We’ll Bet This Drove Everyone… *Sigh* …Bananas

I used to work as a product demonstrator and sample giver at a big box store. Our carts and kits were stored in a small room in the produce side’s back end. When I walked in to get set up, I was confronted with a wall of banana crates about ten feet high, and when I turned, I noticed that the cool storage room on the left had several more banana crates stacked about six feet high, looking as if it filled up almost the entire floor space. Admittedly, I stood a little dumbstruck as I processed what I was seeing.

I worked my way through to the carts and realized I could not bring my cart out the usual way due to the great wall of potassium. I had to go the long way and out the dairy and dry goods back end on the other side of the store. As I was setting up, one of the produce employees ran up to me.

Employee #1: “Hey, [My Name], sorry about the mess… Hey, does your demo need bananas today?”

Me: *Confused* “No?”

Employee #1: “Aw…”

Me: “Why… are you asking?”

Employee #1: “Someone accidentally added a zero to the end of the banana order, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

They went off to their work, and I to mine.

I was positioned where I could get a good look at the produce and bakery sections, and for my entire shift, I saw employees with pallet jacks carting out crates and trying to stack the banana display as high as they could, even getting out stepladders to form a pyramid as customers would stop and gape.

For the next few weeks as I worked, I noticed the price of bananas dropping from 98 cents a bunch to 58 cents, then a new display of loose bananas right at the produce section with a sign declaring that they were free to take, and increasingly desperate hand-written signs by the display of all the stuff you can do with bananas.

I don’t think they got rid of them before they went bad.