I just can’t resist telling you about the folks I told Olpea about. They started a business called the Peach Truck. THey have a web site you can check and also do tons of newspaper and other advertising, wherein they post the location where “the Peach Truck” will be. They have an old 1950’s farm truck with wooden rails, and they will go to a different town every day, or sometimes different locations in the same town. They started out in Nashville, TN and would drive out to the smaller surrounding towns on different days. Now they have even spread into other STATES! (I imagine there is more than 1 peach truck by now). As Olpea mentioned, they sell their peaches in little brown paper bags with a picture of the farm truck on it. Overall, they have done an incredible job with their marketing. Its very clever and has been wildly successful. Seriously, people literally line up at the locations they are going to be at. The owners also frequently go onto the daytime local news shows and do little cooking segments with peaches, and always work in some advertising and mentioning where they will be that day and the rest of the week. Clever.
But what stuns me is how absolutely incredibly outrageous their prices are. First, they promote all their peaches as “REAL GEORGIA PEACHES” and make a big deal out of that, as if a peach from Georgia is much much better than from anywhere else. Then they sell their peaches by the bag, not by the pound. That little bag usually has 8 peaches and never more than 10 and it sells for $18 to $20 (not sure why the price changes or what makes it one price or the other). Think about that…that is about $2 PER PEACH!!! And people line up waiting to pay that. But here is the real astounding part. They also have started taking advance orders for peaches on their web site. These peaches come in a box that has 13 round holes in it, and each peach is individually wrapped in a sheet of foam and put in one of the holes. The price of that box with 13 peaches? $34.50!!! That is almost $3 per peach. That doesn’t include shipping, either, so I’m sure if you have them shipped it would be over $40- so MORE THAN $3 per peach. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
I suppose they have the right to charge whatever people will pay, and since peaches aren’t a necessity for life (except to all of us of course) I don’t suppose I can accuse them of price gouging, but it sure feels like it when I see all those people buying those $2 and $3 peaches. CRAZY.
If $3 per peach just seems too high to believe, here is a link to their web site: