Post-it Peanuts

From time to time a curious thing happens when you are sitting outside a bar in Rio. You will be chatting away, drinking beer and gradually starting to get a little hungry when you glance down at the table and notice what appears to be a small post-it note on which are sitting 9 or 10 peanuts. Where did that come from?

Post-it peanuts – hard to resist when you’re drinking beer and caipirinha

Peanut sellers are found pretty much wherever there are a lot of people drinking at tables out on the street. Their strategy is to nip past, placing a few peanuts on a small scrap of paper on each table. They often whip past pretty quickly so if you happen to be involved in a conversation you might not notice them.

And it’s a great sales strategy – while the peanuts remain on the table untouched you are of course not obliged to buy them but leaving them alone is not easy! Half the time I don’t even make a conscious decision to eat them – I’ll just be talking and suddenly find I’m eating peanuts! When the seller then comes past they will offer you more peanuts, this time wrapped up into nice fat cones. Again, I think the cones are rather a good strategy – I’m sure it maximises the apparent quantity of peanuts. And personally, I just like the way they look.

The damp patches on the bottom cone are just from salty oil on the peanuts… I think.

Two Reais for one cone or five Reais for three. If you can afford to drink a few beers then most likely this isn’t going to break the bank.

There is a bit of a grey area regarding the post-it peanuts. Theoretically this is a free sample. But I always feel that if you eat the sample then you are obligated to buy at least one cone – it would take someone with a lot of cara de pau (literally “wooden face”, meaning rude/cheeky) to eat the sample and then refuse to buy the cone. My Carioca friend Karin puts it this way “the sample is free, but if you eat the sample then it shows that you like peanuts so why not buy the cone?”.

“Er, run that by me again. You’ve eaten the sample but now you don’t want to pay R$2 for a cone?”. I’m not going there with this guy. He was friendly enough but did look kind of high on drugs…

Karin also mentions that if you have the self-control to leave the nuts alone, the sellers generally won’t retrieve them, so later on you can safely eat them without being forced to buy more. But for me this kind of self-control is purely theoretical – I’ve heard it exists but have never experienced it first-hand.