Just ranting...

Does your grocery supply pieces of fruit with little stickers on them to identify the fruit (presumably to save you and them vast amounts of money by allowing them to forgo training of cashiers in visual fruit identification)?

Hate them? Hate how they slow down consumption while you peel the label off? Hate picking the label out of your teeth if you fail to spot and remove it? Hate how you have to find a disposal container for the sticky label, if you can remove it from your fingers? Hate how thorough removal damages the fruit you're about to eat? Hate how unthorough removal leaves label or adhesive on the fruit you're about to eat?

Don't fruit producers and grocery owners eat fruit? Or do they have servants to deal with the ugly unfriendly little labels?

On the local news a couple days ago, I learned a new reason to hate 'em: they clog the sewage treatment system. Apparently lots of people flush them down the kitchen sink. And, I learned they are not merely paper but plastic, and not so degradable. And, it seems they have about neutral buoyancy, so they neither sink to the bottom nor float to the top.

Local sewage processors had to install special new screens to stop most of them, and staff must several times a day vacuum collected fruit labels off the screens, lest they damage the system.

Hey, I know... the sewage treatment folks can turn a profit by recycling the sludgy sticky labels: rinse them, sort them and sell them back for use on fresh fruit!

I'm looking forward to the day they are banned or dropped. (I heard there are laser-labeling machines being investigated that just burn a harmless ID onto the fruit. Please hurry!)

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You don't have many problems do ya?

Yep, they put them on our fruit. I have not had serious issues with them.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

The ones that amuse the heck out of me (because I don't actually eat fruit, and therefore don't have to deal with 'em) are the ones that inform you that the fruit is organic. Leaving aside the chemical definition of "organic," which makes all fruit organic, is the sticker?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I'd rather peel a sticker than have something burned into the fruit. I can't stand bruised bananas or apples - I'm sure I wouldn't like eating around a burned mark.

It's all about getting the right PLU codes to charge the right amount for the product. It's not so easy to correctly identify one of the 10 varieties of apples without the sticker on there.

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Spock Jenkins of the Vulcan Jenkins'.

Does your grocery supply pieces of fruit with little stickers on them to identify the fruit (presumably to save you and them vast amounts of money by allowing them to forgo training of cashiers in visual fruit identification)?

How many different types of apple are there? Can you tell them apart? Those fruit labels, as annoying as some people seem to think, allow the cashier to punch in a short code (typically 4 digits) to ring up the sale. That's a lot more efficient than having them memorize the codes or have to look them up on every sale.

I can understand apples, but when it comes to peppers, you are limited quite a bit with green, yellow, red and orange.

How about just making them out of rice paper or something of that nature?

High speed consumption? Necessary for high volume consumption.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

I think the burned label would be better than the plastic/adhesive one. I'd like to taste-test them. Lightly cooked skin, I can tolerate. Plastic and glue, I enjoy not so much.

Good Fruit Grower magazine: New labeling process could reduce costs

And sewage treatment. Don't forget the sewage treatment!

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Cashier (examining a strange, red fruit): What's this?

It's a pomegranite.

Cashier: Oh! A pomegranite...that's what they make grenedine out of, right?

You got it.

Cashier: So...what do they taste like?

They taste like...Chicken

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PW -- Plant Whisperer

It is fun to confuse cashiers with strange produce. I don't mean to be age-ist, but young teenagers seem to be often most puzzled by such things as ginger, cilantro, various hot peppers (jalepenos and such), etc.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

When I was a cashier for a grocery store (not that long ago, I was 16 at the time and 31 now) we were required to spend 10 minutes in the produce department every day before our shift to familiarize ourselves with the different products.

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I was just sitting here contemplating the immortal words of Socrates who said, "I drank what?"

"Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot." --Carl Sagan "Pale Blue Dot"

Now that I'm ruminating on it... I'm suspecting my new preferred disposal method might cause problems, too.

I usually encounter my first sticky produce label of the day at the coffee shop. I peel off the label and... Now I can't stick it on my cup or plate -- it'll be washed off to the sewage treatment plant. My napkin? I'll be wiping my face with that. Nothing worse than wearing a fruit label all day. Can't flick it on the floor. It's hard to throw a sticky label away; you just stick it to something else. So, I stick it onto my newspaper.

And that gets recycled. And I can just picture the manager of the paper recycling plant wondering why the process is getting clogged up by sticky plastic fruit labels!

I've got it. I'll stick them on the soles of my shoes. They'll get ground off on my walk home and they'll make my shoes last just a wee little bit longer. Wait. Nah... those abraded plastic label particles will wind up going down the storm drain and clogging the ocean and its creatures. There's no hope. We're doomed. Finished by sticky plastic fruit labels.

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I see nobody's mentioned that those labels are edible & biodegradable,so it causes no harm to either eat them or drop them into the sewer or septic tank.

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"An armed man is a citizen
An unarmed man is a subject"

Robert A. Heinlein

Never been a problem with me. I tend to forget to remove the label until it is already gone.

Banning is a strong possibility--especially if they can be shown to be addictive--but the lasers are way too low-tech. Genetic engineers are perfecting chromosomic insertable cyclic rybosomes that will cause the fruits to grow with their own bar-codes.

Reportedly, the Koreans have already had some success with this approach using laboratory mice.

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PW -- Plant Whisperer

Oh, you're showing that you're not from the Southwest! There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of varieties of chiles. They're not peppers, either; they were called that by the conquistadores because they're spicy in a similar fashion, but they're vastly different from a botanical perspective.

If you mean the chile referred to as a "bell pepper," however, yeah, there's pretty much no distinction there.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

What is more fun it to smuggle in a product that they don't have on any shelf. It won't show in the scanner database, and 'price check on till #6' will produce even more humorous results.

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'Sir........, I don't like these numbers.'
'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
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Cite? How biodegradable? The TV News report I saw said they are plastic and do not degrade readily. I'm sure given enough time and UV radiation they could degrade. But they last too long. Hence, they needed special screens to remove them from the sewage stream. The sewage district is spending good rate-payer money processing them.

I wouldn't doubt they, labels and adhesive, are edible, and do no harm to humans, or minuscule. Corporate risk aversion and even the government bureaucracies would make things tend that way. (Edit: But, there's that sewage issue again, for the labels that pass.)

Edit: just double checking. First Google hit I got, Melbourne Water:

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I thought the point of the little stickers was to brand fruit. This way they can charge more for supposedly higher quality versions of the same type of apple. Unfortunately stickers cost money and more importantly it takes time to apply them so the process raises the average cost of fruit while presumably giving people more choice.