Why It's Best To Avoid Buying Bananas At Costco, According To Redditors

Bananas are beloved. They are nutritious and portable, and sold pretty much everywhere in whatever quantity you happen to need, whether that is one or two for a breakfast smoothie or a big bunch for a bake sale sized batch of homemade banana bread. You can usually just pull off what you need from the bunch, because they are sold by the pound or by each banana. Costco changes that equation, because their bananas are sold in big, 3 pound bundles, and Redditors say that bulk format turns what should be an easygoing, fruit bowl staple into a small — but nevertheless annoying — household management issue. 

The problem is part volume and part timing. If the fruit ripens weirdly, or all at once, the bargain is lost. It is one thing to stock up on a massive amount of something that doesn't go bad at all, like toilet paper, or something that can be refrigerated, like their Kirkland Signature grass-fed butter (which we think gives Kerrygold a run for its money), but for something with a short, delicate lifespan, it may make more sense to buy little by little, as needed from a fruit stand or neighborhood shop.

The quantity complaint is evergreen, and it is part of why they made our list of nine foods you should never buy at Costco. One Redditor sums it up, "I can't eat such large quantities before they go bad." That is the main mismatch for many shoppers. Bananas are a fruit people often buy by feel and forecast: a couple in the cart if they're already yellow, a few more if they're green, none if they know they have some already-browning ones at home. When the flexibility to pull-and-peel is out of your hands, you are buying a big banana plan, whether or not your household needs one.

Regarding ripening weirdness, which seems to irritate people even more than the excessive volume, some Redditors complain that Costco bananas stay hard and green for days, then jump straight to brown, no cheerful, useful yellow stage. "They just...stayed green. Then, a few days ago, they suddenly went brown. There was no in between," said one user. Others reported similar: "Green and hard then straight to brown and slimy." Many shoppers describe the same betrayal, the peel says one thing, the fruit says another, and the perfectly ripe window slams shut before anyone is able to make a decent snack happen.

Part of what makes bananas so finicky is that they are a climacteric fruit, meaning that they continue ripening after harvest in response to ethylene gas. That's why bananas are picked green in the first place. While most of the world's bananas are grown in India, the bulk of those eaten in the United States come from Latin American countries, far far away from most North American grocery stores, then shipped long distances. They're much too soft and bruise-prone to survive the trip fully ripe. The whole system depends on getting the fruit to the store firm but mature, so it can, theoretically, ripen in store or in home. When the system works, the ethylene gas triggers the peel to gradually turn yellow as starch converts to sugar. When it doesn't, you get the strange, uncanny valley that Redditors keep describing, hard and green outside, or overripe looking but dense and astringent inside, or somehow, eerily, both green and brown at once.

A lot can interfere with the long, delicate shipping process, starting with temperature, which fluctuates a lot as the banana moves through each part of the journey. Bananas dislike cold. Their ideal storage temperature is 54 degrees, and chilling injury can disrupt the normal ripening pattern. Ethylene exposure is an inevitable factor — it is what's at play when storing bananas next to other fruit makes it spoil faster, and why people tuck unripe bananas into paper bags with apples, keep them away from other fruits they don't want to ripen, or wrap the stems in plastic wrap to reduce how quickly the whole bunch progresses. 

A few Redditors speculate that Costco bananas may have been harvested too early, exposed inconsistently to ethylene, or handled incorrectly. The overarching theme of the comments on Reddit establishes a pattern: that Costco's ripening has, well, gone bananas. But, they may work fine for big families, smoothie people, bakers, and anyone who wants to slice and freeze or freeze-dry to save for their apocalypse bunker supplies.

Unripe bananas can be eaten, and several Redditors more or less treat their Costco banana purchases as pre-banana-bread bananas, noting that, "we consistently have to make banana bread with the last three of the bunch," which is not a bad problem to have if you accept and plan for it. When life gives you a bunch of overripe bananas, we recommend our Best Brown Butter Banana Bread. Costco bananas are not bad bananas. They are just sold in a quantity and at a stage that only makes sense if your household is ready to eat fast. If you do end up with a big batch of bananas, there are ways to keep them fresh. Now, let's talk about that industrial sized tub of cheeseballs....