Prices are still quite seasonal in Aus. Celery isn’t that price all year. For produce, I’ve always thought that not having access to cheap Mexican / North African produce must have an effect on prices: I can’t imagine paying French prices for strawberries while having to pay Aus labour costs. (Or perhaps that’s the effect of farming subsidies). More generally, Aus exists on mining revenues: It’s helpful (though not particularly accurate) to think of us as all rich people living in an expensive place.
I agree with elbows macaroni.
Are you sure that was a mistake? Maybe the store believes that people buy multi-packs without even thinking about it because they’ve been trained to believe they are always the better buy.
Or some other reason. I claim no especial knowledge or even insight about this. I’m just cynical enough to think it probably wasn’t a mistake but I don’t know for sure what the angle is.
Alternately, this can happen because the store moves enough units of the smaller product that they get a bulk discount from the manufacturer, for a better price than the 4-pack. At the grocery store where I work, 16-count packages of Kraft singles are usually cheaper than the 12-count package for that very reason.
Those are minimum weights, and like 99.9% weigh over that amount, some significantly more
I saw pricing yesterday that struck me as odd too. Ears of sweet corn, with leaves still on were 3 for a dollar. Or you could get eight ears without leaves and the ends trimmed, placed on a tray, and wrapped in plastic for $7. I know there’s always a mark up for corn that has been peeled and detassled, but I’ve never seen a price gap nearly that large before.
I have to pay more for unpeeled ears of or corn. I think it’s a specialist item here.
The scenario I see is this:
I believe large distributors/packers buy out entire crops well ahead of time, estimating the crop yield. As the OP stated, celery prices are seasonal, with the current crop going for a premium.
What may have happened is much of the crop wasn’t market grade (i.e. nice and presentable) and the packer had to trim down a large amount of the stalks to sell as pre-cut. Since produce is highly perishable, the markets will only buy X amount of packages. So the packer adds additional product to their packages to be able to sell those X amount of packages to the markets.
As discussed in another thread, selling and even giving away ‘ugly’ produce isn’t as easy as people may think since they have a finite shelf life. Also, from a business standpoint, writing off losses isn’t as easy and advantageous as it seem. It’s often better to sell a product for less, adding some profit to the bottom line versus showing a loss.
A similar situation may occur with the corn mentioned above. Those pretty, packaged cobs were the ugly ones that weren’t pretty enough to sell at a premium or were older cobs.
While sliced/wrapped produce is usually sold at a premium, sometimes it just has to be priced to move. At my local market, the best time to find bargains on produce is early in the morning, just after they open. The produce people are culling the produce that’s still good, but by the end of the day may not be so “fresh” and often is sold at a much lower price to get if off the shelf/bins.
When you see that nicely sliced and wrapped cantaloupe or melon on the shelf, try and find it’s matching half. You usually won’t, because the other half may be bruised or otherwise imperfect. Some produce people will even slice it up the good part and give it out as samples if you see them.
For meats, if you hit the bargain section later in the evening, say around 7-8pm, you’ll likely see meats that were selling for full price just an hour or two ago, marked down. Ground and sliced meats are usually marked down the most because of the large exposed area, they’ll turn brown (though still perfectly good) quicker.
IME, corn is one of those things that a higher price is indicative of lower quality.
Whole ears at the supermarket selling for 3 ears for $2 is pretty much inedible. If it gets down to $1 for three ears, it’s much better. The best corn will be 5 or 6 ears for a dollar.
And, yes, those prepackaged ears with the tassels removed and peeled are peeled specifically because the husks have turned brown and the tassels are matted. I suspect that at my local market at least, the cost has to cover the labor of the store employees processing the old ears, which is why they are more expensive.
In America, they have scales all over the produce dept. Did you try weighing them to compare and confirm?
I put a pre-packaged container of chicken thighs through the self checkout at the same chain the other day, it was rejected when I bagged it. The assistant came over, sighed, said “it’s probably the wrong weight”, even though it was labelled 1.238 kg it was over 1.5kg. Apparently it happens a lot even though it is all packed off site and has precise weights shown. Nobody really noticed before self checkouts that hate things being the wrong weight.
Coles has sloppy suppliers.
Heh. In our supermarket if a consumer peels the ears herself at the bin, she gets charged more. I think that is to keep people from rejecting peeled ears they don’t like.
For us, I think the increase in price for packaged, peeled corn comes from some places which only have that type as an expensive delicacy. Not just corn - we went to a grocery in Aruba where the peppers were shrink wrapped and expensive.
That’s a measure of freshness and season, and so correct- the best corn is **FRESH!!! **and that happens best when it’s at the height of the seans when it’s cheapest and freshest.
The sugars in corn start turning into starch immediately after picking, so the longer it’s been off the stalk, the less sweet it will be. So green husks and silk are indications they’re fresh. Even sitting in the fridge a day or two will change change its sweetness level.
Also, because they’re in abundance in season, local produce, especially fruits will be cheaper during peak season. For example, yesterday, I saw local watermelon at $0.99/lb. Not only do I know that’s it too early for good watermelon, but during summer, it will drop to half the price and then I’ll know to buy it because it will be in peak season and at its best.
I keep an eye on the price at various markets and wait until they all start lowering their prices at the same time, which means the supply and season is hitting its peak.
Perhaps I missed it upthread somewhere but did you think of just asking the store or produce manager?
This is definitely something to be concerned about with respect to eggs. The 18-packs of eggs are not always a better deal in my local store than the 12-packs; it’s likely a function of what supply of each is like and what they need to sell more of before it goes bad, whether we’re talking the distributor or the grocer.
I re-read the OP’s post and realized the trimmed celery was the item in question. However, the premise I posited above probably still holds true.
Due to a bad celery crop that required more product that required trimming and only X number of bags the markets will accept, they chose to make the trimmed bags hold more rather than having it got to waste/write off. This is exacerbated by the fact that trimmed celery will dry out and spoil quicker an untrimmed stalk.
Also, as far as the logical choice being purchasing the whole product, that’s not true for everyone. A few reasons I don’t usually buy the whole untrimmed product:
If I’m not planning to use it for cooking, I don’t want the leaves, only the stalks.
I only want enough celery that I know I’ll use and not let let the rot forgotten in the fridge.
If I’m planning to eat it raw, I find the darker green outer stalks to be tougher and stringier than the inner ones. At my markets, the trimmed bunches tend to have the outer stalks removed, probably due to damage or lack of appearance.
Some people like to shop more often for fresh produce and meats, even though it may have been sitting on the market’s shelf/fridge for a day or two. At least it’s not from their fridge, but directly from the market.
My second sister is like the last situation I posted above. Decades ago, she heard/read that certain cooked foods shouldn’t be kept more than three days in the fridge for safety reasons. She took that “certain cooked foods” to mean ALL food, cooked or not. Buy a stalk of celery, toss it out after three days, even if it’s still perfectly fine. Ice cream? No good after three days. Milk? It doesn’t matter what the expiration date says, no good after three days.
Honestly, at the time I had no idea that the concept of these things being a centrally-distributed item (ie, nobody in the store has any choice over the packaging or price, or any clue about why decisions were made) would be that controversial!
Anyway, I did go shopping again today, and I had a nice little chat with a dude who was putting out stuff on the displays and he confirmed that, yes, this stuff comes in on a truck in a big box, just like all the other bagged items.
And then I said to him ‘so, don’t you think its odd that this thing is twice the size as this other thing but it says they weigh the same?’ at which point I got an earnest explanation of the fact that, you know, the reason why they chop off the tops of the celery is that a lot of people don’t really want the top bit with all the leaves :smack: (which is pretty much how I suspected the conversation would go)
This is my little pretty pic of the two bags side by side BTW
Well, like I said, I weighed mine when I got it home.
Anyway, today I did have more of a poke around, and I weighed a half a dozen ‘300g’ bags (For Science!!) and they were all over 600, except when I went deliberately hunting for the thinnest weediest outlier of the lot (out of a few dozen bags) which was about 450.
Yeah, that is weird. Someone forgot to tare off a scale at the chicken factory?
Anyway, the take home message in my instance might be “it’s dumb to try to put a per-weight indicator on what’s clearly a per-each item” because you end up leaving so much of a margin for error as to make the number meaningless. They might as well say “over 0 grams” - it would be just as informative!
I ended up dropping a dime on them to Choice Magazine’s Unit Pricing Fails campaign which happens to be running at the moment. Because non-informative ‘information’ really grinds my gears. We’ll see what the result is
So I looked (vic.aus), and found 3 kinds of celery: bunch, packaged, and trimmed.
The bunches were sold ‘for each’, and did not have a weight.
The packaged were trimmed at the top, and weighed around 600g
The ‘trimmed’ were cut down to to sticks around 8’’, labeled 300g, and weighed around 450g
Perhaps the “weight” on the long packages I examined was taken to mean net weight? Because if you trimmed aggressively to get 8" sticks, you’d get about the same weight as if you bought the sticks?
The packaging was different, because the products were different lengths with different product names. And 450g on a 300g product is very generous, but I think we can accept that nobody other than me was looking at the weight: fresh celery is bought by volume.