How, in practical terms, do you propose they charge you by weight for an unknown weight of something that isn’t there? It’s not anything like charging you for an extra one of something that’s sold as a discrete item.
Clearly harder than I had hoped.
How much did this asparagus cost? I’m not so sure that it’s (necessarily) done to maximize profits, as much as just easier to harvest that way. They could of course trim it and charge more, although at some point the price will scare away some shoppers.
Here it’s usually $4.99 per pound, and almost always pre-packaged in a one pound bundle. I even weighed the bundles once just to check and they really were 1 lb. each. Sometimes it’s a buck more, sometimes a buck less. This is for the skinnier asparagus, I don’t like fat American asparagus, although I love the super fat, pornographic looking German albino asparagus. When we get this my wife will sometimes peel some of the stalk*, although asparagus will break off naturally about 1/3 of the way up, normally.
*I’m way too lazy to peel asparagus, so if it’s just left to me it will be broken but unpeeled.
The Chinese supermarkets around here often sell lychees and longans attached to actual twigs! Anyone have a good recipe for lychee twig soup?
(The universal practice seems to be to break off any truly egregious amounts of twig before purchasing.)
Hell, around here they sell oysters in these inedible shells. It’s makes a mess, but I just remove the shell and stick the oysters in one of those plastic bags. I mean what am I supposed to do, put the shells in a blender and make dip?
Ok, I am curious why people think that chopping the filler off asparagus is stealing but egg-swapping and banana splitting isn’t?
A) Asparagus grower has product with filler, tells the market this is what you get for that price, don’t like it, go somewhere else.
B) Banana grower sells bunches of six banana, half are already over-ripe, tells the market this is what you get for that price, don’t like it, go somewhere else.
C) Egg farmer has packages of dozen eggs, half are cracked, tells the market this is what you get for that price, don’t like it, go somewhere else.
A) Market puts up asparagus with filler, tells Gruntled this is what you get for that price, don’t like it, go somewhere else.
B) Market now sells bunches of six banana, half are already over-ripe, tells **D_Odds **this is what you get for that price, don’t like it, go somewhere else.
C) Market now has dozen eggs, half are cracked, tells **D_Odds **this is what you get for that price, don’t like it, go somewhere else.
A) **Gruntled **removes the “bad part” giving him all good asparagus for the 50% good asparagus price. This leaves the bad part for the market to sell, but they probably won’t.
B) **D_Odds **removes the “bad bananas” Now the bunch costs half as much. This leaves the over-ripe ones for the market to sell, but they might not. (I know some people like the over ripe ones, I am just saying.)
C) **D_Odds **shuffles the bad eggs into one container so they have all good eggs in their container. This leaves a carton of bad eggs for the market to try and sell.
How are any of the cases above different? The product was secured in a certain condition for a certain price by the market. It was then offered for sale in a certain configuration for a certain price. Why is it not ok for **Gruntled **to manipulate the product in such a way that they get what they want for the price they want, but it is ok for **D_Odds **to do so?
The difference is that it is not offered for sale in a certain configuration in the bananas example. Bananas are displayed and the customer is told to take as many as he or she wants, and have them weighed. That they are in bunches does not mean it is the only way they can be sold. What you may not do, however, is chop a banana in half and pay for only that. The unit of sale is a banana, whereas with asparagus it is a bunch.
Similarly, with the eggs, the unit is a dozen whole eggs. If the carton contains broken eggs, it is a faulty product. If the store has a sign up saying “Eggs sold as is, no exchanges” then you would be stealing if you swapped eggs from one carton to another. But purchasing a dozen eggs with a broken egg in there is a similar situation to buying a six pack of beer where one can has a hole in it. You are not getting the product for which you are paying. With a bunch of asparagus, the product includes the woody ends. By cutting them off you are getting a different product to that for which you are being charged. Hence it is ‘stealing.’
Because your basis for believing they are the same is wrong.
I can guarantee that the egg farmer doesn’t have a contract with the supermarket saying he can deliberately include broken eggs instead of making a reasonable effort to provide the product he said he’d provide: intact eggs.
In preview, what Villa said.
For the same reason that when one buys meat on the bone, one is paying for the bone (and why the same cut of meat de-boned is often more expensive). The bone factors into the cost per pound. With asparagus, the stems factor into the cost per pound.
In banana splitting, you are not depriving a store of sales (assuming all the bananas are equally ripe). You are taking what you need and leaving behind a salable product. If you peeled the bananas and only had them weigh the flesh, that would be similar to the asparagus chopping, as the skin factors into the cost per pound. Removing a bad banana from a bunch is the same as refusing to take a wormy apple, just because it was on top of the pile.
With the eggs, you are actually helping out the market by consolidating. That way, instead of having two bad packages, they only have one. Most people, myself included 98% of the time, just put back a package with a cracked egg and move to the next. Markets do not expect to sell defective products (although some try).
In days past, some people would tear a carton of 12 eggs in half, because they only wanted 6. Some stores were OK with this, others weren’t. Doesn’t work well today with most large markets using scanners. The bar code will ring up for the dozen regardless of how many eggs are present.
It’s not stealing if the spears were priced as a a bunch. I see the quick trim of stems a lot like leaving corn husks behind I guess trimming up other food items should be ok too. But it is a little inconsiderate as a shopper to leave behind your food waste.
At the risk of wrath, I am going to side with the OP somewhat.
Yes, it was wrong.
Yes, while not theft…is fraud.
However, if you have a store playing games…that is…sells something by the pound but adds an unduly amount of fluff to it…I can see the desire to say ‘fuck you’ to the store and do as the OP did.
I wouldn’t do it and, if the store did this often, would not shop there anymore. However, the store shouldn’t be engaging in this dishonest practice and stop trying to pad profits by adding crap to the price per pound.
So…put me on the side of what the OP did was wrong but if I was on the jury would be sympathetic. 
Oh…and as to grapes in a general bin…I WAS accused of stealing by a store employee by removing a bad stock…he felt I should buy the bad grapes with the good ones. Screw that…never shopped there again. (small mom and pop store)
Also, the ends are edible. I eat them all the time. They’re good. You just have to cook them a little longer but they become soft pretty quickly in a steamer or boiled. Wrap some bacon around that and you have a snack you can fool yourself into thinking is healthy! 
They aren’t padding anything. They buy it like that, by the pound, so they sell it like that, by the pound. If you want it pre-trimmed you can get it but you’ll pay more. The price is adjusted so that it works out to roughly the same per pound of usable asparagus. It’s no more dishonest than selling a bone-in ribeye.
I just walked out in my store and checked that, at an average price of $1.99, it worked out to about 50¢. Might not seem like much, but keep in mind, someone has to pay for that and it’s not going to be me. It’ll get passed along to the customer. (By that I mean, if enough people are doing that, it’ll effect our bottom line and we’ll have to mark things up higher to account for the shrinkage.)
So you own or manage a grocery store then? What is your opinion of the asparagus hacking? Have you ever had anyone do this in your store? Would you have me arrested?
Hmmmm
Things to do:
Skin the chicken in the store, and debone it, and remove the spine (like the Predator).
Nah, they’d probably get mad
Can’t they just weigh you on the way in and weigh you on the way out then charge you for the difference? And if you weigh less they can charge a fee for gym membership because you did lose weight walking their aisles, pushing their carts and lifting their products.
That’s what she said!
We’ve established for the eleventeenth time that that was not the case.
How exactly would they add woody stems to asparagus spears? Superglue? Why are you justified in destroying their property? Why not just buy asparagus elsewhere?
If I saw someone cutting the bottom of the asparagus off, I’d charge them for it, if I caught them doing it more then once I’d ask them to shop elsewhere. ---- I just weighed some asparagus, it’s about a pound in a bunch. Today grass is $1.49 a pound, so you’d probably be lopping off about 50¢, but $1.49 is cheap for asparagus, it tends to hover closer to $1.99 to $2.99 a pound.
Now that I think about it, the grapes, the grass, about the same cost. I think the reason that the asparagus would bug me more is a)I can SEE the waste, it’s sitting right there, I have to go out in the store and throw away my own money, as opposed to the grapes where I might not even notice it happening and b)with the grapes, I might notice you eat one here, one there but with the asparagus, it’s the whole 50¢ all at once-gone.
Oh, and arrested, no, probably not unless it really became a problem. I’d ask you to stop doing it, if I you continued to do it time after time after time I’d ask you to shop elsewhere, if after that you still came in and did it, I’d ask you one final time to not come in to my store any more and after that I’d could have you arrested for trespassing…but I really don’t think it would come down to that, though I have had people arrested for stupider things. In reality, we’d probably just keep an eye on you when you were in the store and make sure that if you bought asparagus you purchased the entire bunch and the only way the cops would be involved is if you became loud or potentially violent when asked not to cut the bunches apart (which does happen, some people are wound just a little too tight).
ETA, I just checked our profit margin on the asparagus, if you lopped off 50¢ from $1.49 bunch of asparagus, not only would we not be making money, we’d be paying you a few cents to buy the rest of it.
ETA, for the record, when we buy (for example) asparagus, to decide on the price we first do [cost]/[weight] which gives us the price per pound and then we go from there, when we sell asparagus tips, first we trim them, then we re-weight whats left and re-calculate our cost. So yeah, the whole asparagus might cost (for example) $1.00 per pound and we sell it for $1.49/lb which is about a 33% margin, when you cut off (let’s say) a third of the bunch based on 33% we should be selling it for about $2.19 a pound, but when you still buy it for $1.49 you change the margin to 0%. (BTW it’s a coincidence that you cut off exactly the profit, it’s just the way the example worked out, I was just trying to show the change in the margin)
good one
Okay, I’m having a hard time parsing this, but, the reason you can split a bunch of bananas is because the rest of them WILL sell. We sell probably 15 cases of bananas a day, we throw away maybe 2 individual bananas a month. There are always people who just want one or two bananas, there will always be people that like their bananas a little riper or a little greener and these are the people that will take the ones that the other people left behind…I’ve never had someone come into my store and ask me for just the bottom half of the asparagus.
Also, you’re argument is flawed, it assume that ALL asparagus has in-edible bottoms, ALL bunches of bananas have half the bunch overripe and ALL egg cartons have 6 broken eggs. I’ll give you the asparagus, but a bunch of bananas with half of it being overripe doesn’t really happen, they tend to be the same stage, and like I said before, you can rip apart the bunches, it’s rare for someone else not to buy the rest. Same thing for eggs. If half the eggs in every single carton were broken, I could understand the grocer not being very happy if you started arranging them. But that would only be because he almost for sure got a discount on the entire lot and he’s probably selling them for a considerably cheaper price then they would normally be sold at on the basis of them being in such poor condition. But that typically isn’t the case, since it’s more likely that one egg may be broken in one out of 10 cartons, you can just set it down and pick up a different one. Yes, in this case, it’s the grocers problem, not yours.