Thursday, January 26, 2012

A tale of two Korean pears

English: Costco Wholesale Corporate Logo
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A friend greeted me at the gym this morning with a complaint: 


Although I said in Monday's report that shoppers can save 20 cents by buying Korean pears at Costco Wholesale instead of at H Mart, I didn't mention the weight of the respective packages.


Did a trio of the large pears from the Korean supermarket weigh more, thus wiping out the price difference? I said pears from the two stores looked to be about the same size.


I was wrong. The lower-cost package of three pears from the Hackensack Costco actually weighs more than the package from H Mart, which is about 2 miles away in Little Ferry, so the former is an even better buy than I thought.


At Costco, Jumbo Shingo Pears from Happy Valley Farms weighed a total of 3 pounds and cost $6.79 or 14.1 cents an ounce. 


I had to fish the H Mart container out of our outdoor recycling can. The package of three "Sweet and Crispy" pears weighed 2.7 pounds and cost $6.99 or 16.2 cents an ounce (not 15.8 cents an ounce, as I wrote earlier).


The pears from Korea come in form-fitting, clear plastic containers, and each pear is wrapped in a padded plastic net. They are also available in boxes that hold up to 10 pears.


They are called pears, but they are apple-shaped.


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About Me

Hackensack, NJ, United States
Starting in 1979, I was a reporter, copy editor and food writer at The Record of Hackensack, N.J. I was forced to retire in May 2008, several months after I filed an age-discrimination lawsuit against top managers and editors of the paper over selection of the food editor. I had nearly 40 years' experience at daily newspapers in the Northeast, 29 of them at The Record. I now write two blogs, Do You Really Know What You're Eating? (which focuses on food shopping and finding pure ingredients for home-cooked meals) and Eye on The Record (a critical look at a once-great suburban daily newspaper in northern New Jersey). I feel newspapers such as The Record abandoned their readers long before they stopped reading the papers. See April 2010 posts for the outcome of my lawsuit and related commentary. Follow me at www.twitter/vsasson