A headline that I am sure grabbed your attention the other day, and certainly grabbed mine as I thought “hmmm…must be a slow news day for CNN…why report on real news (like the quagmire in Iraq) when you can bring such hard-hitting news from across the Pacific…?”
Yes, you know the headline I am talking about - Japan: Bunch of Grapes sold for $910:
I don’t really have any problem with such a story being reported, and it is certainly true that some pretty high prices are paid for fruit over here, BUT, in the AP wire story that almost every newspaper in the world seems to have picked up, it’s this sentence that gets me :
Fruit is generally expensive in Japan, and people often buy grapes, peaches and melons as luxury gifts. Japanese are often willing to pay top prices for high-end fruits, especially for the prestige of owning the very first ones of the year.
“Often” is used twice and it leaves the reader with the impression that what was a completely exceptional purchase (something that could happen only once a year for this type of grape and for a few other select fruits) is almost commonplace.
The truth is that most Japanese people buy their fruit at the supermarket, just like everywhere else in the world and some fruits are significantly more expensive than in other places (for example, a watermelon is probably an average $15 U.S.) while others are just slightly more expensive (say 30% more than you’d pay in North America), while others still are on par (for example, bananas and kiwis). But everything’s relative right? Bear in mind that food is either imported (think: transport costs, distribution costs, etc.) or grown domestically (think: limited agricultural land availability, a high cost of living for farmers, and an extraordinarily strong agricultural growers union) and also that Japanese shoppers are notoriously picky (they won’t overlook minor blemishes or bruising, so the fruits need to “look perfect”) and you can understand why general prices would be higher.
So, on to the real story behind the $910 grapes. To understand why such an auction and purchase would take place, you need to get deeper into Japanese culture than just saying people often buy certain fruits as “luxury gifts” - a number of factors come into play.
In general, Japanese consumers do not make purchasing decisions based on price alone - perceived freshness and quality are more significant and, in fact, a price that is “too low” suggests that the product must not be good enough quality. When it comes to food, most Japanese people prefer domestically grown produce because they feel it is safer (there’s a mistrust of food from China in particular), fresher, and tastes better.
In addition, there is the quest for perfection. Ask anyone working in Quality Control for a multinational company that does business in Japan and you are guaranteed to hear stories that detail either how Japanese customers (which include middle men/distributors) reject products regularly due to perceived flaws that would go undetected by buyers in other countries, or how quality standards are just so much higher here than any of their other production facilities in other countries. As an example of the former, I recently discovered that distributors often reject shipments of goods because the boxes are damaged even though the goods inside (i.e., the hundreds of packaged products inside the boxes) are completely intact and undamaged.
Imagine, for example, taking 40 china plates and packing them individually in cardboard and then placing those 40 cardboard packages in a large box filled with straw and styrofoam popcorn and then shipping that large box to a distributor on the other side of the world. The large box arrives and there is a minor rip on the outside that was incurred at some point in the shipping process. However, inside the large box, all the individual boxes are in perfect condition. Now imagine being told by the distributor that he cannot accept the large box because he will not be able to deliver such a box to his customer, a department store, because of the minor rip in the large box used only for shipping. If you’ve ever worked in shipping or procurement or package delivery, you’ll understand just how unbelievable this situation is (but it is true).
The third element, which is a core concept in Japanese culture dating at least back to the Heian period is the love of the ephemeral. If you’ve ever wondered why it is that Japanese people turn out in droves to sit under cherry trees while they are blossoming or why you cannot book a hotel room in Kyoto during the Autumn when all the leaves are changing colour or why those green tea Kit Kats are only in the stores for 1 month before they are replaced by a new flavour.
And this segues into the fourth element: an absolute love for newness. This love is self-evident in many aspects of Japanese culture, most documented perhaps is the marketing concept of Shinhatsubai (which basically translates to “new and improved product” and can help you understand why products are constantly appearing and disappearing and then re-appearing with modifications in this lightening fast market). Newness, however, is everywhere here: people don’t want to rent apartments that are more than 10 years old, culturally significant landmarks (such as temples) are regularly renovated or even knocked down and rebuilt, and you would be hard pressed to find a car on the roads that is more than 7 or 8 years old (those all get shipped to other countries in what is a very lucrative re-sale market).
So, the $910 grapes are domestic, they are new, they will only be in season a short time, and they are in perfect condition. This means they are valuable and their rarity only helped to boost that price.
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