Stop the Stickers . . . Please

It seems that unless you go to a farmers' market, you can't buy a piece of fruit anywhere that doesn't have a sticker on it -- sometimes more than one.

Usually, the stickers give you information that you already knew from the sign that appeared in the grocery store. If you're interested in eating a piece of fruit out of hand, it gets annoying having to look for the sticker and pull it off. And sometimes those stickers can be difficult to peel off without digging your finger into the fruit.

As this N.Y. Times article explains, I'm not the only one who has found this frustrating. An elderly woman from Clarksville, Tex., voiced this complaint:

"I was picking all the little stickers from the Piggly Wiggly off my plums and my avocado pears and my peaches. Then I had to make fruit salad out of the ones that got hurt when I took the stickers off, and then I had to wash the glue off the other ones before I put them in the fruit bowl."

I love her choice of words -- "the ones that got hurt." How pervasive is this? Well, check out this photo that someone posted on Flickr, and you get a sense for how sticker-happy the grocery stores have become.

Grocery chains need to stop doing this. It's annoying as hell. Let your signs tell us what kind of pear or peach that is. Stop slapping stickers on everything.