NEW YORK, NY — Buy-now-pay-later platform Klarna informed investors Tuesday that roughly one in three Thanksgiving turkeys sold in the United States this year will be financed across four interest-free installments, a figure the company appears to have sourced primarily from Klarna.
The 14-slide deck, distributed via a 6:42 a.m. press release titled Democratizing the Center of the Plate, notes that the average $34 Butterball now amortizes over six weeks — meaning the final payment posts roughly four days before Christmas, by which point the bird is past tense.
“I rang up a 16-pound Honeysuckle for a guy who paid the first nine bucks with a debit card and the rest with his face,” said Marcus Petrillo, an assistant manager at a Wegmans in Parsippany, referring to Affirm’s facial-recognition checkout pilot. “He told me his fiancée didn’t know. I told him neither did I. He started crying in produce.”
Klarna projects that 4.1% of turkey installments will go delinquent by mid-January, at which point the company’s standard penalty APR of 33.99% applies to what is, mathematically, a Tupperware of sandwich meat.
Competitor Affirm responded within hours by announcing a partnership with HoneyBaked Ham allowing customers to split a spiral-cut over 12 months — 0% for prime credit, 28.99% for everyone else, and a hard credit pull triggered by adding the pineapple glaze. Sezzle, which is smaller and angrier, simply tweeted “we do mashed potatoes.”
Inside Klarna’s Flatiron office, where employees received a half-day Tuesday to “lean into the holiday narrative,” a 23-year-old growth associate named Hadley was overheard on a Zoom explaining to a vendor that the company’s mission was “meeting Americans where they eat.” The vendor, who sells dunnage trays, said he understood completely.
Asked whether financing a perishable protein over a duration exceeding its USDA shelf life represented a sound consumer-credit product, a Klarna spokesperson declined to comment on the record but did forward a GIF of a turkey wearing aviators.
The deck closes with a forward-looking slide projecting that by Q4 2027, Klarna expects to be financing 18% of Christmas Eve communion wafers, 22% of Easter ham, and “a meaningful share” of the cheese cube tray at a wake.