26 Opinion
Luxury Fruit Can Go Suck a Lemon By William Urbanski
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
December 2021
COMMUNITY
W
ith the holiday season bearing down on us like an out-of-control freight train, I feel it is my civic duty to raise awareness about one of the most blatant scams that unscrupulous sonofaguns are employing to fleece you of your hard-earned cash. This despicable racket takes place nationwide but has become ever-more prominent and brazen in our fair city and will only get worse in the coming weeks when people are under pressure to shell out the big bucks for holiday gifts. Like rabid hyenas, conmen nationwide can sense the desperation honest people feel to find suitable gifts for their friends and family and leverage this duress to target honest, hardworking consumers with perhaps one of the most ridiculous hustles the Asian continent has seen in decades: so-called “luxury fruit.” Overpriced, overpackaged boxes of luxury fruit are nothing more than a shakedown, and you should just say “no.” To be perfectly clear, “luxury fruit” is any of a wide variety of fruit that is genetically identical to “normal fruit” but has been put in a fancy box that magically triples or quadruples its fair market value. Particularly around the holidays, it is all too common to see peaches, grapes, and even the wholesome apple (the best fruit) wastefully overpackaged and sold at a price that is an affront to common sense. While it is surprising that anybody is daft enough to shell out fifty or sixty bucks for ten oranges (each of which is cradled in its own nonbiodegradable Styrofoam wrapper thingamabob that goes immediately into the garbage), it is not completely unexplainable. There are certain consumer goods that people buy simply because they are expensive: a phenomenon called conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption is a performative act; one that ostensibly signals the purchaser’s social status and explains why people go into debt to buy designer handbags, and why they drop two-hundred grand on a Porsche that they barely know how to drive. But getting back to the topic at hand: If you buy expensive luxury fruit, the moment you are out of earshot, the person who sold it to you will burst out in a
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hysterical fit of laughter because you just forked over the equivalent of a week’s worth of groceries for something that literally grows on trees.
▲ As this fruit tier list clearly shows, apples are the best fruit. Unfortunately, when they are placed in a fancy box and sold for a ridiculous price, you are better off eating a durian.
Listen, I get it. When the holidays come around, it is rude to not pick up a gift for your family and friends. The problem with choosing luxury fruit as that gift is that it actually perpetuates a system that takes a nutritional staple that should be readily available for all to enjoy and turns it into some sort of exclusive product that people use to show off. When people start clamoring for luxury fruit around the holidays, it creates a domino effect. Stores carry more of it and less of the regular, delicious fruit that the average Joe Schmo would like to pick up on his way home from work. In the long term, as demand for “regular fruit” decreases, producers switch to growing and distributing less of it. Whatever the justification or social pressure to pay for expensive fruit like this is, it actually creates a lot of problems by reducing access (in the short and long term) to good-old regular fruit.
2021-11-26 �� 2:47:26
