Another supermarket caught out.

Devalueing the pound. And, seemingly, the kilo. On top of charging well-documentedly exorbitant prices, it seems some supermarkets also want to screw you on the quantity. (Various TV news shows have now caught out various supermarkets charging huge markups in some suburbs, and blaming quadruple prices on some mythical middleman. It's pretty much accepted. The stuff the farmer gets paid a dollar apiece for, you end up paying five to ten bucks for.)

So today we have two almost identical packs of pork chops. These two:

If you look cursorily, they are a pair of chops each, pretty much standard butchering. Now look closely at the price. One is "0.312Kg" and costs $3.74, the other is "0.568Kg" at $6.80? How come? Being pissed off at the store already for this:

(yeah, that's two bags of moldy oranges without even trying to look deeper - look at the center, and at the top left,)
we decided to become investigative reporters and used their vegetable scales. I didn't have the presence of mind to take a photo of this at the time, so I weighed it again once I got home:

Yep. Their "0.568Kg" is actually under 300g. We bought both (obviously not at sticker price but by arranged price instead) so I could do this article.

So - in the one night, this store decided to try and sell me mold-contaminated oranges, then sell me almost half as much pork as they were charging for.

People - keep the bastards in check - check everything!

If you don't (as we did) then they will get away with this. In this case, the supermarket made good the price for us once we made them aware of the error. You should always point such errors out and give them a chance to make good.

(Oh - and in the end, besides the evidence [which was yummy] I decided to just use the supermarket for cat litter and milk, I'll buy my other produce elsewhere thanks. Not that I already don't do that.)

Have YOU Adopted The "Consumer Position?"

This is pretty much an object lesson in how commercialism directly affects your health.  I can't really improve on the advice given in this article, they sort of say it all.

If it wasn't grown in your own back yard, you have no idea whatsoever what the commercial interests all along that supply chain have done in order to get their hands on a few extra precious dollars. 

Did the growers use radioactive fertilisers on the tomatoes you're eating?  Don't laugh, in the US it's perfectly legal to ship poisonous radioactive crap across a state border where they can legitimately add it to fertilisers.  And don't laugh because you're in Australia, because several million tons of the shit found its way into Australian soils as fertiliser, before someone figured it out and put a stop to it.

Did the transport company save some loading and put the tomatoes in the same shipment as some insecticide, and by any chance did one of those barrels leak and contaminate the whole load?  Again, don't laugh, because that has happened right here in WA, a long time ago I'll grant you, but we had to dump a whole load of groceries in the bush town I lived in as a kid becuase of precisely that. 

And then - the supermarket.  Did they store those tomatoes for six months before putting them on the shelves?  Because they all do that.  There are guidelines for the length of time you may store vegetables, but it's been proven over and over by reporter and investigators that these are being well and truly ignored and that our vegetables only get to us when they have become protoplasm with almost zero health benefits.

So if you feel slightly violated and raped, it's because we're all copping that, in the interest of the mighty dollar.  Grow your own or get used to the sting...