peppers
I have found conclusive proof that the world has gone mad. Yesterday, I called into Asda to buy a few vegetables. Specifically, I needed some peppers. Careful study of the fruit & veg display revealed Asda were offering a pack of three peppers for £1.28, or a bag of five peppers for £0.78.
The bags of five peppers were labelled “Asda Smart Price Peppers”. I half expected the other pack to be labelled “Asda Silly Price Peppers”. For the life of me, I could not work out the reason for the ridiculous price differential. The two sets of peppers looked pretty much the same. The cheaper ones weren’t manky or mouldy or anything like that. They were perfectly good peppers.
Then I noticed that the cheaper pack was described as containing “unsized” peppers. Looking at the expensive pack, I noticed that all three peppers were the same size and shape. In fact, all the packs of three had almost identically sized peppers. The bag of five, on the other hand, had a variety of shapes and sizes. So you pay extra to get all your peppers the same size. Twenty-seven pence extra per pepper! An uplift of 173% over the price of the unsized pepper. Wow.
Now, I may be missing something, but I can think of no reason on earth why you would need all your peppers to be the same size. Yet people were actually buying the more expensive pack! Yes, really.
So you see. The world is demonstrably absolutely bonkers.
David says:
This sort of thing was featured on a telly programme several weeks ago [I think it may have been called “The Truth About Supermarkets”, or something like that]. Apparently the British are particularly fussy about the shape and general appearance of their fruit and veg, and are more than willing to pay over the odds for the priviledge; on the continent they’re more than happy to purchase irregularly-shaped peppers et al, and only when they’re in season. We want nice-looking things, all year round, and don’t care if they’re competely lacking in any kind of tastiness. Not to mention the 30% rejection-rate of food that’s not up to our extreme standards [most of it goes back into farmyard food, although we were shown mounds of rotting “unsightly” potatoes]. As you say, bonkers.
David spoke at 09:46 UTC on August 31st, 2005 link
Blue Witch says:
I was about to say exactly what David did!
The line is now, I believe, “And the public get what Mr Tesco/Sainsbury/Asda wants” rather than, “And the public get what the public want”.
Blue Witch spoke at 13:02 UTC on August 31st, 2005 link
Richard says:
Actually, my mother used to work for a company that grew salad stuff for various supermarkets. She told me that Tesco require their cucumbers to be delivered at 12 degrees celsius. But, as they are harvested in the summer, when they come off the fields they are a lot warmer than this. So the cucumbers have to be cooled. And because Tesco want them delivered as soon as possible after the harvest, they have to be cooled quickly. But if you cool them too quickly they go mushy.
You can just imagine how many cucumbers are binned whenever this process goes slightly wrong. Absolutely bonkers.
Richard spoke at 14:09 UTC on August 31st, 2005 link
Blue Witch says:
Easy solution - boycot supermarket fruit and veg.
Ah problem - the likes of Tesco have caused all the greengrocers to close…
Blue Witch spoke at 15:44 UTC on September 1st, 2005 link
Jann says:
And the irony is that the producers (Spain, France etc) get to keep all the best stuff for themselves while selling on all the tasteless crap to us at hugely over-inflated prices and then rubbing their hands at the triple-whammy of their enormous farming subsidies. Subsidies which British farmers spend on pink diesel, Agas and dogs called mitzy.
Actually, I’m not so sure this is irony in the true sense of the word. More the Alan Morris sense. Rain on your wedding day’s just bad luck or poor planning, surely?
Jann spoke at 15:53 UTC on September 2nd, 2005 link