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You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb
by denimnerd42 6y ago
You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality.
Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.
- kerkeslager 6y agoWhat I'm saying is that your perception of quality is not actually objective quality.
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- asiachick 6y agoThis car has dents but those don't matter. Full price for you. Car still gets you from a to b just fine. This jacket has some holes and few stains but it will still keep you warm.
- moosey 6y agoEffectively, there is no difference between an apple and one with a bruise. I still get the same nutrition and taste, most other differences being unimportant. A jacket with a hole has massive loss of effectiveness, and I don't receive a new jacket to wear each day. A car with a dent has significant loss of value, not that it's something I'm terribly concerned with, I run all cars until they die.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago>Effectively, there is no difference between an apple and one with a bruise. I still get the same nutrition and taste, most other differences being unimportant. That's simply not true. The bruises become rot spots and before getting there they introduce oxidation which affects taste. The shelf life is then also diminished not only for the bruised apple, but for any that are nearby. Relatively speaking, I think the bruise on an apple is actually a measurably greater decrease in (relative) value than the dents in a car.
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- perl4ever 6y agoYou could compare it to rust instead.
- incelmods 6y agothere is not the day you buy it. you are absolutely correct. it got bruised being dumped in the bin in the morning, and when you buy it in the afternoon there is no difference in nutrition and taste. You should buy milk and meat that expires the next day when you shop. I still get the same nutrition and taste, most other differences being unimportant. just like dense and purposefully dense to get that much needed confrontation is the same thing, to everyone around you.
- hansvm 6y agoI know this isn't the point you're making, but the right dent patterns can increase fuel efficiency and make cars more desirable to some buyers.
- saagarjha 6y agoOk, now I need to know about these dent connoisseurs who measure their impact on fuel efficiency.
- seneca 6y agoIf the vast majority of shoppers perceive a product as lower quality it is, almost by definition, worth less in a market. Quality is a very tricky idea to pin down (read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance if you'd like to hear a lot on the idea) and claiming that your own highly biased opinion on the matter is what counts as "objective" is a pretty bold claim.
- jankassens 6y agoI can understand that for a crooked carrot, but for example a tomato with broken skin actually gets bad pretty quickly.
- simlevesque 6y agoThis is true in some cases, but not most.
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- pdonis 6y agoNeither is yours. But if yours is satisfied with the food you can get by ordering online, you're free to order online.
- maxerickson 6y agoIt doesn't sound like they are claiming that their perceptions are objective. In your previous post, you trip all over yourself acknowledging that their preferences are valid. It's obvious enough that's what they are driving at; they want a shopping service that accounts for their preferences.
- david-cako 6y agoPerhaps this was the “actual price” of the produce anyway, including the wasted and donated food. Delivery means there’s more reliable metrics about the average quality of food stocked and expected by shoppers (in a given area). This is a good thing if they make it so customers can easily post reviews and request refunds.
- fsckboy 6y agoin a competitive market (which US groceries mostly are) if the store has to "eat the cost" of bruised fruit, then the price will necessarily have to be higher on the fruit they sell. Think of it this way, you have fruit at home to be shared by all the members of your family, it was fine when you bought it, but now some of it is bruised. So now you own a mix of fruit: what do you do, throw away the bruised fruit, or trim it, or give a loved one the good looking one and eat the bruised one yourself? Those costs (tossing or trimming or eating slightly lower quality) have to be borne by somebody, in this case the whole family or a member of the family. You buy a car and you buy insurance for it; that's because a car is expensive and you don't want to bear the burden of a bruised car yourself, you want to share that burden with all the other people who buy insurance; and yet, the insurance company is making money, so apparently you are paying a little extra for this decrease in the variance of quality. Same with your theory of purchasing fruit: you are not saying (in your original comment) what you think you are saying, that bruised fruit is too expensive; what you are actually saying is that you prefer to overpay for expensive fruit all the time and not deal with imperfections. Because otherwise, if the supermarket could sell all their fruit and not just perfect fruit, and was competing against other supermarkets, then the fruit would be overall actually cheaper across the board; you say "you don't get any discount", but with time you actually would. I explain all this because it allows you to live your life feeling less miffed.
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- dooglius 6y agoYes, you are correct that you are essentially paying a premium, but the issue is less about the item's cost and more about the need for time investment and physical presence--correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like it's possible to get the same level of un-bruisedness from delivery or curbside pickup that you could from going into the store and picking fruit yourself.
- Spooky23 6y agoMakes sense in economics 101. The reality is, the Instacart guy doesn't give a shit and will provide bruising as part of the service of schlepping your crap for you. The in-store shoppers don't really care either. The explanation that you're providing is really a rationalization for paying more to procure an inferior product. You're always going to have wastage of perishable items. It's much cheaper and sensical to avoid moldy strawberries, close to date meat and dairy, etc by shopping yourself, or hiring your own casual labor without some intermediary subtracting value. All of these services are hiding costs through VC largesse and exploitation. You can literally get more for less by just hiring a housekeeper and having them pick up stuff for you, but nobody does that because the costs are "above the line", and it feels less nouveau riche and more clean to have some service exploit the poor sap picking your banannas rather than talk to a human.
- TuringNYC 6y agoWhen I lived in Brooklyn, the standard at most fruit/veg vendors was to have the best stuff inside and the bruised stuff outside (e.g., at 40cents/lb discount.) We usually brought from the outside and did the math on whether the recoverable portion was worth the discount. Unfortunately the supermarkets do not work this way -- they seem to have one class of goods. I'm not sure what happens to their bruised goods, but I do wonder if they offload those items to other stores? Does it really go straight into the trash?
- seibelj 6y agoI believe supermarkets then sell it to the next group, which are restaurants or wholesale purchasers that send to factories. Highly unlikely that non-rotten food of supermarket quality is wasted.
- barbecue_sauce 6y agoNah, if it goes to anybody, it goes to food banks (or other 501(c)(3) organizations). The supply chain bifurcates much further up; it'd take a lot of effort for a relatively low volume of unsaleable but unspoiled food at the store level to make it to a restaurant or a wholesaler.
- frandroid 6y agoI used to live 20 floors above a supermarket. I could see quite clearly when they'd bring in a large garbage container and dump hundreds of pounds of produce into it, pêle-mêle, and then it getting carted away.
- kaikai 6y agoI live in the US and 10 years ago ate almost entirely out of dumpsters. Grocery stores throw out perfectly good food every day. If you ask in front they'll say they donate it, but in back there's a dumpster full of cartons of eggs with one egg cracked, and packaged food that's a day past its sell-by date. We waste an absurd amount of food.
- 6y ago
- jmpman 6y agoJust had grocery curbside pickup last week, including two pineapples. Both looked much greener than any I would have selected myself. (I normally select a pineapple where the inner leaves come out easily.) A bit of research online, pineapples don’t ripen once picked. Cut them up, and they were both fantastic.
- haecceity 6y agoThey should price the produce according to its quality then.
- beobab 6y agoThey already do to a certain extent. Damaged goods often find their way into the "reduced" section.