves at home. The National Transportation Institute could not be more grateful for truckers’ contributions to our wellbeing.
Then there’s the rest of the team who keep drivers going. The HR managers, recruiters, and executives that we know work around the clock to make sure drivers are happy and freight gets to its destination. We see you staying late at the office and putting out fires. And we can’t thank you enough for it.
This year, we’re raising a glass to all of our family and friends in the trucking world. We are so grateful for all that you do. Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at The National Transportation Institute!
