As you get incredibly busy with work and “real life,” you tend to forget to take care of yourself.  I remember times when I used to go days (or weeks) without fresh fruit since the effort and time of preparing them myself was perceived to be too much.  To remedy that situation, I started getting cut fruit from Whole Foods which solved the time problem but introduced a huge cost element.

I put the table above to figure out the various options available and their trade-offs.  Whoever invented cut fruit in a disposable bowl is a genius — some people are willing to pay an absurdly high amount of money to avoid any of the work.  This isn’t too different from the invention of lettuce in a bag (ready to go salads).

I admit some of these figures/judgments are a little subjective but based on reasonable assumptions (see the end of this post for some of the thinking/calculations).  

From the table, I now think that there is a great middle option thanks to to frozen yogurt craze sweeping the nation.  Instead of getting frozen yogurt, you can just scoop up a lot of fruit and pay by the ounce.  Crunching the numbers, you will realize that you’ll save about 20% and have greater control of the ever important ratio of honeydew to cantaloupe in your fruit fix.  I’ll likely be shifting my consumption to this supply of cut-fruit.

It’s interesting to think about how there are (natural or made up) necessities in life that many people will pay a high premium to solve even if the solution is quite simple and do-able.   Coffee and tea are probably illustrative though often times you consume them on the premises to get access to the wifi or general atmosphere.  What else is there?

Figures/Judgments Made:

1. These aren’t apples to apples comparison — hardy har har.  I am assuming the basket of fruits to be the same across the sources but of course individual consumer preference may change what is being eaten.  So just assume this to be an average cost for all fruits consumed by Americans.

2. Explicit cost refers to what retail customers actually pay in money.

3. Implicit cost refers to what retail customers pay in money and time (not including the time it takes to get the items which is assumed to be equal across all sources)

4. Canned and fresh fruit cost per pound taken from USDA figures

5. Gross margin on cut fruit at supermarket assumed to be about 65% based on industry figures on prepared foods.  Therefore, the cost of labor (for yourself) is calculated by subtracting out the likely wholesale cost of the fruit and then multiplying 35%.

6. Canned fruit does takes some work to open and possibly clean up after since you aren’t given the requisite utensils/dishes though you could of course eat it straight from the can.  

7. I assumed that the freshness of the fruit is binary.  Either it is fresh or it is not.  Personally, I don’t think I can do a good job discerning the freshest fruit from the average fresh fruit.