Tuffy P and I have a weakness for blueberries with our morning soggies. As a result of our need to get that blueberry fix, we’re keenly aware of the bizarre pricing of the damn things. I’ve never seen any single item fluxuate in price quite so radically in a short period of time. Oh, I understand that seasonally there will be price shifts, and I’m OK with investing a few extra kroners to get those taste treats in my cereal bowl. But it isn’t just seasonal. Here’s an example. Yesterday on the way home from the salt mines, I stopped into my local grocery store, where blueberries were on special, 3 pints for $5. Just last week the same store was asking $3.99 for half a pint. That’s a difference of about $6.40 per pint. Sometimes it seems like they’re charging by the berry (we switch over to bananas during those periods) and other times they’re just about giving them away. It doesn’t seem right.
27th Street 
I love them. Next year I am going to buy and freeze a lot of them before the prices get insane.
Two things control the retail price of blueberries. One is agricultural and one is the pricing policies of grocery stores. Blueberries grow on bushes and they ripen a couple of months after the last frost in spring. The bushes also require a period of cold dormancy. You cant grow blueberries in the tropics, the bushes need cold. Northern Florida gets a wee bit of cold in early January and by late January the plants are able to come to life and start to grow and to fruit a couple of months after that (think april). That area is basically the earliest growing area in the Excited States for plants which need a dormant time. The Florida tomato crop often freezes around Christmas marking the end of the previous year’s growing season at a time when every other state has already experienced killing frost. So you basically cant get a big commercial crop of blueberries which have been grown in north america any earlier. At the other end of the season you cant get a crop from bushes that have been frosted. So there is this period between the end of the previous crop and the start of the new crop when there are just no berries being harvested in north america. Think winter. Blueberries are of course grown in south america but there is a transportation issue. You cant send them on a 2 week boat ride and hope they will still be berries when they are unloaded. So you have to ship them air freight from south america on refrigerated planes. This gets mighty expensive and these freight costs make up a significant part of the retail price. Remember that the stores not only mark up their cost of the fruit they also mark up the cost of the freight.
Then there are the stores. The stores like to make vast quantities of money. It is their favorite thing to do. Their best game is to buy something for really cheap, apply a healthy markup and let their customers think they have reduced the price. That bit of smoke and mirrors lets them sell huge quantities of product at decent margins. When they see an item like air freighted fruit they become afraid. To sell a large quantity of an item they have to first buy a large quantity of the stuff. Big bucks. What if the price is too high and it doesnt sell (this happens more often than you think). They could blow 10’s of thousands of dollars on a single highly perishable item if they make a mistake. They dont like that so they simply dont do it. They buy small quantities when their cost is high. Now grocery stores work on the principle of go big or go home. If they arent going to sell a lot of something but it is an item they pretty much have to stock they crank the price up. way up. no mercy. And they concentrate their efforts on other products where their cost is lower.
A grocery store NEEDS to put out a flyer. It is part of their culture. Each department will typically have one item on which the store will actually lose a bit of money – generally a couple of percent of the selling price. You can get a really good feel for their profit margins by comparing the price of an item on the front page to its regular price. These items are placed on the front page of the flyer and represent actual deals, provided the individual stores order enough product to supply all their customers (they very often dont) . Then they have to fill the rest of the flyer without losing their shirt. They make money on the items on pages 2 through to the end. Lots of money. Look! this week lettuce is only 99 cents, last week it was $1.99. This is not the store being generous. Last week they paid a buck and doubled their money. This week they paid 60 cents and are almost doubling their money and they have an item to “put on sale”. Save a dollar they say. Yep, but not all at their expense. When the north american blueberry growers start harvesting their very perishable crop they have to sell it or lose it and the grocery chains are able to buy the berries for cheap, add a healthy markup and sell them at a fairly reasonable price. Stuff that is “in season” is less expensive because the farmers need to sell it in a hurry. The stores might even decide to front page them and this really drops the price.
The same sort of thing happens with non perishable items. When you see brand x of canned beans on page 4 of a flyer for 79 cents instead of a regular price of 99 cents you can be pretty sure that the store got a deal from the canner rather than taking a voluntary hit to their margins. This is still a good thing because you get to pocket the 20 cents even though the store is allowing you to believe the savings are a result of them being good guys. There is a decent chance the store charged the canner 10’s of thousands of dollars for the honor of seeing their brand on the shelf in the first place. Recently I spoke with the store manager of a store within the Loblaws chain. He told me that the chain is undergoing what he called a product rationalization and that they had recently dropped 3,000 items from their stores. 3,000! Not making enough money on them so out they go. You can eat what the store bloody well wants you to eat or you can go hungry. What an interesting approach to a business.
I’ve been noticing the same perplexing price fluctuation in blueberry stocks. Although sometimes it’s because the higher priced ones are organic. Or claim to be organic.