Boomers Are Baffled By Gen-Z Willing To Spend $20 On A Single Strawberry — 'Dystopian And Insane'
A single Erewhon strawberry costs $20 — and the youth are buying it.
cottonbro studio | Pexels Did anyone else see the viral TikToks featuring youthful, dewy-faced influencers doing a taste test of Erewhon’s $20 strawberries? The $20 price tag is not for a pack of strawberries. It’s just for one single berry, grown in Kyoto.
Online, you can see influencers rave about the “sweet smell” of the berry, the delicious taste, and everything else about these berries — all of which as sold in single-use plastic containers with a mild mist on them.
As a foodie, I’ll admit that news about Erewhon’s popularity piqued my interest. Erewhon is a grocery store that’s on my “to visit” list, if only because I’m a huge fan of peanut butter and theirs is legendary.
With that said, Erewhon is one of those polarizing hotspots for foodies. It’s a place where you can tell what class a person is by the way they buy their food.
Baby Boomers are baffled by a recent trend involving Gen-X influencers going to Erewhon to try a single strawberry from Kyoto, sold at $20 a pop.
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No, I’m not kidding. It became such a big deal that the strawberries sold out and got news coverage on ABC7. The strawberry brand became a status symbol of high-end fruit, with rave reviews from most people who tried them.
As many people know, I’m a huge fan of high-end food. I have no problem spending $100 on a steak or an upscale Japanese hot pot. I’ve done that for my food critic work in the past.
I’ve always viewed quality food and fine dining as an investment. Good food makes you feel good. Great dining experiences are excellent for brainstorming good articles, talking about business, and reducing stress.
With that said, I’m a massive fan of caveat emptor — or “let the buyer beware.” I’m well aware of the fact that a high price tag does not always yield good food.
Lately, a growing number of Gen-Zers are buying food because of the price tag rather than the quality.
Let’s take a look at Erewhon for a moment. This is a store that often sells brands that you can find elsewhere at a high markup — and yet, people tend to go there to buy those same brands rather than Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s.
If it’s a matter of convenience, I can understand that. There’s a certain premium that you pay for being able to go to a place close to you to get certain things quickly. That’s why convenience store markups are so high.
However, that’s not always what Erewhon is doing. They’re charging crazy money as if it’s proof of quality, despite the quality not being anything really out of the ordinary. If you know food, you’ll realize what a rip it is.
Let’s take a look at the strawberry example above. These strawberries are famous for being grown in Kyoto. Japan has a famously decadent luxury fruit market, and they sell individual strawberries like these in the country…but for like $5 a pop.
Here’s the kicker: influencers are freaking out over Kyoto strawberries, but Kyoto is not even known for its good berry production. Tochigi and Aomori are where the best berries are from. Those are often cited as the major hotspots of Japan’s ultraluxe fruit creation hubs.
To give you an idea of how this sounds to someone from Japan, I’ll give you an American version. This would be like Chinese companies selling a single peach grown in New Jersey (NOT GEORGIA) for $9.
Or, if peaches ain’t your thing, this would be the equivalent of China selling a pint of farm-fresh Idaho blueberries (a berry that was invented and optimized for New Jersey) for $50. Yikes, right? Well, it gets even more impressive.
We can also talk about “oxygenated water,” too. This is a pretty common marketing trick. If you’re like me, you like bottled water. When I’m not guzzling supplements like Feel Free, or just doing my kava tea, then I’m drinking bottled water.
I’m a fan of “alkaline water,” which is regular water that has additives that help increase the pH of the water — or at least how your body reacts to it. Essentia, for example, has traces of sodium bicarbonate and calcium carbonate. (That’s baking soda and chalk, two natural antacid electrolytes.)
Essentia’s great because I find it to taste good and it also helps prevent me from puking up the supplements I take to help me with my CPTSD. It’s also pretty darn refreshing in a way that pure distilled water is not. While some might say it’s a scam, it’s not. It’s a good product that can help subtly settle your stomach.
When you pay for alkalinizing water, you’re paying for filtered water which is a solution mixed with low levels of trace minerals that can improve your health. Or at the very least, you’re paying for water that tastes better than straight distilled water.
Since you’re paying for decent-tasting water, I don’t think alkaline water is a scam. Do you know what is a scam, though? Oxygenated water. It’s the process of adding oxygen to the water as it’s being bottled, which is said to promote wellness.
Here’s the problem: water will always have this same chemical makeup, which is H2O. Water will always be two hydrogens with one oxygen molecule, otherwise, it’s H2O2 — otherwise known as Hydrogen Peroxide, the stuff you bleach your hair with.
H2O2 is not drinkable. It will make you vomit and possibly kill you. So it’s not water with extra oxygen mixed into the bottling process. Oxygen naturally occurs in air, to the tune of about 20 percent of the mixture that makes air.
Adding extra oxygen to the atmosphere during bottling has no change in the water’s taste, chemical makeup, or ingredients. You’re just paying for them to add an extra, needless step to the water that should have been sold for pennies less.
And man, do stores like Erewhon love to peddle oxygenated water. To those who don’t read into their food, this is a flex about health and wealth. I mean, Ophora water goes for $26 a bottle there.
Erewhon doesn’t always have quality house-branded food, either.
I cannot speak to the flavor and enjoyability of the foods Erewhon makes in-house. I’ve never been there, though I’ll openly admit I’m curious about their smoothies and salads.
As a person who will spend top dollar for good food as both a topic of culinary writing and as an experience, I’ll always defend people who shell out big bucks for a great meal. I mean, I can’t judge there.
I’m sure Erewhon has great in-house foods. You can’t have as many good reviews without doing something right. Sadly, Erewhon doesn't have the perfect track record it claims to have when it comes to its brand of goods.
In 2018, a warning was released not to eat Erewhon’s brand of canned soups as a result of a suspected botulism outbreak. This was a result of improper canning, a very high-risk mistake that can yield deadly results.
Even brands found elsewhere get a higher price tag at Erewhon.
It’s true. Driscoll’s strawberries are being sold there, often for about twice the price I pay for them at Shoprite or elsewhere from what my LA-based buds tell me.
Business Insider did a quick study of Erewhon’s prices versus Whole Foods’s prices for the same stuff. Take a look at the differences from their study
- Low-fat Oatly was being sold for $6.99 at Erewhon. The same box of oat milk was sold for $5.49 at Whole Foods.
- Eden brand organic black beans sold for $6.99 at Erewhon too. At Whole Foods, the same can have a $4.99 price tag, which is still a bit pricey in my opinion.
I decided to look at the prices myself. Here’s more evidence of the pattern:
- Organic Girl Prewashed Baby Spinach (10 ounces) sells for $5.99 at Erewhon. This isn’t too bad, since it’s the same price around the area I used to live in — possibly cheaper. With that said, I still found that same brand at Acme for $5.49 with a sale for the same box.
- Harry’s Berries are available for sale at Erewhon for $24.99 typically. If you order that same brand delivered from Farm to People, it’s $19.99. These are not omakase strawberries, either. They’re just very high-end berries made in California.
- Del Real Medjool Dates cost $8.49 at Erewhon. For fairness’s sake, I’ll admit these are roughly standard for Del Real prices. Even so, you can still find them online for $7.99 a pack.
With that said, some things at Erewhon were cheaper than elsewhere — mostly upscale organic clamshell produce and specialty brand goods.
All things considered, this highlights a classic difference between Boomers and Gen-Z and old and new rich.
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Having grown up around both “old money” and “nouveau riche” types, there’s a major difference that’s impossible to ignore between the families. People who were newly minted millionaires in my area always made sure people knew they were wealthy.
The new rich are people who are still in that phase of “I want to buy all the things I never had before,” that phase that involves flaunting money because you have it. Most of the stuff they bought didn’t last very long. They also weren’t connoisseurs of quality items, despite their claims.
The old rich, on the other hand, didn’t care about the “mainstream brands” that the new rich insisted on. The wealthiest people I met were people who often drove beat-up vintage cars, avoided big names like Versace, and often kept their dining simple.
The new rich often congregated at large, noisy bars that had overpriced but “pretty-looking” meals. The drinks were often light, simple, and involved premade mixes. In recent years, new rich often ended up in “influencer-friendly” restaurants that upcharge a lot and had photo opportunity areas.
The old rich I knew? The truly old wealth families didn’t snub their noses at ACME or Shoprite. Though rare, you might find them at Taco Bell or a local pizza joint. They didn’t always go out in their best attire, but when they went out, they went out.
The restaurants they’d go to were ones that involved serious gourmet expertise. They would go to the quiet, local restaurants that somehow managed to make the best butter steaks you’d ever taste. The cocktails they’d buy never involved mixes or gold flakes. It was just good food.
In other words, one group went because they wanted to enjoy high-food. The other group went because they wanted to be seen enjoying things people assumed were high-quality food products. These are not the same thing.
In a world where diets are a status symbol, make sure you’re not getting fleeced.
Food is not just food. It’s an experience, a major part of your life, and the stuff that fuels your body. You owe it to yourself to eat well and really enjoy what you are eating.
Assuming that you’re getting top-tier food because you’re paying a ton is not the way to get great meals. It is, however, a way to make a lot of other people very rich off your ignorance.
What more can I say? Pretense has a premium price tag, especially in the culinary world.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.