Some lessons are learned the hard way. My husband and I spent $100 total on 5 large bags of oranges and grapefruits while in Florida to bring back to friends and family. After we had traveled for a few hours, we decided to eat a few in the car. Once I started going through them, I found several rotten oranges and others that weren’t even ripe. Finding out that we had bags of bad fruit was a huge disappointment and definitely a waste of money!
The fruit sat in our van overnight and the next morning you could smell “rotten fruit” in my van and this made me even more irritated at the situation. Luckily I was able to find our receipt and the fruit company said that it was the end of the season and that she would happily refund our money. Here are a few fruit buying tips she gave me:
- Ask the fruit stand for a bag so that you can hand pick your own fruit.
- Have the fruit stand worker hand pick your bag of fruit for you instead of buying a prepacked bag.
- Always keep your receipt.
We would have happily hand-picked our own fruit, but unfortunately I didn’t know that was possible. We asked to buy fruit and the fruit stand brought us the bags of fruit to put in our van. He even told us how great our fruit was going to be since it had just been picked 4 days ago. Have you ever bought Florida oranges from the fruit stands? Has your fruit buying experience been a good one or a nightmare?
I have never bought hand picked fruits on the side of the road. But I would definitely hand pick my fruit so that I can make sure that I am buying quality fruit and not get ripped off.
I agree, I wish they would have given me that option when I bought our fruit:(