Thread: Decadence?

Originally Posted by bennylaird

Just wanted to brag about my morning treat, I actually got to eat a Banana......

Benny,

I'm allergic to the smell and taste of bananas. Have been ever since the tender age of 8 when I was forced to eat one against my will.

If I sit next to someone eating a ripe banana the smell will make me vomit.:eek:

Your brag is making me sick as well.


Peter.

Yeah, I hate the things too. Apparently when I was little I loved them, then one day my Dad's Aunty let me eat about 4 of them one after the other. I chucked up all over the place and have not been able to eat one since.

I feel the same way when I see a ripe banana, especially when they brown off. As bad as the ripe figs my Dad used to love.

Have to eat Bananas just slightly over the green stage when they are stioll firm. Trouble is that the bananas we are getting now are smaller and taste a bit strange? Not sure where they are from or what chemicals are on them and they were a bargin at $12 a kilo..........................

Wonder what will happen when the crops recover, farmers will have a glut and prices will tumble.

Thanks for the reminder, had some bananas here I forgot about, and had to eat one.

About $1 a kilogram. Who said it was expensive in Japan?

You know what really ##### me? New Zealand imports all their bananas from the islands (and they are nice bananas!), and they are currently paying something like 70c / kg $NZ!!!

Why the #### can't we do that here? The farmers could be the only ones allowed to import, so then they supply their normal distributers, and so on down the line, so noone gets bypassed, the industry is protected, and as the farmers homegrown supplys increase, they just decrease their imports.

Nobody suffers, nobody gets to profiteer from the situation, all the supply channels are still working to their normal capacity, so no layoffs etc, the farmers get to supplement their income with the profits from the imported bananas to help them reestablish, and the end consumer gets bananas at the normal price.

What's a banana????

Why the #### can't we do that here?

Jeeps, Stuart, that actually makes a lot of sense. Stop it, you're scaring me :eek:

Originally Posted by silentC

... I chucked up all over the place and have not been able to eat one since.

Yeah, they don't taste as good coming up as they do going down....bit like beer.

The price of bananas is due to a well known marketing phenomenon called "Rip Off".
A case in point is Olive Oil. At my local supermarket, name witheld for the obvious reason but they get the same stuff from Newcastle, 2Ltr bottles of Moro Extra Virgin Olive oil are $29.00+. A small independent distributor, where I buy my rye flour and a lot of other goodies, sells it for $19.75. So considering the buying power of the supermarket compared to the small distributor, you see the "Rip Off" phenomenon in action. You see the same thing with petrol, a camel farts in outer Mongolia and petrol jumps 10c a litre. A cyclone hits Broome and fruit and veges all jump in price. etc etc.

Here's how I think it works:

1. Some natural or man-made catastrophe happens somewhere
2. An economist announces that this will cause an upward trend in the price of x as the market struggles to cope with the decreased supply/increased price speculation/phase of the moon
3. The retailer, who is no fool, follows suit
4. The economist smiles smugly and says to anyone who will listen "see, I was right"
5. etc.

Was'nt it Paul Keating who mentioned "banana republic" and the Govt we had to have.

Have the Govt security agencies really checked out who is responsible for the high price of banana's ...rather than blame it on a cyclone which ultimately becomes responsible for higher interest rates on the battlers mortgages not to mention fuel prices....

Cheers

Stuart,
the reason we don't import bananas from elsewhere is that they can't garuantee them to be free of black cigatoga (sp?) disease, the introduction of which would cost our local industry more than any cyclone. New Zealand has, if anything even stricter quarantine laws than we do, but as they don't have any banana industry there it's not a problem. I doubt very much the government is doing it to protect locasl industry, they stopped doing that some time ago.

Mick

Mick, please don't bring rationality to this discussion. It upsets Al

Richard

I thought that the big grocery chains had long term contracts with their suppliers, fixing the costs of supply. That is why some farmers and growers have been complaining that their margins are being eroded by increases in the cost of fuel.
If that were the case for bananas, those growers still able to supply would not be getting super profits and the consumers ought to be getting bananas at the same price.
The inference seems to be that the big chains are the ones making the super profits on bananas.
Am I wrong?