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Thanksgiving is now less than six weeks away, which means many families are making plans for travel and meal prep. But the cost of inflation will also be weighing heavily on their minds, especially for those who have large Turkey Day gatherings to feed. However, the world of grocery shopping is highly competitive, and one chain, Aldi, is aiming to outdo the competition in enticing cost-conscious consumers to shop at its stores. The national grocery store chain has announced that it will put a full Thanksgiving meal, which feeds 10, on your table for just $40. Heres what you need to know as the turkey dinner wars kick off for 2025. Aldi announces a Thanksgiving meal for 10 for just $40 Every national and regional chain that sells groceries will be vying for Americans dollars over the next six weeks as they begin shopping for their Thanksgiving meals. Today, Aldi has announced that it intends to give cash-conscious consumers the ability to get a full turkey spread for 10 people for just $40. As Aldi notes, at an average cost of just $4 per person, the deal, per household guest, costs less than a pumpkin spice latte. The deal also happens to be $7 cheaper than the $47 Thanksgiving dinner for 10 that Aldi offered last year. It should be noted that the $40 price isnt for a package of set food items. Instead, Aldi calculated the price by adding up the cost of 21 individual products and ingredients that are needed for making a Thanksgiving meal of nine dishes. Those dishes include: a 14-pound turkey rolls cranberry sauce mac and cheese stuffing mashed potatoes with gravy sweet potato casserole green bean casserole pumpkin pie In a potential dig at competitors like Costco, Aldi notes that no coupons or memberships are needed to buy the individual items that go into making the $40 meal for 10. The grocery store chain is also providing a downloadable list of those items here. The average cost of a Thanksgiving dinner has hovered around $60 for years The cost of Thanksgiving dinner can vary widely based on numerous factors, including the dishes you plan to prepare, the number of guests youll be feeding, and where in the country you are located. However, 2024 data from the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) found that the average cost of a Thanksgiving meal for 10 people has hovered around $60 for years. The AFBF found that the average Thanksgiving meal for 10 cost $58.08 in 2024. That was down 5% from the $61.17 average meal cost in 2023. In 2022, the average cost of a Thanksgiving meal for 10 hit a record high of $64.05, according to the AFBF. Of course, Aldi wont be the only one vying for your Thanksgiving dinner dollars. Last year, the chain was in a heated competition with other major U.S. grocery stores, including Walmart and Target. As reported by CBS Mornings last November, while Aldi was offering a 2024 Thanksgiving meal for 10 for $47, Target was offering a Thanksgiving meal for eight for $40, and Walmart was offering a meal for eight for $54. You can expect both of those major chainsand many othersto be similarly competitive this year. This year, Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 27.
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E-Commerce
The gyoza needs to look a little whiter. Its too pink. Nigel Ng is genially micromanaging the look and feel of Fried, an animated series that will premiere on YouTube later this year. His feedback comes during an early planning session at Toonstar, the company producing the show, which is headquartered in a former furniture warehouse in downtown L.A.s arts district. Ng has every right to be fussy about Frieds world. The show represents the cartoon debut of Uncle Roger, the volatile middle-aged Chinese guy he has portrayed in live-action YouTube videos since 2020. They famously depict the character growing agitated as he watches western chefssuch as Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver, and Nigella Lawsonbotching, by his estimation, the preparation of Asian food. (Especially fried rice.) In his own idiosyncratic way, Uncle Roger is a perfectionist. So is Ng. People follow my YouTube channel because they like Uncle Roger, Ng tells me during a break. They like how he thinks, they like how he talks, and the jokes he makes. People can tell it’s not a decision made by a committee. Its this one person’s sense of humor. Probably not the best sense of humor, but it’s his sense of humor. Doing this animation, I need to bring that ethos into this. Nigel Ng [Photo: Courtesy Asian Nation (@asian_nation) and @dollyave] During the planning meeting, as Ngs critiques of Frieds visuals keep comingspanning subtle details of characters, settings, and other aspects of the productionToonstar staffers swiftly incorporate them into updated artwork. In many ways, its not a radically different process than animation studios employed decades ago. But theres one crucial new element: The closer the show gets to completion, the more AI will perform much of the heavy lifting. Thats the not-so-secret ingredient at Toonstar, which Hollywood veterans John Attanasio and Luisa Huang cofounded in 2017 after working together at Warner Bros. As much a platform as a studio, it built two proprietary pieces of software that it uses in all its productions. One, Ink & Pixel, uses generative AI to produce much of the art thatonce upon a timewould have been handled entirely by humans with pencils and paintbrushes. The other, Spot, uses analytics to help the company figure out how to turn raw ideas into stories that people will actually watch. It sounds cliché, but its part art, part science, says Attanasio, Toonstars CEO. Even Frieds food went through multiple passes of human-rendered art before being generated by Toonstars Ink & Pixel software for the show. [Image: Courtesy of Toonstar] Now is as good a moment as any to confront an inescapable fact: Many in Hollywood are instinctively repelled by the very notion of mixing the art of entertainment with the science of AI. They regard it as robbing creative people of jobs and the work of its soul. The web is already bulging with AI slop that confirms their worst fears. But Fried, and other Toonstar properties such as StEvEn & Parker, belie AI-assisted medias sketchy reputation. Theyre hardly mass-produced: Frieds first season consists of just 12 eight-minute episodes. Theyre written by creators, not algorithms. Voices are recorded by actors in a studio (with some use of AI-synthesized dialog for purposes such as filling in pickup lines). Perhaps most important, the shows visual identities are their own, not LLM-produced offal. Judging from Frieds preliminary artI havent seen any final footageit will owe its greatest stylistic debt to hand-drawn TV animation of the Saturday morning sort, leavened with a dash of anime. Its undeniably true that tiny Toonstar, which employs just 20 people, is using AI to create more animation faster and with fewer staffers. The company sees its technological bent as reflecting a time-honored tradition for the medium, dating to when Walt Disney himself adopted innovations such as sound and Technicolor. The cartoon business also has a long history of shrinking headcounts to control costs, historically by offshoring much of the production to Asian studios as contract labor. Today, Hollywoods titans are ever-more skittish about gambling on properties that arent already household names. Toonstar argues that its efficiencieswhich include using YouTube as its primary streaming venuepermit it to take greater creative risks. Without the companys ability to do a lot with a little, something like Fried might never have gotten greenlit in the first place. In other words, Toonstars goals do not involve wringing the humanity out of its shows. Fundamentally, storytelling is a team effort, says COO Huang. Its about putting together a band. In this case, its one thats unafraid to use technology as an accelerant. [Image: Courtesy of Toonstar] YouTubeand beyond Backed by investors such as Founders Fund, Greycroft, and Snap, Toonstar has gone through several iterations of what it means to be a tech-forward cartoon maker. They have included using NFTs to let fans get involved in shaping stories. But its current modus operandi came into focus with StEvEn & Parker, the family-friendly saga of two silly young blond-haired brothers. Derived, like Fried, from the live-action bits of a social-media comedianTexas-based TikTok star Parker Jamesthe show became a bona-fide YouTube hitits in five languages, says Attanasio. Now, with 3.29 million subscribers, its a franchise capable of conquering other media. They include an upcoming smartphone game and, starting next spring, a graphic novel series from Random House. Distributing StEvEn & Parker on YouTube let it reach an audience without Toonstar needing to cut a deal with a megastreamer such as Netflix or HBO Max. Spinning off games and books gave the property a business model bigger than subsisting on YouTube ad revenue, though Attanasio stresses its making good money there. If the company could replicate that formula, it might end up with many multi-platform properties. Thats the blueprint, says Huang. With StEvEn & Parker as precedent, Toonstar grew even keener on identifying creators whose existing ideas held promise as fodder for new shows. Last June, it announced that it was teaming up with WME to find them. The giant talent agency has an incredible roster of digital creators, says Attanasio. They’ve also got an incredible roster of traditional writers and showrunners. And so the combination of that is really supercharging the creative pipeline and projects that are going to be coming. Fried is up first. The idea of cartoonifying Uncle Roger originated at Toonstar, but when WME brought it to Ngs attention, he was instantly amenable. I’ve always wanted to do something in the animation world with Uncle Roger, because I feel the character itself lends itself well to being in cartoon form, he says. So when they reached out, I was like, Oh, perfect. Like Toonstar, he saw potential for his character to become a business empire unto himself: Already, there are Uncle Roger restaurants in Malaysia. Variations on Uncle Roger, who ended up looking like his middle self from this triptych. [Image: Courtesy of Toonstar] Ng grew up watching cartoons. But he knew enough about animation to realize he didnt know that much about animation. So he studied up on its techniques. I watched a lot of these YouTube explainers, he recalls. I had to read what makes good character design, what makes bad character design. And then there’s that Disney handbook, the 12 rules of animation thing. Fortified with this crash course, he was ready to take an active hand in imagining the show. That was a major undertaking. After all, until now, Uncle Roger has basically been Ng wearing an orange polo shirt, ranting at cooking shows, and using catch phrases such as Haiyaa! and Fuiyoh! (His accent has occasionally led people to accuse Ng, who was born in Kuala Lumpur, of stereotyping, and was the subject of a scholarly paper.) On Fried, Uncle Roger has a rich backstory. Hes a restaurant owner. His ex-wife, Auntie Helenoft-referenced in Ngs comedyis not yet his ex; the show is set before they split. He has an arch-rival, fellow restaurateur Olivier. Theres a cat named Lucky. Eventually, all of these characters and the environments they inhabit will be rendered by AI, with human oversight and polishing. But first they had to be designed. Uncle Rogers restaurant, in preliminary sketch form. [Image: Courtesy of Toonstar] That involved a million little decisions. For instance: Should Uncle Rogers eyes have whites? (Nojust pupils.) Should his trademark polo cover his entire torso, or leave a skosh more of his pants visible? (The longer-shirt version made him look too much like a bell when he walked, says Huang.) How should the food look at Oliviers eatery? (Healthier than it does at Uncle Rogers place.) AI came in handy during these deliberations, because it let Ng and his collaborators quickly look at several options, even in animated form if it helped. At least when I spoke to Ng early in the production process, he claimed not to notice the technology playing much of a role. They either beam up some drawigs to the screen or they print it out for me, he explained. But he did find progress happening far quicker than hed experienced with another Uncle Roger project, a now-shelved live-action sitcom: That got optioned in 2021, and then wed do a draft a year. If Ng doesnt feel like theres a layer of AI between him and his show, thats kind of the point. With any luck, his experience will bolster Toonstars reputation among creators who start out skeptical about the companys process. We’re very artist-first and story-first, says Attanasio. Theres this compounding effect of creators like Nigel that won’t work with other AI tools or studios, but he’ll work with us. Even as Toonstar gets ready to release Fried, Attanasio and Huang say theyre poised to expand furtherand faster than they ever could sans AI. Another dozen shows are in various stages of production, with a couple dozen more in the pipeline. We have folks that we’re working with who are very interested in horror as a category, says Huang. Suspense thrillers are another. There’s young adult, maybe more female-led voices. Also on the horizon: distribution beyond YouTube, which could become another component of the companys multipronged business strategy. Already, three different streamers have inquired about the possibility of a longer-form StEvEn & Parker series. Whatever happens, entertainment is headed for a period of AI disruption, and Toonstar intends to lean into it. Depending on your frame of reference, the company could be the moments Disney, Hanna-Barbera, or Pixar. It will accept any of those comparisons. Yet even at its present scale, it has certain advantages that the iconic cartoon factories of yore couldnt have imagined. Historically, animation has taken a very long time to produce and it’s been very expensive, says Attanasio. Those have been the reasons why there hasn’t been as much produced as we believe there’s a market for. Theres an audience for more. There are more genres you can do. There’s just a lot more to be done.
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October is usually a month for innocent frights and fun scares, but for Bitcoin investors, this month has left many holding the token legitimately fearful. In the last 24 hours alone, the cryptocurrency king has lost nearly 7% of its value. Bitcoin is currently sitting at below $104,000 per token. Thats especially notable considering that the cryptocurrency hit an all-time high of more than $126,000 just 12 days ago. Heres what you need to know about Bitcoin’s most recent crash. Bitcoins tumultuous 2025 Bitcoin has been on a wild ride in 2025. The token began the year with considerable faith from investors, largely due to the incoming Trump administration, which clearly favored cryptocurrencies more than any other presidential administration before it. In the weeks surrounding Trumps inauguration, Bitcoin spiked, going from a January low of around $91,000 to above $106,000 on the day Trump was sworn in for his second term. But as Trumps Liberation Day tariffs loomed and roiled markets in March and April, Bitcoin slumped, reaching lows of nearly $76,000 at the beginning of April. Yet, into and over the summer, Bitcoin steadily rose. By August, it had hit a high of over $123,000, and by October 5 of this year, it had hit an all-time high of $126,198. Since that all-time high, the token’s value has been slidingand Bitcoins decline has accelerated in the past 24 hours. Whats behind this recent slide? There seem to be two main factors pulling the token lower recently. 2 events are weighing Bitcoin down This year has been no stranger to geopolitical uncertainty. Such uncertainty can negatively impact markets, including stocks, cryptocurrencies, and other financial assets. Throughout 2025, weve had the ongoing conflicts between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Hamas. These conflicts introduce uncertainty into the world, and if theres one thing investors hate, its uncertainty. But recently, another geopolitical uncertainty has arisen: This time, not from a physical conflict but from an economic one. Earlier this month, President Trump threatened to impose an additional 100% tariff on China after the country introduced new export controls on rare earth elementsminerals vital for industries such as technology and national security due to their importance in electronic devices. So far, neither Trump nor China has backed down, leading investors to fear that the two largest economies on the planet may yet again raise barriers against each other. These barriers could have severe negative knock-on financial effects for both countries. Besides the U.S.-China economic conflict, a second event seems to be weighing on Bitcoin. This one is domestic: the continuing U.S. government shutdown. The current shutdown has now lasted 17 days and counting. It began on October 1, with Republicans and Democrats being unable to reach an agreement on funding the federal government. One of the primary issues in the shutdown is the implementation of spending cuts. Republicans want to reduce spending on critical social services, while Democrats want to ensure that funding for healthcare subsidies is included. Like the ongoing U.S.-China economic conflict, the continuing U.S. government shutdown breeds uncertainty, which makes investors nervous. And nervous investors tend to sell, rather than buy, in order to lock in gains and hedge against potential further losses in the future. Gold seems to be the preferred safe-haven this time Paradoxically, investor uncertainty can sometimes benefit Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Thats because cryptocurrencies are sometimes viewed as safe-haven assets. These are assets that people turn to during times of economic uncertainty, which often sends traditional stock markets down. Howeverso far at leastthis time around, investors seem to have gone back into the arms of a more traditional safe-haven asset: gold. While Bitcoin is down more than 10% in the past month, the price of gold is up more than 18%. As gold rises, some investors who own cryptocurrency may choose to convert their digital token profits into physical gold. Over the past 24 hours, during which Bitcoin has fallen nearly 7%, gold has risen by over 1.1%. One ounce of gold is now worth $4,352nearly an all-time high. The precious metal is up over 9.4% in the last five days alone. During that time, Bitcoin has fallen more than 9%. Yet Bitcoin isnt the only cryptocurrency seeing steep losses in recent days. As of the time of this writing, other major cryptocurrencies are also down significantly in the past 24 hours, including Ethereum, which has fallen more than 8%, and BNB, which has fallen 11.5%.
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The fortunes of major quantum computing firms turned negative this week as share prices sankin some cases by double digits. The so-called Quantum Four publicly traded companiesRigetti Computing, IonQ, Quantum Computing Inc, and D-Wave Quantumsaw their stock prices tumble on Thursday. And as of this writing, all four companies are down even lower in premarket trading on Friday. Berkeley, California-based Rigetti (NASDAQ: RGTI) has seen the biggest drop, with its stock price falling almost 15% on Thursday, October 16. As of this writing, the stock was down another 7.65% during the premarket session. Shares of IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) were down by a similar amount on Thursday, although their 2.23% drop on Friday has not been quite as steep. Quantum Computing Inc (NASDAQ: QUBT) fell by 11.73% on Thursday, while D-Wave (NYSE: QBTS) was down 9.65%. Why are quantum computing stocks down? There doesn’t seem to have been any market-moving negative news specific to the quantum computing space. In fact, D-Wave had just announced on Wednesday a $12 million deal to bring its much-hyped Advantage2 computer to Italy. However, the broader stock market experienced shocks on Thursday after regional bank Zions Bancorporation accused some of its borrowers of fraud and warned that it would take a large loss, as the Wall Street Journal reported. This disclosure has sparked fears about the credit health of regional banks more broadly, and those fears appear to be spilling into the markets. Stock futures were all in retreat on Friday morning as investors continue to digest the news. In the meantime, some may be gravitating toward safe-haven assets like gold, which just set yet another record this week when it topped $4,300 per ounce. Quantum computing investors may be profit-taking All four of the major quantum computing firms have had enormous runs over the last 12 months, with shares of Rigetti soaring almost 5,000% over that period. With markets turning negative and troubling signals emerging from the banking sector, it’s natural that investors in quantum computing might be inclined to sell off some of their shares while profits are high. Although quantum computers are seen by many experts as a transformative technology that could reshape the industry, the space is still highly speculative, and some have argued that the stocks are currently overvalued. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
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E-Commerce
Hello again from Fast Company and thanks for reading Plugged In. Before I go any further, a bit of quick self-serving promotion: This week, we published our fifth annual Next Big Things in Tech list. Featuring 137 projects and people in 31 categories, its our guide to technologies that are already reshaping business and life in general, with plenty of headroom to go further in the years to come. None of them are the usual suspectsand many have largely flown under the radar. Take a look, and youll come away with some discoveries. Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote about Sora, OpenAIs new social network devoted wholly to generating and remixing 10-second synthetic videos. At the time of launch, the company said its guardrails prohibited the inclusion of living celebrities, but also declared that it didnt plan to police copyright violations unless owners explicitly opted out of granting permission. Consequently, the clips people shared were rife with familiar faces such as Pikachu and SpongeBob. Not surprisingly, that policy gave Hollywood fits. Quickly changing course, OpenAI tweaked its algorithm to reject prompts that clearly reference copyrighted IP. A handful of high-profile Sora members have used its Cameo feature to create shareable AI versions of themselves, including iJustine, Logan Paul, Mark Cuban, and OpenAIs own Sam Altman. Theyre everywhere on the service. But with other current celebs off the table, the Sora-obsessed turned to one of the few remaining available sources of cultural touchstones: dead people. That too has proven controversial. Most notably, the daughters of George Carlin, Martin Luther King Jr., Robin Williams, and Malcolm X have all decried the use of Sora to create synthetic videos of their fathers. Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad, wrote Zelda Williams on Instagram. If youve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. I am sympathetic to their angst. In 2021, a genealogy site called MyHeritage presaged the Sora era by launching a feature called Deep Nostalgia that let you turn old family photographs into brief videos. Out of curiosity, I uploaded a photo of a deceased relative. The moment I saw the results, I regretted having done so. Being constantly exposed to AI simulacrums of your parent created by random strangers must be agonizing. In response to concerns about bad-taste AI resurrections, OpenAI told The Washington Posts Tatum Hunter and Drew Harwell that it would allow representatives of the recently deceased to block Sora depictions. But the company didnt specify what it considered to be recent. Whatever its definition, its not going to make everyone happy. The aforementioned famous fathers died anywhere from 1965 (Malcolm X) to 2014 (Williams). They surely wont fall under a recency exception. Yet the old bit of wisdom tragedy plus time equals comedywhich apparently originated with another dead person, comedian Steve Allendoesnt always hold true. It depends on the context. Even more than a decade later, Robin Williamss death by suicide still feels like an incalculable tragedy. I have not run across any videos of him on Sora, and would prefer I never do. But I dont feel the same way about Queen Elizabeth II, who made it to 96 and was spry until her 2022 passing. Actually, I thoroughly enjoyed a jag of Sora remixes that began with a clip of her praising the cheese puffs at Costco (delightfully orange) and went on to show her relishing other delicacies in various venues around the world. Some of these clips made me LOL, not figuratively but literally. In fact, the only reason I peruse Sora at all is because an overwhelming percentage of the items in my feed are fanciful and at least aspirationally funny. AI slop of the sort that striveshowever clumsilyfor realism is scarce on the service. The same is hardly true on other social networks such as Facebook and TikTok, which are infested with machine-generated kindhearted celebrities and cute animals. Im not saying that Sora is consistently riotous. Ive scrolled through a lot of videos of MLKand Mister Rogers, Bob Ross, and othersin which the only point is that theyre mouthing some anodyne term they wouldnt have used, or talking about Sora itself. That gets tiresome fast, and makes me at least slightly queasy. It might even be slop. Its just not the sum total of Sora. I have not been above making my own Sora videos depicting the departed. Inspired by the fact that Orson Welles once recorded a radio commercial for frozen peas, I prompted for a video depicting him filming such an ad. It came out entertaining, in part because Soras version of Welles reminded me of the late John Candys wonderful impression of him. Other users remixed the clip into ones showing Welles endorsing everything from twine to camp chairs, starring less and less convincing approximations of the legendary actor-director. Maybe you had to be there. But I found it to be a rewarding if minor act of collaborative creativity, not a regrettable coarsening of the internet. All in all, encouraging people to channel their AI-video-generating energy into clips that are playful, genuinely social, and cordoned off from reality, as Sora does, seems like a positive development to me. Still, I try to show grace toward the feelings of others and would accept more restrictive policies on the use of deceased celebrities. Maybe the service could permit them only if nobody alive ever met the person in question. Cleopatra and Abraham Lincln would pass that test; Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein would not. (Thats before you get to the fact that the estates of some celebrities have deals with licensing companies that probably arent thrilled with Soras unauthorized use, such as CMG Worldwide, which represents the Monroe and Einstein estates.) If nothing else, building new guardrails around specific categories of famed individuals no longer with us would be an interesting challenge for some engineer at OpenAI. I cant see the company investing much effort in it. But in a strange way, its done the world a favor by forcing us to confront questions like this while the stakes remain relatively low. AI is only going to get better at deepfaking people, famous and otherwise. Better to figure out how we feel about that now, before the synthetic dead folks are truly indistinguishable from the real thing. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company Inside Microsoft’s quest to make Windows 11’s AI irresistibleExecutives with a combined 130+ years of tenure on the company’s decades of work to get people to talk to their PCsand why the time might finally be right. Read More Billionaire investor Frank McCourt is not giving up on his dream of acquiring TikTokThe financier says he wants a closer look at the Trump deal for the wildly popular social-media platform. Read More Goodbye, SEO. Hello, GEOHow AI search is rewriting digital strategy. Read More How kids are getting around classroom phone bans‘Kids will always find a way, but honestly, the creativity involved is a skill worth developing,’ one teacher commented. Read More This addictive game is like ‘SimCity’ but for transit nerdsThe goal of ‘Subway Builder’ is to move people from A to B. Some believe it might just start a transit revolution in the process. Read More 5 time-saving Google Calendar tricks you should be usingMake your calendar work for you, not the other way around. Read More
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