Why are bananas so cheap?

Factual Questions
61

I’ll have to concede that at least during the off season, we get our kiwifruit from elsewhere. Some of it is undoubtedly from New Zealand. I don’t know what the prices of kiwifruit are during the off season, since I never actually look. I’ll try and pay attention next time.

It is still unfair for the link athelas provided to claim that the USPS is inefficient when comparing bulk shipped prices with individually processed packages. There are a number of advantages a bulk product has over individual packages each going to separate places, not the least of which being that the USPS must also pay the foreign postal service to deliver the package to the appropriate address. The fact that they imply that kiwifruit must inherently from New Zealand, is just evidence of exactly how ridiculously biased that website is.

62

We pulled ourselves up into the trees to get some bananas, and we had one in hand when we came back down from them to walk upright. If there’s one thing we ape-men know how to do it’s get ourselves some dang bananas.

(I am not an evolutionary biologist, forensic anthropologist, or bananologist)

63

Not True. Bananas ripened on the plant are excellent. While hiking in a very isolated area in Hawaii, I came across a field of hundreds and hundreds of banana plants. Because of the way they grow, the plants were in various stages of maturity. Many had very ripe fruit on them and the flavor was excellent.

64

I imagine tree-ripened bananas would be a little starchier, but have a nice, more complex flavor.

I mean, the ethylene-sprayed ones are good enough.

65

Logistics are all about minimal handling. There is an often quoted line in the ocean transport business that it is cheaper to load a ship at Long Beach, sail it around the whole world and off load it again than it is to load it, sail it a mile out to sea, turn it around, come back in and and off load it, then do the same again.

A system that will get a huge volume of letters from extremely widely distributed points, and deliver each letter to its own individual address is a logistician’s nightmare. You need a massive standing system to accomplish it, with a vast asset inventory and payroll which leads to an enormous fixed cost that must be borne across the individual items. Every single item, no matter how light or small, requires individual routing and delivery. Volumes to any given address go up and down but the system must be standing by to work all the time.

By comparison, bananas are grown in certain reasonably fixed places, they are a uniform commodity that can be shipped in bulk to a very limited number of addresses, and volumes are known and steady.

Think about this: if I gave you a truck with a container on the back with 20 tonnes of palletised bananas in it for delivery to 20 supermarkets (one tonne per supermarket) in your city how long would it take you? Two days maybe? If I gave you a truck with a container on the back with 20 tonnes of letters in it each weighing an ounce (that’s over 700,000 letters), all for delivery to individual addresses in your city how long would it take you? At a thousand a day it would take you two years, and you couldn’t work that fast.

I don’t mean to suggest that the postal system is as efficent as it could be or that prices are as low as they should be. But frankly the OP and your post is the type of ignorance that cause people in logistics to want to strangle someone.

This would only make sense in the context of oversupply. Where demand is steady the import rates will be matched (approximately) to demand so that limited shelf life will be taken into account. No way would the importers import so much that they are constantly putting themselves under pressure in the way you suggest.

As you say, dry bulk rates are irrelevant. However, general container rates are also irrelevant. The collapse in the container sector is due to lack of imports of consumer goods basically from China. A specialist trade like bananas would be very different. No doubt rates will have dropped a little but not much. I also had the feeling that bananas to the US were a vertically integrated trade ie the big banana companies own their own vessels, but a quick google hasn’t given me the answers I was looking for. But if I’m right charter/freight indexes have nothing to do with it.

66

:rolleyes: If you can ease up on the antigovernment knee-jerking for just a second, it might occur to you that shipping bulk produce from commercial growers to commercial distributors is a somewhat different task from delivering individually addressed pieces of mail from individual senders to the individual residences of their individual recipients.

Try asking a commercial “private supplier of fruit” to deliver a single banana, or even a single bunch of bananas, directly to your Auntie Millicent at 245 Peckling Way in Springfield for 49 cents a pound and see what kind of a response you get.

67

We have those growing in the backyard - they’re nasty!

68

And that, my liege, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped.

69

That’s why I like them, they’re the dumbest, easiest fruit to eat.

70

69 cents a pound is actually about where they should be priced. At my store we’ve had them at 29 cents a pound for the last 10 years and they recently went up to 39 cents (causing an uproar among the old ladies). It’s a loss leader. Depending on the market price we either lose a little or make a little on them, but no where near what we should be making. But for some reason, bananas are one of the things that people compare prices on. On the rare occasions that we have to go even higher then 39 cents, we actually do lose quit a bit of business because said old ladies will go to a different store that has them 5 cents cheaper.

71

Oh, and shelf life isn’t a big issue. Bananas come in stages, we order them at whatever stage we want. We have lots of super ripe bananas, we order some green tips, we have all bright green bananas we order some ripe ones. Some wholesalers even gas them on premises to make this even easier, others stock a selection of the most common stages (which would be 1, 2, 3 and 4). Once we have them we can control how fast they ripen by stacking the boxes differently (6 block which restricts air flow) or a 4 block with the plastic liner pulled back which lets lots of air though. Also, we can put a blanket over them or a fan on them. Bananas generate quite lot of heat as they ripen, and if that heat gets trapped they’ll ripen even faster so it’s all about controlling that. But that’s not to say we don’t get stuck with over ripe bananas from time to time, when that happens we sell them even cheaper, usually 10 pounds for a dollar.

72

The price of apples is over 2$ at the grocery store, now, but bananas are still cheap. I eat a lot more bananas.

73

I have been buying and eating bananas for a very long time, and I’ve never seen a spider of any kind on any of them.

For those wondering why bananas are so popular, consider how easy they are to peel and eat. They’re not hard work to eat, even if you have no teeth. Even the peel is edible, if you want to eat it without peeling. Take the sticker off first, and wash it, like any fruit with an edible peel.

74

I prefer brains myself.

75

Enjoy those bananas while ye may. There’s a very damaging fungal blight, called Panama Disease, playing havoc on banana plantations. The disease isn’t too bad of a problem at higher elevations that most bananas grow, but that space, as you can imagine, is not limitless. And since the vast majority of commercially available bananas are ONE variety, the aforementioned Cavendish, growers could be in for disaster. There are many varieties of bananas that we never see because they don’t look nice, don’t travel well, tend to be small, have hard seeds, etc. The old standby of my youth, the Gros Michel, was far tastier and creamier than what is offered for sale today, but it was one of the first to succumb to disease. Believe it or not, France is doing scientific research, looking for ways to help growers avert disaster due to their monoculture practices. Sacre bleu!

76

Its been good growing conditions all around the world… its been warm and humid in all the tropics, northern and southern. eg The indian ocean is warmer…

77

Yeah they cost 49 cents a lbs. here too and when on sale 39 or 33 cents depending which store is selling them .

78

The Wiki article on bananas, as currently written, discusses this. It implies that it is only a matter of time before a strain of Panama Disease appears that can attack the Cavendish. In fact, if I read it right, that’s already happening in Africa, and growers in the Americas are taking great pains to keep it from spreading here. The wiki article estimated that such a banana disaster might happen in anywhere from 20 to 50 years, and that will be the end of the Cavendish banana too.

79

Please note that ricksummon’s “recently” was february 2010, and that the question focused on the cost of transport.

80

I have read (sorry, can’t remember where) that the ubiquitous Cavendish variety was developed to replace a previous popular variety, which was suddenly wiped out by disease.