The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Which is why you sell it at a lower price instead of giving it away for free... Also, I don't think supermarket buyers are going to pick up supermarket rejects from the ground.
Which means all your customers are now buying at that lower price.
I don't understand why people keep trying to argue that this doesn't make sense under the logic of capitalism. If it didn't make sense, why do they do it? Like this isn't so much about arguing what is or isn't economically viable, it's about explaining why food waste happens. The fact is that they don't do what you're suggesting because it's not profitable.
Doesn't matter. You'll make more money because of the higher quantity.
Because we still don't understand it. Why waste food instead of selling it? Making a loss is always better than throwing your goods away. Ask any fruit vendor on the streets.
No, you won't. As evidenced by the fact that they don't do that.
There's other expenses that go into selling a banana besides growing it. They have to be shipped, in temperature controlled containers, and they need a place to be displayed and sold.
The costs of production are kept very low by paying low wages and the US intervening whenever workers get uppity (Guatemala, for example), so the main expenses are transportation, maintaining the storefront, and of course advertisement. And "misshapen" bananas are calculated to incur more costs through damaging the brand than the cost of simply overproducing bananas.
This is before getting to the point about artificial scarcity, as described in that quote from The Grapes of Wrath. You're already getting a lower profit margin on the misshapen bananas, but you're also undercutting your own business! By providing that option, you're satisfying people's demand for bananas without making much profit, which is going to reduce the sales on full-priced bananas that you actually profit from. It's not hard to see how it can end up being a net loss.
Of course none of this "makes sense" except within the logic of capitalism, but it does make sense there, which is why it's done.
Maybe it has to do with the climate but bananas aren't shipped temperature controlled in my country and bananas being sold wholesale in tiny storage units without lighting or air conditioning so that explains me not understanding.
So bananas are purposely dumped there to market them as a premium product?