The picture (me, with a camera phone, at Andronico’s) says it all. A dollar-off special on marinara sauce — $9.99 a jar.. The sign is not a mistake. An online search confirms that someone is intentionally selling pasta sauce for 10 bucks (and up) a quart. Our dilemma here at the Infospigot household is that we do not have pasta fine enough to exalt with this product.
I’ll see you one further Infospigot: no canned tomatoes are worth 10 bucks. A bottle, *maybe* but not a can. Unless it’s a big can. I’d eat pasta Reagano (that’s with ketchup) before I forked out 10 bones for a can of red sauce.
Man, What ever happened to Ragu or Chef Boyardi? How many ounces is that jar anyway? I’m thinking it’s one of those Cosco platoon-size containers. Or is it all organic? What next, five bucks for a box of saltines?
It was a 24- or 32-ounce jar. It’s all organic. Probably it’s got a magic ingredient like yogi sweat (or “Richard Simmons tank-top squeezins,” to steal from Letterman) that makes it so pricy
Spaghetti sauce with (magic) mushrooms, perhaps?
Check out this Malcolm Gladwell piece from The New Yorker:
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html
He begins by recounting how mustard in the United States used to be just plain ol’ yellow mustard. And then came Grey Poupon…
“The rise of Grey Poupon proved that the American supermarket shopper was willing to pay more–in this case, $3.99 instead of $1.49 for eight ounces–as long as what they were buying carried with it an air of sophistication and complex aromatics. Its success showed, furthermore, that the boundaries of taste and custom were not fixed: that just because mustard had always been yellow didn’t mean that consumers would use only yellow mustard. It is because of Grey Poupon that the standard American supermarket today has an entire mustard section.”
And it’s the reason — Gladwell goes on to say — we now see a big variety of pasta sauces at a broad range of prices (although I’ve never heard of breaking into double figures — yow!). The question the article focuses on is: Can the same thing happen with ketchup? Someone is trying!
Gladwell’s stuff is great — it’s a real pleasure to read his exposition of subjects like this (reminds me, it just strikes me now, of long-ago John McPhee stuff; though I’d say McPhee’s prose was warmer).
I’ve done a little checking into that $11 marinara sauce. I’ll do a post after I make a couple phone calls.
Well, well. Turns out Rao’s Homemade was, just three short years ago, declared winner in an important marinara taste test.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2059252/