Orange complaint

I take an orange most mornings for breakfast, with most of our oranges coming from the big Sainsbury's up the road, usually what they are pleased to call 'taste the difference', sometimes in a net, sometimes loose. The one I am looking at is more or less spherical, about three inches in diameter and nicely coloured in orange - my understanding being that if you want an orange to be reliably orange it needs to be spray painted.

The complaint being that while these oranges are generally satisfactory, they vary a good deal, even within purchase.

Some of them might be characterised as large satsumas. Peel comes off very easily, spongy in feel, a bit watery inside. Some have navels which I don't care for, with the navel being so much waste as far as I am concerned. Some are very hard to peel, with the pith separating from the peel and being hard to get off without damaging the orange proper. Some are rather chewy, which I believe to be the result of having been stored too long, although it may be that some of them just come like that. And some are very good.

The problem is that we can't tell from the outside. What they look like outside seems to be no guide to what they are like inside. Nor does price help much - paying more may improve the average but does not result in reliability.

Maybe this is the result of cutting costs. I fondly imagine that in the olden days when Sainsbury's was the grocer of choice for the housewives who fussed about their bacon and cheese and who could afford to pay, that somewhere in the HQ in Stamford Street there would be the Tsar (to use a word which has become a bit overused) for bacon, a Tsar for cheddar, a Tsar for butter and a Tsar for foreign cheese, assuming, that is, that they sold this last. And when they moved into oranges there would have been a Tsar for oranges, or at the very least for citrus. A man who knew everything there was to know about oranges. And nothing could be done with oranges in Sainsbury's without getting his nod. Who maybe, during his holidays, paid visits to orange groves where he would be royally entertained by the growers. Who was cute when it came to buying. With the result that Sainsbury's oranges were reliable and good. Which was the whole point of using a big grocer, rather than a corner greengrocer or one of the barrow boys down Surrey Street. The former could afford to carry experts.

But maybe now, in their effort to match the prices of everyone else, they have let all these sort of people go. Or at least not replaced them when they retired. And buying has become a matter for the purchasing department, staffed up by people who have perhaps got MBA's but who do not know too much about grocery.

PS 1: fifty years ago there used to be a top class fruit and vegetable street market in Surrey Street in Croydon. I think that last time I was there, a few years ago now, it had been given over to fancy goods and street food. And the Dog and Bull was not the house it used to be either. They probably sell food and have a television.

PS 2: I also remember reading once, possibly about Sainsbury's, that junior members of the family had to cut their teeth (as it were) on butter. They would spend most of their time, day and night, down at London Docks, keeping an eye on the butter as it came it, making sure it was fit to be sold. Can't imagine anything of that sort going on now.