People make mistakes.

Yet, some of the mistakes are so extraordinary that they make you wonder: "How could this have happened?"

One day, Japanese Instagram user pokupoku0303 (@pokupoku0303) was shopping at their local supermarket. They stopped by the produce section to buy vegetables.

That's when a bag of carrots made them do a double-take.

These are definitely not watermelons...!

Carrots are far from watermelons not only in size, color and shape, but also price. In Japan, watermelons can be quite expensive. As of September 19th, 2022, the average price of watermelons was 249 JPY per kilogram. Since they usually weigh between 3 to 5 kg, or 7 to 9 kg for large ones, you can see that 1,580 JPY (11.02 USD at today's rate*) is not an unreasonable price compared to the average. Carrots, on the other hand, were 168 JPY per kilogram as of Aug. 23rd, 2022. Since they weigh about 200 grams on average, three carrots would be around 100 JPY on average (around 70 cents USD at today's rate). The most expensive carrots can go up to 600 JPY per kilogram, but even then, this price doesn't make sense.

By what mistake could a label for watermelon have been put on a carrot?

Usually, no matter how tired they are, a clerk wouldn't normally make such a mistake. It's very unusual to see a mistake of this kind in Japan.

So, if this label was on the carrots, did somebody get a sweet deal on cheap watermelons?

* Rate calculated on September 19th, 2022