Nov. 30, 1905 was Thanksgiving. The day's NYT notes that the formal holiday of Thanksgiving was created during the Lincoln administration during the Civil War - a period during which the country had little to be thankful for.

The article describes the same basic holiday we have today - food, visiting with family, watching football, playing golf, oh, and more food. There are voluntary organizations providing dinners to the poor and homeless. It is all comfortably familiar.

The last paragraph, however, mentions that turkeys were selling for between 23 and 28 cents per pound and "there was no dearth of supply." I bet there wasn't. According to the folks at eh.net, $0.23 in 1905 would be:

$4.77 using the Consumer Price Index
$3.85 using the GDP deflator
$22.04 using the unskilled wage
$27.83 using the GDP per capita
$90.31 using the relative share of GDP

The loss-leading turkeys at the grocery store during the Thanksgiving/Christmas period sell for about $0.40-$0.60 per pound, putting the nominal price of these turkeys not much higher than a hundred years ago. However, this article points out that (in 2005):

Sendik's on W. Blue Mound Road in Brookfield was taking orders for Amish free-range turkeys from Wisconsin for $1.49 a pound, while Jacobson's, the butcher shop in Brennan's in Brookfield, offered free-range turkeys from northern Minnesota for $1.99 a pound.

At the end of the turkey spectrum are heritage turkeys, breeds that were nearly extinct a few years ago, according to Tricia Riley, general manager at Fields Best in East Troy. ..The fresh heritage birds have been selling for up to $13.69 a pound on the Internet, Riley said. Fields offered them for $3.35 a pound this year.

For some turkeys (or turkey-marketing techniques) the nominal price hasn't changed in a hundred years - isn't that impressive. For the high-end, fancy turkeys the real price hasn't changed in a hundred years - that, too, is impressive (perhaps moreso). If the demand for turkeys was static, this would suggest no change in the technology of raising turkeys. However, the demand for turkeys has likely increased with the increase in population, income, and the number of households with deep-friers, therefore the technology for raising turkeys must have improved and reduced real costs (even for free-range turkeys!) in order to keep real prices constant.

Yet more evidence of the power of markets.