Why.
Why must all fruit in stores have a nasty stickum label on it now? I loathe them with every cell in my body. Picking pieces of plastic film out of my salad or cereal or teeth is not a gustatory enhancement. If I remember and have time, I peel them all off when I unpack fruit from the store, but if you peel them off even half-ripe pears you tear the skin, which starts a spoilage spot.
The why is a mystery to me. The only possible use is for a checkout clerk who can’t tell Boscs from D’Anjous or Black Twigs from Winter Bananas. The tiny print can’t be aimed at the consumer except by marketing morons.
It is one of the reasons I shop at farmers markets and roadside farm stands; they have no label machines.
I suspect that’s why. That and “brand identity”, which of course is pursued with messianic fervour by those in marketing. Presumably that is why, say, Dole bananas have a sticker proclaiming their provenance even when they are the only bananas on offer.
I remember them starting on bananas by Chiquita, who was in the midst of a gigantic branding campaign. The stickers had the country of origin on them and it was fun to look at the bananas and see all the places they came from. They’ve ridden that forever and Chiquita country stickers are now an iconic part of their marketing.
What works for one company will be copied by others. But what really sells it is that the stickers now contain the four digit code for the exact type of fruit that can be typed in to get an exact price from the computer. That’s the tiny print that is supremely important. If you shave off even a few seconds from every customer you move more people through and shortern the wait in lines and need to pay fewer clerks. That’s big money.
There’s also the price difference between very similar looking fruit. Look at a Winesap compared to a McIntosh. Or a Pippin/Granny Smith pairing.
I remember when the clerk had to check a pictorial chart to identify the produce.
Yeah that, and let’s face it, cashiers used to be career jobs for mostly middle aged women. Now you usually see teenaged girls who wouldn’t know a mango from a pomegranate even with pictures. I’m not sure I would either.
Can I add to the complaints, finding the indestructible plastic stickers in your compost? Grr…
Sure would be nice if the industry moved to biodegradable paper stickers. I mean, if the paper has been in bad conditions long enough to rot, maybe the fruit isn’t in shape to sell, either?
This is a legitimate observation. Whether human beings can be expected to recognize the differences between fruit varieties or not, the automated checkout machine needs a number, and it is much more convenient for the customer if it’s a barcode on the item rather than a manual lookup. And automated checkouts save the supermarket chain having to have a checker at all (or will, once people get used to the system, and all the kinks get worked out so an employee doesn’t have to monitor the things, or at least not as actively).
Exactly. Some stores I go to have the exact same produce in “organic” and non-organic-labeled varieties. Also, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had celery root, rutabaga, and turnips confused for each other.
I griped about this too awhile back but was informed that I was holding up the progress train.
I don’t see much in the way of organic apples that are the exact same variety as non-organic apples, nor are different types of apples priced differently at the supermarket in common experience. So the necessity for such labeling is not quite so obvious. It does aid tracking of consumer preference, and as we all know such tracking is vitally important to supermarkets which have loyalty cards for this purpose, so that they can raise prices while giving a “discount” or “bonus” to card holders.
We might also ask why it is that organic produce is so much more expensive than the narsty chemical kind and what actual benefits it offers, but that’s another thread.
You have a very different supermarket experience than I do. And the rest of the country.
OTOH, I don’t normally see bonus card sales on produce. Stores probably are tracking your fruit purchases but that is about 90th on the list of reasons.
Look up economy of scale. You don’t even need to get into any other argument.
I daresay that neither the checkout clerk nor you can reliably and consistently tell a Fuji from a Honeycrisp from a Gala from a Braeburn apple. With the great variety of similar looking produce and the great variety of unusual (not often encountered by most people) produce available in most grocery stores, it’s simply not realistic to expect a cashier to be able to identify everything. Putting the numerical stickers on the items solves a lot more problems than it causes.
