Bananas are the most-sold item at most grocery stores and, notably, Wal-Mart.

Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to make a highly educated guess about their purchasing activity and, thus, to project volumes for products. But bananas defy that wisdom, except that people in aggregate buy a lot of them. Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason. Bananas aren't seasonal purchases like berries or corn or other fruits or vegetables. Bananas also tend to be a high purchase at gas stations and convenience stores.

Bananas have to be effectively "tricked" into continuing to ripen after being prematurely picked and then refrigerated for transit. So there are banana ripening centers that pump ethylene through a chilled chamber to get them to ripen.