If you ever see a banana on sale for an absurdly cheap price, know this: it is not the work of supply and demand – it is the will of the Banana Lords, enforced by their Keepers and their Guardians … Hallowed be the Sundae, Merciful be the Split.
But for one item you’re actually paying for maintaining thousands of points for collection, labelling and handling at various stages, loading and unloading many times, re-sorting those individually addressed items again and again, plus inspections and assessments for customs charges and the like.
The costs for moving an item are shared between millions of bananas in hundreds of containers going in one load from port A to port B.
To this day, governments, supermarkets, and shadowy financial institutions maintain a silent truce with the Banana Lords, keeping prices low and never questioning why.
In a big supermarket, a single banana costs about 15p, but presumably it has been shipped thousands of miles at some expense.
