I’ve witnessed some truly unhinged behavior out in the wild. And while I try to be very namaste and not judge things I don’t understand, some people really do take advantage of my desire to be zen. Take, for instance, a gentleman on TikTok who is going to some pretty extreme lengths to save money at the grocery store. He’s not down with paying the 69 cents a pound or so it must cost for bananas, especially when half the fruit is getting wasted via the peel. His answer? Remove the peels from the bananas before weighing them at checkout and save dough.
To be honest, I’m not sure if this is ludicrous or genius (or maybe a bit of both). On the one hand, the price difference between peeled and unpeeled bananas is likely only a few cents. And while I appreciate those cents can make all the difference to some people’s ability to eat in a given week, I feel like this is an example of extreme cheapness/performative ridiculousness for views. It’s got more than 800,000 of those, by the way, so it clearly worked.
@savingforboba the secondhand embarrassment tho #lifehacks #savemoney #straya #australia
The clip in question, posted by @savingforboba, claims to be of the user’s boyfriend unwrapping a bunch of bananas, putting them in a produce bag, and heading to the supermarket self-checkout. Not only is doing this likely illegal, the fruit itself is probably smashed to smithereens by the time it gets home, so it truly doesn’t seem worth it. While the poster, whose name appears to be Mal (with the banana peeler being called Mason), claims this is just an example of her boyfriend being “frugal,” I’m gonna have to call bullshit on this one.
To be fair, this is going down in Australia, where broccoli apparently rose to $11.90 AUD ($8.18 USD) last year. That had people cutting off the stems and leaving them behind in the shop so as not to pay for something they didn’t plan on eating, so I guess the banana thing isn’t too far off that. Still, it seems totally bonkers!
