Comment by disillusioned | Hacker News Reader

Comment by disillusioned | Hacker News Reader

Time for me to re-post my perennial "fun banana facts" post:

Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart.

Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to make a highly educated guess about their purchasing activity and, thus, to project volumes for products. But bananas defy that wisdom, except that people in aggregate buy a lot of them. Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason. Bananas aren't seasonal purchases like berries or corn or other fruits or vegetables. Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.

Bananas have to be effectively "tricked" into continuing to ripen after being prematurely picked green and then refrigerated for transit. So there are banana ripening centers that pump ethylene through a chilled chamber to get them to ripen.

Berries are most certainly not seasonal anymore. They should be but we thoroughly engineered the seasonality out of them. They're always on the shelf. Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore? Probably something that can be found in this dataset as well.

> Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore?

Depends on the store I'd wager. We have a store here (Ametller Origen) that sell things they cultivate/make themselves "nearby" (in the same region, and among other things they sell too) and sell in their own retail stores, I'm guessing most of their customers do indeed follow the habits of seasonality as lots of stuff isn't available outside of the seasons.

The pricing of berries are certainly seasonal. Bananas are cheap year-round.

Depends where you are. I am in Southern England.

Strawberries are available year round - we get them from Morocco and Spain outside the summer. They do taste differently and during the off season are less reliably red all over.

Thus I will buy them only in the Summer.

Prices also change over the year.

I had an interesting conversation with my mom recently when she said don't buy apples. It isn't in season right now. And I didn't know what to say because I didn't even know apples had a season. I just bought the bag of gala apples without much thought to it.

Apples are kept in cold storage to extend “the season” across the year. No guarantee you’ll get fresh apples in a supermarket even if you see workers harvesting them as you drive to the store.

If you pay attention you’ll see that apples are more expensive the longer it’s been since apple season. They’re cheapest in fall, and the price rises over the year. They store really well, though, so they’re still available year-round.

I don't get snobby about food very often, but I have to say that these days strawberries and tomatoes are things I never buy any more.

They're so large, watery, and tasteless, that I grow them myself or go without.

A lot of foods are no longer seasonal, as noted above, but I can't say I can taste the difference. Except for tomatoes and strawberries where I think I can - who knows, maybe I'm imagining it?

Tomatoes have always tasted different depending on the variety. I never really liked salad ones - including Alisa Craig which my parents grew. Beef tomatoes and small cherry ones seem OK.

Strawberries again I never partically liked even home grown ones. Som modern ones are tasteless especially those available out of season.

We absolutely buy berries (and tomatoes) when in season. The flavor is much better!

They are highly seasonal. We have not "thoroughly engineered the seasonality out of them".

Available year round and seasonal isn't an oxymoron. Something can be both. Just look at potatoes, we learned a long time ago how to store them. Doesn't mean there isn't a time in the fall with they're the freshest and cheapest.

Very interesting!

> Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason.

The bananas were cut up or pureed and fed to a child at a particular stage of development. Kid is now eating on their own, doesn’t want bananas or doesn’t have the dexterity to peel them. Parents reintroduce bananas a few months later, kid likes them again.

Or someone got a new job and they’re not eating breakfast at home. A few months later, they go back to eating at home to save money or lose weight.

> Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.

Bananas are often the only fresh fruit at convenience stores. Sometimes there are apples or oranges that look extremely underripe or dried out and starchy. Bananas also don’t need to be washed and don’t excrete juice, so you can eat them on the go. There’s nowhere to wash an apple in most convenience stores, and oranges are more likely to get juice on your clothes or car seats, have a harder peel to remove and neatly dispose of, and may have seeds.

When I worked on recommendation systems 15 years ago, I learned about the "banana problem", where bananas are so commonly purchased, they tend to be the top recommendation regardless of other foods in your cart. The solution, of course, was to bias for less commonly purchased items, but it was my first run-in with the weird statistics around banana purchasing patterns.

The initial grouping of 'pack of organic bananas' with individual bananas feels like a wrong number in the pack problem; eg we typically want one a day so want to buy 7 in a weekly shop but the pack size is 5.

> eg we typically want one a day so want to buy 7 in a weekly shop but the pack size is 5.

Can't you just grab a bigger cluster/bunch and remove N bananas so it has the amount you want? Or remove 3 from the bunch that has five so two 5+2 clusters? Feels like I'm missing something obvious here.

Yes, because Instacart is ordering for delivery :)

Oh yeah, of course, guess I kind of forgot the overall context, and I was thinking in-person shopping... Thanks! :)

Yes, once I can put in the delivery details something like '7 medium size bananas, with no bruising, varying in ripeness from almost ready to still slightly green' and let a robot at the other end sort it out I'll be happy.

I wonder if there is a statistically significant group of people with a mild potassium deficiency, who crave bananas due to it, but then go off them again when their potassium stores are replenished.

No.

I imagine people either buy single bananas as a quick snack or bananas in bulk for breakfast. (Ignoring the "funny" uses here). I wonder if this kind of irregular pattern is a reflection on people's breakfast habits.

This comment is WAY more interesting than the article it is a comment on.

It is the only fruit that requires no washing before consuming. And also, it makes my tummy hard.

much more interesting than the actual article

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