Beware the Swiss Cheese People

Guess what I saw yesterday.

A woman in her early fifties at the market opening different bags of grapes, then popping them from the stems and putting them into another bag. I had never seen that before! I mentioned this to my coworkers and they said, sure, people do that all the time, because they don’t want to pay for the stems.

Hmm. They don’t want to pay for the stems.

I don’t know about you, but I find that rather… well… cheap. From this point forth they shall be known as the Swiss Cheese People (you know, the cheap-ass people who “don’t want to pay for the holes.”) They probably have an attack every time they have to pay for a pit, too.

But to see if they maybe had something there, I decided to weigh the stems from my beautiful Red Globe grapes, each between 1.25 and 1.5 inches in diameter, and sweet as candy. I had the math all ready, and 15 huge grapes (.44 lb at $1.49/lb. = $.66 for the fruit = $.09 per ounce of fruit = $.00317 per gram of fruit) gleaned two smallish stems, which weighed zero grams. They didn’t even register on the scale! Double it, triple it, quadruple it, hell, quintuple it – it’s still zero.

I can understand if you were a little old lady receiving a fixed income from Social Security, suddenly got a craving for grapes, and only had 49 extra cents to buy them – you may feel you could afford an extra grape. Or picking a bag, then removing one big branch because all the bags weigh four pounds, and who can eat that many before they rot. Or even picking one bag and removing each grape and putting it back into the same bag and then buying that same bag, particularly if you needed eight pounds of grapes. You might save a few pennies by picking them off the stems, but you have wasted a few dollars by spending your time.

But all that aside, I’m much more grossed out about this woman opening all the different grape bags, and popping individuals off each one. Lady, get your paws out of the grapes! Have you no sense of decorum? Readers, you know when you get your grapes home from the market and wash them, only to discover a bunch of naked stems without any grape floaters in the bottom of the bag? These people got to them first.

Sounds like fruit harassment to me. Manager!!!