I cannot stand those damn little labels either. I don’t know how many times I’ve cut up a bell pepper into thin strips to find out I also cut the label into thin strips, still clinging tightly to the pepper. And even when I happen to remember to check and peel the label off beforehand, sometimes it’s stuck so fiercely you need to take off the skin of the produce underneath it.
That’s odd. Here, leaving aside organic produce, apples of different varieties are usually priced differently. Are you saying that where you’re at, a Gala, a Fuji, a Honeycrisp, a McIntosh, and a Cortland would all be priced the same? Most places I shop at have a range of prices for the apples, depending on the type. And then if there’s organic versions of those, they carry even another premium.
yeah. exactly.
At one place we shop at, they will typically have at least 6 varieties of regular Red Delicious apples. (Sadly, the Washington ones are the worst of the lot.) Plus several organic types.
This time of year, there’s something on the order of 30 different orange varieties.
Plus a bunch of sweet potato types. And then there’s so many onions …
At one market, they usually don’t have labels on the Asian pears. And so they tend to ring it up as one of the more expensive ones. We catch it, the manager gets called, we wait, eventually the price gets fixed. If they labeled them, we could save a recurring hassle.
Never had a problem peeling off a sticker.
I don’t get this at all. Of course supermarkets look to shorten through time and eliminate checkout jobs. And McDonalds tries to shorten wait times in the drive-throughs and the DMV - really, truly - tries to shorten lines for licenses. Every business, private sector or government, is maniacally working to cut wait times. That’s a preoccupation of all management everywhere. There are whole industries devoted to specialized equipment and time management studies to reduce every possible second of waiting. There are tons of trade magazines for every industry that are filled with articles about this.
Is it really not like that on your planet? Or are you just so young that you have no memories of longer lines? I’m old. Everything is faster today. Supermarkets, McDonalds, the DMV. Guaranteed.
Actually, for all produce, the USDA, (I believe–not sure of the agency), requires that each product be identified by country of origin. This can either be a sign over the bin, (meaning the store is prohibited from mixing batches from separate countries), or it may be on the sticker.
The stickers are an easy way to place the PLU (product look-up) number, so that each item is scanned at the correct price and identity. This eliminates the need to spend hours training new cashiers, (who tend to be hired in batches as schools open up or let out), as well as allowing the company data systems to track sales more effectively.
PLUs are standardized so that a standard sized navel orange (3108) can be distinguished from a large navel orange (4012) or a standard sized Valencia orange (3107), regardless of the store or chain.
I think it’s all marketing and branding. We recently did a cross-promotion with a local supermarket chain and the movie “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2” in which we made little fruit stickers with the “Foodimals” characters from movie on them. Strictly marketing.
Tom is talking about Country of Origin Labeling, which went into effect in the past decade. It’s now law and not just marketing. It was only marketing when Chiquita started this decades ago. Back then you didn’t see these labels on other produce which is what made them distinctive and effective.
I notice that most fruit labels are bar-coded. OK, I can see why that might be needed for modern fruit-processing machinery.
But why is it that with avocados, the stickers are almost always right where you need to cut, along the same longitudinal line as the stem?
Perversity of the inanimate, that’s why.
Although, to be honest, I’ve never been bothered by the fruit stickers. I have not found them a trial to remove and since I don’t remember a time before them, the habit of giving produce a quick once over before slicing or whatever is pretty deeply ingrained.
I dont understand how it could be different. Any point on the surface may be intersected by a line running direct from stem to blossom end.
For the poor cashiers who have to know and recognize every produce product, there’s an added complication in some stores: They may sell “day-old” produce (that is, stuff past its prime) at a reduced price. Thus, you might have 4011’s (bananas) but also “day-old” bananas. There is no separate PLU for those.
One custom cash register project I did involved writing an add-on module that would support this. If the store manager had 4011 in the PLU table, but then added an entry 4011-A, the cashier could simply ring up 4011 and the register would pop up a menu listing that and all the alternate items (4011-A, 4011-B, etc.) and their prices.
Where on the fruit the sticker goes can be fixed, but for avocados especially I really appreciate the individual country-of-origin info. California ones are far better than Peruvian or Mexican ones, and they’re often thrown all together or mixed up by careless shoppers.
I don’t mind the stickers. They come off easy enough, but laser print would obviously be better.
The least they could do is make those damn things biodegradable. I could dig up a ten-year-old compost pile and the only thing recognizable would be those stickers, as fresh as the day they were printed.
You dug up a year-old thread to add that? I don’t even get it - you can slice anywhere along the longitude. 
That was exactly what I was thinking. My son loves him some apples, and we buy a lot of them as a result. I’ve noticed that there is definitely enough natural variation among varieties and growing regions that they’re really hard to tell apart from each other in some cases without biting into them. The stickers solve that problem.
Probably more importantly, the codes change based on the size of the fruits. For example, a “small” pink grapefruit would have the code of 4027, 4047 or 4280 depending on where it was grown, a large would have 4281, 4282 or 4283, and an extra large would have 4491, 4492 or 4493. Better that the code distinguish the size for pricing purposes than having the minimum-wage cashier squinting at a grapefruit trying to figure out if it’s small, large or extra-large, and whether it’s a ruby, pink, red or white grapefruit.
First World Problems. 
nm
The stem point is usually is a half-inch or so below the apex of the fruit, so I use it as a guide to obtain more or less equal halves. I suppose I could learn to do just as well along any plane, but it just seems natural to do it on the stem line.
I’m at a loss as to how I resurrected this thread. I must have been searching for something, but I forget what.
zombie or no
some people put them on their radio console.