Peppers in containers that are too small will start to flower and pop out peppers prematurely, before the plant gets to be full sized. If these are container plants, you might consider up-potting. In any case, early flowering is a sign of stress. You probably won't relieve that stress by pulling off early peppers.

It depends on how long your growing season is, I think. I would do this to mine, waiting until there's more plant to support the fruit - in fact, I would remove the flowers before they have a chance to set - but my pepper plants used to last me for a couple years or more, since we don't get any freezes here.

My pepper experience (limited to sweet banana and jalapeno) starts off with small plants which produce about 6 peppers each. Once I pick those (like right now) the plants recover quickly and proceed to grow larger and produce more peppers than we can use. I use to think that since the plants were smallish that I forgot to fertilizer them, but nope, they continued to grow and produce at a steady pace all season long. Mine are in the ground but if you have yours in pots (as daninthedirt suggests) then your situation may be different. Below is yesterday's pic of one of the banana peppers...it's about 18" tall compared to the tomato plant next door at about 6' now.

Thanks everyone. My 3 peppers are in a 70 gallon stock tank, along with a cherry tomato plant....so they each have about 17 gallons of soil. The past 2 years, I've been a little disappointed in Bonnie's plants. All 3 of these pepper plants are Bonnie's red peppers. One looks very stunted, but making 3 peppers, One is fairly normal looking. And one is about 12-14" tall without fruit or blossoms and only a couple branches. Strange. Carolb......it never occurred to me to remove flowers. DUH! I'll definitely try that sometime. I do think I'll pull the 3 peppers on the very bottom of the very small plant, and let it grow up a bit. Not sure what to do with the tall one that isn't doing anything. I have fertilized them recently. Thanks again everyone!

The season is too short here to remove flowers on anything but small peppers like jalapenos or shishito -- the larger peppers just won't ripen if the fruit sets too late.

One of The other pepper plants I have (red bell) is about 18" tall (mostly stalk) and has no sign of flowers. Like I said, I've been getting a bit disappointed with Bonnie's plants, so maybe next year I'll try some others.

Kind of hard to blame a marketer for flowers not happening. A species is a species, and a variety is a variety, and for any given kind of plant, if they grow well, but don't flower. the fault is that of the plant and not the marketer. You might shoot for a different variety next time. That being said, lack of flowers in peppers is often a sign of overfertilization with nitrogen. Also, overly cool temperatures will often inhibit fruiting.

I also would pick first fruits green as soon as they reached full size - it's supposed to encourage more production.