Going Bananas for Bananas

One of my favorite, if not the favorite, tv programs  of my childhood was Captain Kangaroo. One of his recurring characters was the Banana  Man. He always fascinated me with the endless  variety of items he pulled from his bottomless coat pockets , featuring of course the lowly banana.

Both the Captain and Banana  Man  are long gone but the banana  has now become a bigger star than  ever  before. Thanks to Japanese ingenuity ( who else)  it now has its own vending machine. A Japanese subsidiary of  David Murdock’s Dole Corporation  installed its  first banana vending machine almost a month ago in Shibuya station on one of the country’s busiest subway lines. Kept cool by a refrigerator inside, bananas sell for $1.50 each  or $4.50  a bunch. Thus far the machine  has been  a big success.

This is the perfect solution for those locales who are busily banning soft drinks, etc from city owned facilities. I wrote about that exact thing taking place in San Antonio under the direction of city manager Sheryl Sculley. She now has a healthy alternative to the evils of soft drinks. First bananas and then the sky or banana tree is the limit. Then the city can just  wait and peel in, uh reel in the profits. Probably should not locate a machine anywhere near the zoo’s primate habitat though. It would be  a shame to turn lawful chimps into criminals.

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