If you don’t know, let me lay it out.
I do the grocery shopping in our family, and for years — before Covid — bananas were a stable $0.65 per pound. Without fail. Full stop. Apples, by comparison, were generally around $1.00 per pound. (Prices are from Superstore, may vary in other grocers)
We grow apples in British Columbia. We’re next door to Washington State, which is a major apple producer. We have apples coming out of our ears. Bananas? Not so much. They don’t grow in Canada. They don’t grow in the USA either. The bananas we get have to come from Mexico or Costa Rica or somewhere warm and moist and tropical.
So why is it that after Covid, apples have doubled in price? A five-pound bag now costs $9–10. Inflation? Increased transportation costs trickling down? Who knows. But they’ve doubled.
Bananas? Yeah. No. They’re $0.68 per pound. Essentially the same price as pre-Covid.
Why???
They come from way farther away. They’re fickle to transport — can’t be too cold, can’t be too hot, and don’t bruise them.
What the heck is going on?
I was in England for two weeks in November, and bananas at the local Sainsbury’s were £0.27 each. That’s about fifty cents per banana, or roughly a dollar per pound. Not outrageous, but still more expensive than here.
Turns out there’s a reason — or rather, a few overlapping ones — for this odd price freeze.
There’s currently a banana supply glut, and even though fertilizer and shipping costs have soared, producers have very little leverage with large grocery chains to demand price increases. For retailers, bananas are classic loss-leaders: keep them cheap to get people in the door and hope they buy other things. They’re also wildly popular in Canada, produced year-round, and moved through an extremely efficient logistics system.
It still seems wonky to me.
And rumour has it the price may finally start creeping up, because producers are now operating on razor-thin margins.
Time will tell.
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