I live in a fairly international area of the country. Off the top of my head, there are predominantly Salvadoran, Korean, Mexican, Vietnamese, Indian, and Ethiopian communities within about a five minute drive of my house.

Consequently, there are lots of international groceries nearby. And one thing my girlfriend tipped me off to is that you can get herbs and spices at international groceries at a fraction of the price you’ll pay for them at chain grocery stores like Giant, Safeway, or Harris-Teeter. It’s really pretty amazing. Get your spices at an international store, and you’ll pay 80 or 90 percent less than you’ll pay at a regular grocery.

Today, I was in a grocery store called Shoppers Food Warehouse. It’s a chain that sort of straddles the line between a retail store like those mentioned above and the wholesale stores like Costco or Sam’s Club.

The Shoppers stores around here also tend to cater to the international community. And the one nearest my house now actually has an entire section of the store devoted exclusively to international food (I call it “the Goya section”).

This morning I glanced down the new international aisles and saw that there was a section for herbs and spices. Could the vast price discrepancies between international spices and domestic spices exist within the same store?

I checked. Indeed they can. I didn’t have a pen and paper handy, or I would have written down more examples. But the one spice I checked was ground nutmeg. In the international aisle, Shoppers was selling a 1.5-ounce jar of ground nutmeg for $1.39. I mosied on over to the spice section in the regular part of the store. Sure enough. A 1.8 ounce jar went for $6.59! Maybe I’ll go back and check, but I would guess there are similar discrepancies with other herbs and spices.

Now perhaps there are some qualitative differences between international brands and American brands. I don’t know. I do know that I’ve bought herbs and spices from both, and haven’t noticed much difference. Nutmeg is nutmeg.

So I’m wondering, what explains the difference in pricing? I at first thought perhaps the international groceries were getting their spices from less-regulated sources, a kind of gray market for herbs and spices. But that wouldn’t explain why the same spice would be priced so vastly differently in different aisles of the same store. Might it have something to do with subsidies in the country where the different brands of nutmeg are located? Are American spices just overpriced? Why? I’m curious.

Seems like a Tyler Cowen kind of question.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 2:28 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.