(NEXSTAR) — Say goodbye to the 19-cent banana. The lunchbox staple just got a bit more expensive at Trader Joe’s.
Conventional bananas now cost 23 cents each at Trader Joe’s stores around the country. Several locations in California and New York confirmed the price change was already in effect Monday.
The 19-cent banana has long been a point of pride for the grocery chain, which said — until now — it hadn’t raised prices on the piece of fruit since they first started selling them individually.
“We only change our prices when our costs change, and after holding our price for Bananas at 19 cents each for more than two decades, we’ve now reached a point where this change is necessary,” a company spokesperson told Nexstar.
Trader Joe’s is unusual in how it prices its bananas — by the piece and not by the pound. The company made that change in 2001, CNBC reported.
In a 2018 edition of the “Inside Trader Joe’s” podcast, then-chairman and CEO Dan Bane explained that Trader Joe’s used to sell bananas by the pound, albeit in prepackaged baggies that contained four or more bananas. In other words, you couldn’t rip open the baggies and buy just one or two bananas, seeing as there weren’t any scales in the store to determine the correct pricing.
One day, Bane said he was working in one of the California locations when he observed a “nice little lady” — likely from a nearby retirement community — who spent a few moments looking over the banana baggies before deciding she didn’t want any.
“So I asked her, I said, ‘Ma’am, if you don’t mind me asking, I saw you looking at the bananas but you didn’t, you didn’t put anything in your cart,’” Bane recalled.
“And she says to me, ‘Sonny … Sonny, I may not live to that fourth banana.”
Bane then claimed that Trader Joe’s made the decision to switch over to individually priced bananas “the next day.”
The price of an organic banana was not hiked this week. Though they once sold for 25 cents a pop, they’re now 29 cents each.
At the same time, Trader Joe’s is dropping prices of a few items. Raw almonds got a dollar cheaper per pound, romaine lettuce hearts plus the trio of bell peppers are 50 cents cheaper, and green onions are now 99 cents — “our lowest price in at least a decade,” a company spokesperson said.
