For most supermarkets, bananas are what people in the biz call a loss leader: They’re sold below cost to lure customers into the store, where they’ll presumably buy other, more profitable items too. Bananas are the bang-for-buck poster child, typically setting you back less than 70 cents per pound in the US. (The retail price of oranges is more than double, at $1.50 per pound.) One simply cannot have too many bananas.
That is, unless one shops on online grocery delivery sites like Instacart, where people have been known to end up with far more bananas than they bargained for.
Recently, Carla Sosenko placed an Instacart order from her local Wegmans: She wanted four organic bananas. Instead, four bunches (around 20 bananas) arrived on her doorstep. “I thought it was hilarious and not at all surprising,” says the 46-year-old writer living in New York City. “It’s happened before.”
Though ordering snafus have been a side effect of online shopping since its inception, floods of bananas are a recurring presence on social media feeds. Search “accidentally ordered bananas” on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, and you’ll find an abundance of misbegotten fruit: seven bunches instead of seven bananas, a family who accidentally ordered 114 individual bananas, and 10 pounds of bananas instead of 10 bananas. On Reddit, where gripes about too many bananas abound, one particularly helpful thread is entirely dedicated to how to use excess bananas ordered online.
I should be clear: There are worse things in life than an unexpected influx of bananas. But look, it can be a nerve-wracking event, especially when you don’t want to waste food. “I felt anxious and horrified by the pressure of now having to make banana bread or find a Ziploc bag to freeze the bananas,” says Mona Kirschner, a 35-year-old writer living in New York City who recently ordered two conventionally grown bananas from Wegmans but received nine.
Of course, sometimes we are the architects of our own demise. One user took to X to publicly rat out their fiance, who accidentally added five pounds of bananas to their cart…12 times. But surely this much banana botching isn’t all down to user error. Virtually every online grocery ordering site, from FreshDirect to Amazon and Shipt, has reportedly had issues delivering the correct number of bananas. But the most regularly noted peddler of excess bananas seems to be Instacart, which has partnered with over 80,000 stores and, since its founding, has delivered over 900 million orders. The company also announced a milestone in April: It had delivered one billion bananas, enough to lap the earth more than five times. But how many bananas did its customers actually want? Maybe only three laps’ worth?
I decided to place my own Instacart order last week from a nearby Sprouts Farmers Market in Salt Lake City, where I live. I added just two individual bananas to my cart—a gotcha number I figured could feasibly be confused for bunches, like what seemed to happen to Kirschner in New York City—plus loads of other veggies I needed for a weekend of cooking and watching Netflix. The ordering interface clearly read: “Organic Banana, $0.28 each (est.).” The dropdown option to add bananas stipulated: “1 banana,” “2 bananas,” etc. The product image featured a single banana.
Sure enough, two single bananas arrived. My adrenaline faded. Like most stores, Sprouts sells in bunches and customers can break off individual bananas as needed. But in a tangential twist of fate, nine organic beets showed up when I thought I had only ordered three. The drop down clearly stated “1 ct.” (presumably meaning “one count”)—but the product image bore three beets, which clued me in on how things might have gone awry. I did not realize that “1 ct.” actually meant one count of three beets. (The total poundage could have tipped me off, but I am an Australian who deals in kilos.) In the end, I secured my intended amount of bananas but I was dreadfully long on beets.
Interpreting banana orders is confusing for Instacart shoppers too. Unlike Amazon or FreshDirect, which own their inventory, Instacart shoppers have to buy from various grocery chains. The user places an order from their local store and the shoppers pack and deliver the bananas.
Each customer is different, though. “Does this mean one single banana or a bunch of them?” A shopper in r/InstacartShoppers posted along with a screenshot of one of their delivery requests, in which a customer had seemingly requested just one piece of fruit. Virtually all of the shoppers who commented agreed the interface was referring to a single banana—and a line of Instacart copy distinctly reads, You can separate bunches to get the right amount—but they couldn’t get on the same page about what the customer really wanted. One shopper said, “People buy one of something all the time.” Another wrote, “Very often customers will select one, but actually mean they want one bunch.”
One of the hardest parts of the job is decoding customer orders, says Eric Waldron, a Salt Lake City-based Instacart shopper who’s been working for the company for more than three years. Once he had a ginger order from Sprouts that added up to multiple pounds (three bulk boxes each weighing over a pound). “I could tell it wasn’t a restaurant or anything placing the order, it was just a regular person,” says Waldron. “So I was thinking, there’s no way they want this much ginger.” Waldron reached out to his customer for clarification. But, he admits, oftentimes he doesn’t hear back and has to make a decision for the client. (Many others on the r/InstacartShoppers banana thread described a similar issue with unresponsive customers.)
This seems to be what got Kirschner into trouble. She’d ordered two individual bananas (0.5 lb), but on her receipt, the original weight was adjusted to two bunches’ worth (3.68 lb). Was she notified of this change, or asked to approve it? Kirschner doesn’t remember seeing anything, but an Instacart representative tells me the app encourages customers and shoppers to communicate while orders are being fulfilled.
The spokesperson also says, “When shopping for a batch that includes bananas, shoppers are advised to pick the correct number and/or weight of bananas that the customer ordered.” That could result in slight differences between the number ordered and the final count—but doesn’t explain how two bananas become two bunches.
In some cases, the product images and descriptions on Instacart are pretty befuddling too. “At Sam’s Club, their bunches of bananas come all together,” says Waldron. “Bananas aren’t sold individually, so you just scan the code on the packaging, and then you grab the bundle of bananas.” Sure enough, I saw my local Sam’s Club has two banana options on the app: a 3-lb bundle for $1.73 and a mysterious option that has no other information but the price: $5.36, referring to what must be at least…nine pounds of bananas ($1.73 x 3 = $5.19). However, this huge haul is denoted by product copy that reads “Banana, 1 ct” and a product image of one single banana. It’s easy to see how a customer might think one single banana costs $5.36.
I needed a professional to diagnose Instacart’s user interface. “Wow, bad,” says e-commerce designer Ian Hatcher-Williams, noting the discrepancy between some product images and the actual item, as well as the inconsistent way of describing bananas (each, bunch, count). “The product title should say what the item is,” he says, adding that both “1 banana” and “1 ct” “both imply...one banana.” Meanwhile at Sam’s Club, one count actually means more than $5 worth of bananas, and at my local Sprouts, one count is three beets. For bananas specifically, Hatcher-Williams suggests Instacart use the words “single” and “bunch” instead of “count” or “each” (which could easily refer to each banana or each bunch) to describe banana quantities. (“We are always making updates and improvements to the Instacart platform to ensure shoppers can easily and accurately shop and deliver orders,” the Instacart spokesperson tells me.)
After staring at hundreds of photos of bananas for far too long, willing them for answers, I started wondering: What even is a bunch of bananas? After talking to a self-described “banana weirdo,” I learned that grocery bananas don’t technically come in bunches at all.
“The popular way we refer to bananas isn’t correct,” says Dan Koeppel, the author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. A bunch technically describes all the bananas grown on one tree—up to 250 individual bananas. Koeppel presents his evidence: The popular song Day-O released by Jamaican artist Harry Belafonte in 1956. “Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch,” go the lyrics. The bunches in my local supermarket are half-a-foot tall at best. So what are those yellow clusters called? “A hand,” says Koeppel. “A finger, then, is the individual banana.”
When I emailed a different agricultural historian (who didn’t want to be named because she didn’t feel qualified to discuss the subject), she brought up another, more psychological point: “I will say that I am hesitant to tear two off a larger bunch if there is anyone nearby to witness it,” she says. My anonymous historian instead hunts for a bundled pair of bananas while shopping for her weekly two. Koeppel says this grocery store faux pas is inadvisable for a reason. “You don’t want people tearing apart banana hands in the market because they’re going to expose a little bit of flesh near the stem and those bananas will go bad much quicker,” he says. “So that’s why they’re sold as hands.” (Instacart doesn’t seem to have qualms, though, based on the app’s suggestion for shoppers to separate bunches.)
Waldron, meanwhile, says the best way users can make sure they end up with the right amount of bananas is to get ahead of the problem: Leave a message for your shopper. “I’d say one out of every 25 customers ever use” the feature, he says. “But there is an option to enter notes under each item.” The Instacart spokesperson encouraged the same. As is the case with many conflicts in life, communication is key.
So, there we have it. I am sorry to report that my bumpy, bending investigation ends here. Perhaps customers aren’t paying enough attention while ordering; perhaps Instacart shoppers are confused too; perhaps the Instacart app could offer more guidance for everyone. Or, perhaps bananas, a historically fickle fruit to categorize, simply transcend material calculuses and human exigencies—such as, well, grocery delivery orders.