Dear Trader Joe's Produce Buyer,

First off, let me tell you how much a love your store. Inexpensive but good wine and beer, quality prepared foods for when you just don't feel like cooking, cheese, coffee, baked goods, and more. We must spend 90% of our grocery budget there. However, your produce offerings concern me. Yes, I buy your fruits and vegetables, but sometimes reluctantly, as much of it's over-packaged or in odd quantities (although I do love your cherry tomatoes and Persian cucumbers—keep 'em coming).

The most disturbing thing, however, in the produce department has to be your bananas. I don't know if you know this or not, but bananas are supposed to be yellow in color when ripe and edible. Sometimes it's ok to get them a little green, as they soon ripen into their full sunny splendor. But the bananas we picked up there last week were green. Really green. Kind of a deep lime green of the shade most associated with, well, limes. And, oddly enough, they were the ripest ones of the bunch. As of today, approximately six days later, they still haven't ripened, although they seem to be growing brown spots on their still-green peels. And they're still hard as a rock. They'd be quite useful as tent stakes, but alas, we're not going camping anytime soon. They'd also be useful in the unlikely event of a vampire attack, as they be the perfect things to drive into their undead hearts. But they're really not very useful as bananas. Perhaps your signage can be changed to read "banana-like-objects" and list some alternate uses like those I mentioned above?

I tried to peel one for my insistent two-year-old daughter, who really wanted a banana the other day. I literally could not strip the peel from the banana-like-object's rock-hard core. She was a little disappointed, as most of the bananas we've purchased in the past have been a little more user friendly. I had to explain to her that although the object may have closely resembled a banana, in fact it was really something else entirely. Ever tried to explain that to an unhappy two-year-old? I didn't think so...

Needless to say, I'll be back, and I'll probably buy bananas from you because I don't want to make a trip to yet another store, especially with one or possibly two small children in tow. I'd consider it a personal favor if someone on your staff would try to make sure they are at list a little bit yellow. I'd really appreciate it.

Sincerely,
Andrew

P.S. If you could tell the wine buyer to try to scare up some more of that Grüner Veltliner that I really should have bought several cases of before it disappeared from your stores forever, that would be swell, too.

A