I learned a little something a while ago from a little old lady savvy senior citizen who didn’t even speak English. I was in the produce section, picking up some vegetables, and saw a lady with a shopping basket nearly full of bagged carrots. (Maybe she was a rabbit lady – like a cat lady with 40 cats, but rabbits? I don’t know… ) I thought it was odd, but went about my business.
A minute later she was at the scale, putting the bags of carrots onto the scale one by one. She was systematically weighing the carrots. I never thought of that!
The carrots are all pre-bagged, with an average weight of whatever they put on the bag – just like apples, or any other bagged produce. You pay for the bag full. But the bags weighed differently, based primarily on carrot size. On a five pound bag of carrots for $3.99, you could be getting 4, 5, 6 or even 6.5 pounds of carrots for the same price, with very little effort!
Obviously in the bagging process they are not weighing every bag, and at best they are doing a random sample and I 
doubt they are even doing that. It’s just the bag size, and whatever carrots tumble down the chute. (My occasionally over-analytical mind envisioned the probabilities and advantages of all carrots falling down the chute into the bag skinny end up, or skinny end down, or an equal distribution of both – optimizing the space in the bag, and being the best bargain… but I digress…)
If everyone did this weigh-in, there would be an unmanageable line at the scale, but the savings is pretty clear.
I saw some organic carrots and the price was a bit higher, but I thought I would apply this new found nugget of knowledge and see if I could earn myself a “discount” on my carrots.
I found the heaviest bag of organic carrots, a whopping 6.5 lbs, ($4.45) and measured it against the price of an average bag of regular carrots. ($3.99)
Instead of regretting paying an extra 46 cents for the bag of organic carrots, I was actually paying less per pound, and getting my organic carrots. (Yes, of course, this is sort of comparing apples to oranges. If I checked all the bags of regular carrots, I may have found a heavier bag – this was just an illustration.)
So anyway, that’s my lesson from a little old lady (oops, there I go again) savvy senior citizen who didn’t speak English.
PS. I get a little more value out of my organic carrots, since I don’t peel them – I just brush them, and usually use the organics raw, instead of cooking them. I usually peel non-organic produce like carrots. It sad that although much of the vitamin value is in the skins, I have been told that’s were most of the pesticides are. Yuck.
