With a pop-up grocery store selling absurdly priced fruit, The Ordinary makes the case that beauty's luxury markups don't hold up under scrutiny.
What would you pay for an "all-natural magical energy-boosting bar"? At The Markup Marché, The Ordinary's new pop-up concept launching this month across six cities — Toronto, London, Paris, São Paulo, Mexico City and Melbourne — the answer is USD 98.50. The product in question is a banana. Next to it sits an "exotic thirst-defying hydration vessel" (a coconut) at USD 195.50. Putting beauty-industry pricing logic into a grocery store is a simple trick, but it works: the absurdity lands fast.
The pop-ups look like actual grocery stores, complete with shopping baskets, fridges, a produce section and checkout counters. Visitors can write their own florid ingredient descriptions for everyday items like lemons, and a food scale illustrates how much of a product's price goes toward packaging and marketing rather than the formula itself. According to Deciem, The Ordinary's parent company, some luxury beauty products carry markups as high as 700%. Outside Toronto, nothing is for sale — the experience is purely educational.
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The Markup Marché arrives as consumer mistrust of premiumization is already fairly high. Dupe culture has normalized the idea that efficacy and price are often decoupled; The Ordinary is taking that instinct and sharpening the argument. The deeper pattern isn't specific to beauty. Across categories, more consumers are separating what a product actually does from the story and packaging built around it. And asking whether that story is worth the price difference. Brands that built their margins on aspiration are finding that a more outcome-minded buyer is harder to charge for vibes alone.