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Due to location, history, and demographics, Zabar's has a disproportionately elderly-and-living-alone clientele. I will bet you a huge amount of money that many of these peeled mandarins are bought by old people who have trouble using their hands.
Big chunks of the Upper West Side, by the way, serve as a dispersed assisted living facility for the elderly. No stairs, food brought to your home, no need to drive, good hospitals nearby, family near enough (often) to get to you quickly. Zabar's is part of that network.
My own building, a middle-income public housing site where I sit on the board, has been dealing with this for years. We were built in the sixties, so the founding generation (and the subsequent early arrivals) are often in their 80s now.
Very few people ever leave, unless they need an actual nursing home—it's ridiculously affordable, it's their home, and it's in a neighborhood with lots of advantages for the elderly.
And so we on the board are constantly trying to figure out how to best serve our aging residents. It's an ongoing challenge, but lots of what the building does, formally and informally, is really important.
And Zabar's is nine minutes away on the subway.
(For those only seeing the thread now, the original embedded tweet was Max Boot mocking a box of peeled mandarins on sale at Zabar's. Since deleted.)
