Just shopped at my local Safeway. They had Tilapia on sale at $1.99 an lb. The fish came from China. How does fish get from China to my local store and someone still makes a profit?
They save money on heavy metal disposal by injecting it into your fish. As has been said, we send them toxic debt and they return the favor by sending us toxic products.
Did you not read the Apple thread?
They simply pay 230K employees an extra biscuit to assemble your fish.
~Matt
Just shopped at my local Safeway. They had Tilapia on sale at $1.99 an lb. The fish came from China. How does fish get from China to my local store and someone still makes a profit?
I would be more interested in how it is still fresh (frozen or not).
Tilapia is not “fresh” when it is still swimming around live. At the fish farms Tilapia are grown in the tanks that receive the waste flush from the other fish tanks.
They don’t. But they figure that at that price you’ll try it and be so impressed with the 100 percent manufactured taste that you will go back there and use Safeway for all your future tilapia (at full price) and other fish needs.
Consumer promotions are the bedrock of the food and packaged goods industry.
They call it Tilapia, but it is really Chicken of the Sea - Seagull.
Don’t let the label fool you.
I think the less you know about the origins of that fish the better.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_44/b4201088229228.htm
(from page 3)
“They’re able to cut their feed costs because they’re able to use manure,” he fumes. Raised-in-China tilapia are therefore much cheaper, according to Picchietti. “The Chinese are able to use cowshit,” he says, “and I can’t.” Chinese tilapia growers deny Picchietti’s claim.
Fascinating article. I am kind of an enviro when it comes to sea creatures and our consumption thereof.
Some interesting excerpts:
"…from China are in the freezer sections of Wal-Mart superstores around the country, selling under the Sea Best name. The two ingredients are: “Tilapia” and “Carbon Monoxide (To Retain Natural Color).”
With all the talk of Foxconn and sweat shops, I maintain the cost of products from China are going to keep increasing. Case in point:
“…With China’s economy booming, costs are up sharply. His rent—which was just 500 yuan ($75) per mu (equal to about 79 square yards)—has more than doubled. Pay for his dozen full-time workers and 15 part-timers has jumped 40 percent, to 1,500 yuan a month. Feed and electricity costs are up, too. Meanwhile, the price he can get for his fish hasn’t kept pace. Last year, 10 percent of the Zhanjiang region’s tilapia farmers gave up on farming the fish.”
A quick google search reveals the wholesale price for frozen Talapia fillets from China is around 50 cents/lb. Another quick search shows that shipping by boat in a referigeraged container is around $2000 per container. I have no idea what that would be per pound but I bet you can cram alot of fish in one of those babies so it has to be just penneys per pound.
Therefore my wild ass guess is that your fish hit the US shore at less than 60 cents/lb including trasport. You’d have some stateside trasport costs but, agian, train and truck is cheap so that would be just penneys per pound. There is a markeup as it gets sold to Safeway but even if the mark up was 100% (I’m pretty sure it isn’t even close to that in the gorcery business) Safeway would still be making a few cents per pound selling it at $1.99/lb. In all likelyhood, they are making more.
For a couple years now, the companies looking for absolute lowest cost manufacturing have been pulling out of rising wages China in favor of places like Vietnam.
A lot of the economic realities of our world are more obvious if you remember this:
shipping stuff on huge boats over the ocean is essentially free.
They use sludgey cheap oil and they are SO HUGE once you divide the cost of shipping by how many items are on the boat you basically get 0$ per item.
Just shopped at my local Safeway. They had Tilapia on sale at $1.99 an lb. The fish came from China. How does fish get from China to my local store and someone still makes a profit?
Thanks. That was eye opening.
Thanks. That was eye opening.
what will really disturb you is there basically isn’t any food you can eat where you aren’t being somewhat environmentally irresponsible.
too many people!!
shipping stuff on huge boats over the ocean is essentially free.
I have a hard time getting my brain around that, but it must be true. A co-worker finished a stone patio a while back. The pallets of rock that he used originated in a quarry in India. They shipped that rock to America and sold it for the same price as rock from a local quarry. Simply amazing.
The largest ships can hold 15,000 of these:
imagine how many tilapia you can fit in each of those
shipping stuff on huge boats over the ocean is essentially free.
I have a hard time getting my brain around that, but it must be true. A co-worker finished a stone patio a while back. The pallets of rock that he used originated in a quarry in India. They shipped that rock to America and sold it for the same price as rock from a local quarry. Simply amazing.
A lot of people also don’t realize how much cargo travels by sea, since they don’t have experience with ports or how cheap it can be. The answer is nearly ALL of it, except for a very small portion of high value/high priority stuff that is a tiny fraction of the total weight moved.
Which is one of the reasons we have a large Navy.
You are assuming that the store had to make a profit on that item. What else did you buy with that purchase or what else did other people buy that visited the store just for that specially priced item?