Joe Cool – Why isn’t Trader Joe’s on social media?
thenewinquiry.com
thenewinquiry.com
I think this is key. Being "local" is important. I saw this in the comic/gaming shop I volunteered in. We had a web presence and facebook page, but no one used them except for memes and news links. The money was made with people coming into the store and impulse-spending during a Friday Night Magic tournament or RPG sessions. Conversations and real-life interactions with people are why these shops have survived the move to online and big-box outlet stores.
I've recently become aware of how problematic the lack of "local" news is in my community. Our local papers have vanished, so that we rely on a patchwork of blogs and government facebook pages to know what's going on--but those get drowned out in the ocean of other national-news posts and facebook filters. My wife and I have made it a point to always attend our town hall meetings each month so we can know what's going on in our neighborhood. Our local government is getting away with some pretty outrageous things now because social media fails to inform local citizens about what's going on. People have strong opinions about national politics, but have no idea how their local politicians are bringing down their quality of life.
Local is important, it's what's going on around our immediate area and it's where we can make the biggest difference in the world. Unfortunately, the World Wide Web has us so focused on global oftentimes that we are ceding our localities to other to our own detriment.
It is interesting that a lot of the food at TJs is not organic. But by clever marketing, using brown paper bags, imagery/graphics with a turn of the century feel to them, they impart the idea that there they are healthy, natural and good for you. In reality it probably is not no better or worse than the food you'd get a Kroger, Giant, Safeway or other such traditional grocery stores.
Even more so when you're in Ohio...
I rarely need to go anywhere but Kroger to get everything I need (tofu, soy/almondmilk, nutritional yeast, Daiya products, Silk products, produce, hummus, vegetable stock, pasta, etc.)
There is another grocery store called Earth Fare nearby which fills the void due to Whole Food's absence in this region. I occasionally go there to buy more specialized spices, tea, and Field Roast products (especially their sliced chao tofu cheese). Plus they have delicious vegan chocolate chip cookies that I totally should not be eating. One time I made a pulled jackfruit recipe and had to drive a bit out of the way to buy the canned jackfruit from an Asian grocery store.
At any rate, I've been remarkably surprised and happy with how easy it is. And I don't live remotely close to "downtown" or "urban" Fort Wayne. My area is better described as straight up rural. I feared the worst given Indiana's politics, religiosity in this part of the country, and high cultural value placed on hunting and meat consumption. But it's been really easy to be vegan here.
They do often offer organic choices, too. Such as regular bananas for 19 cents and organic bananas for 29 cents.
Personally, I appreciate the non-organic option.
In reality it probably is not no better or worse than the
food you'd get a Kroger, Giant, Safeway or other such
traditional grocery stores.
I'm sure reality was a little less heroic than the story makes it sound, but it's still something a bit more concrete than olde-timey graphics.
While I suppose they could outright lie about things, you could imagine it would be an incredible risk to the business.
I'm not sure you've thought this through. How are you getting people in to a game shop to spend money? (Or: a game shop is not analogous to Trader Joes.)
10 years ago I ran the Magic events for a large game shop and also the corresponding part of their website. The events mostly ran at break-even to get people into the store to spend money. And the website - specifically the event calendar and email list - was incredibly successful at getting people to come to events.
Game shops should absolutely have as much social media and web presence as possible, tuned towards raising awareness of events. And also possibly raising awareness of their electronic shopfront, if that's something they do - another thing that was a nice extra source of revenue even 10 years ago.
If you live in an area with a TJ's and least one high quality artisanal baker, for example, there is a very good chance the bread stocked at Trader's is from the high end baker but covertly rebranded as generic. If you pick up some well-aged Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano at $10 or $12/lb, I guarantee you it was not curated by some Trader Joe's affineur in Europe but by an Italian cheesemaker that normally sells at closer to $18/lb and wants some marginal revenue growth without diluting the original brand.
Another important question to ask is "Does Trader Joe's have sales or coupons to promote" and the answer is "No." The company says on its website that it considers sale "a four-letter word". The article spends all this time talking about how discount grocery chain Aldi has a big social media presence without noting that Aldi DOES have weekly sale specials to advertise on social media (they traditionally use newspaper but seem to have some sales on Twitter now). In this light the different social media strategies make sense.
Basically TJ does not have the usual retail things to gain through social media but it DOES have things to lose (like questions/speculation on identities of its covert generic conversion partners). Not to say they won't ever do it but you have to look at specific possible motives instead of intellectualized theories like "it seeks to generate brand loyalty through its silence" (what?) and "Trader Joe’s is counting on capturing successive generations of its target consumers by being the choice for no-choices" (WHAT?).
But it's Trader Joe's business model that makes it come across as a "low-priced gourmet-cum-health-foods store" (original owner's words). It doesn't seem to me that social media has anything to do with it.
On a side note, does anyone actually think Trader Joe's "Frequent Flier" handout is useful? It looks to me like an amateur, Microsoft Publisher-designed handout. They could use some modernism in that department. Unless it's ironically bad as the point?
https://gbr.pepperdine.edu/2010/08/the-trader-joes-experienc...
Excerpt:
"...The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between organizational culture and business strategy that has propelled TJ to extraordinary success. The article also offers a model for readers to consider in creating a culture within their own organization that provides a defensible competitive position by incorporating value, rareness, inimitability, and non-substitutability."
There are some nice points about the way TJs tried to maintain its UX while adopting modern supermarket trappings like checkout scanners.
Trader Joe's doesn't isn't as sensitive to that because they sell a bunch of products which are their own brands or not commonly carried by traditional supermarkets. Coupons and sales are still useful but far less critical because odds are you'll be stopping by anyway.
[1]: They split up in 1960 for unknown reasons (it's speculated that it was a dispute about selling cigarettes). They only have stores in the north and south of Germany respectively, hence the geographic names. They also divided the rest of the world between them with the US being the only other country in which both operate.
In reality, there are contract food manufacturers in the same way that Foxconn is a contract phone manufacturer:
http://www.contractmfgdirectory.com/
I don't know how much of Trader Joe's stuff is contract manufacturing to TJs specifications versus TJs selecting already existing products and buying more of the same. My guess is that it's mostly existing products. But their house wine is custom made for them, so it's definitely not all commodity. And given the scale they work at, I'm sure the line's a bit blurry; a manufacturer who is nominally making a particular thing can certainly afford to make changes to get TJ's business.
Personally, I don't care much how much they "really" make. Trader Joe's is valuable to me mainly because of their editorial judgement. In a normal supermarket, the supermarket is selling a bunch of stuff of unknown quality. Trader Joe's is basically vouching for everything. As a bonus, I don't have to pay for a lot of irritating marketing.
And best of all for me, their store is filled with smart, effective staff. At Safeway, I can spend 10 minutes of a 20-minute visit wandering around trying to find things. If I can find a staff member to ask, they often won't know any better than me. At Trader Joe's, it's just the opposite; somebody's always around, and they can answer almost any question I throw at them.
The key detail you left out is that they still specify the requirements for what they'll buy – it's not like they're buying mac & cheese from Kraft and putting it in a new box, the product is made using a different recipe for a different price point. Theoretically, yes, the supermarkets could stock equivalent quality products at similar price points but in practice there are whole categories where Trader Joe's moves a ton of product because they stock a grade up in quality from what every supermarket in town chooses to stock while still being less expensive than Whole Foods or specialty markets.
This very much depends on what you're buying and where. I've lived in San Diego, New Haven, and Washington DC and we've found that Trader Joe's is significantly (30-200%) cheaper than buying at our local markets for many categories — cheese other than cheddar or jack, nuts if you buy anything other than planter's peanuts, non-Hershey's chocolate, etc.
The common factor is that grocery stores are brutally competitive on certain key commodities – e.g. a gallon of milk or a bunch of bananas – and make most of their profit on niche products, prepared foods, etc. If you buy the higher-volume products at any given store, you're likely to get a better price than buying the same item from a different store. That's why Whole Foods is often cheaper for organic products since they don't sell e.g. non-organic eggs but Safeway treats those as a luxury good.
Aldi is happy to dole out recognition to individuals who want to engage with it, playing the attention game where consumer praise is awarded with publicity from the Aldi feed. The consumer endorses the brand, and in turn the brand validates the consumer. The opportunities for this quasi-reciprocal participation in brands is presumed to catalyze customer loyalty.
Some people like to share their appreciation through social media. It can also be nice to know that the company that you patronize has responsive staff monitoring public conversations to service your needs.
I think you can understand that, you just don't see the value in it, which is fair enough because I don't either. That's probably one of the (subconscious) reasons I shop at TJ's - decent food at a great price, and no marketing BS that detracts from my experience with the brand.
There was a philosopher (Sartre?) who was to meet his friend at a cafe in Paris. His friend was late, and as the philosopher sat drinking coffee and waiting, he realized that his friend's absence was present, and this this absence was different from the absence of all the other people who also weren't at the cafe.
> I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too. "Ohh, you know what Bill's doing? He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market. He's very smart."
I completely understand this from my own life, and I've found that good categorization, rather than fewer choices, is the key to stopping the paralysis.
Good categories, preferably on some sort of spectrum (from cheap to expensive, from funny to tragic, from mild to spicy) allow me to do the equivalent of a quick binary search in my head. I like my buffalo wings hot, so I'll immediately gravitate to two or three choices on that end of the spectrum. Grocery stores and restaurants should setup their shelving and menus, respectively, to accomodate their customers in this.
I guess you could say it's an interface issue.
One useful way to break down choices is on the satisfice vs optimize continuum. For some choices people make, they're optimizers. When I'm buying a laptop, I will put hours and hours into picking the best one for me. But when I go to a new bar and am faced with 30 beer taps, 2/3rds of which I've never tried, I don't care about getting the best beer, just a satisfactory beer.
The paradox of choice shows up mainly with satisficing choices. Before phone cameras were common, for example, a lot of people just wanted to buy a digital camera. They didn't care much about megapixels or features; they just wanted to take pictures of the kid's birthday party next week. But each camera was working hard to differentiate itself. That meant the buyer was facing a ton of information to evaluate even though most of the cameras would be just fine for them. It made people crazy.
If you want to notice paradox of choice in yourself, pay attention when you're on the satisficing end of the spectrum: when you just want a thing, but you have a bunch of options to wade through. Common places for people to experience this: large restaurant menus, picking vacation destinations, choosing wine off a large wine list.
You may not be noticing it because you already have a good default strategy. After learning about this, I developed one for myself: pick the first thing that looks like it will do. E.g., with a large restaurant menu at a new place, some people will agonize. But I just scan down until I find something that sounds good, skim a little more just to be sure, and go with my first choice. If I come back to the restaurant in the future, I can invest in optimizing by trying different stuff. But in the general case, I've optimized my overall experience by having a low-load satisficing heuristic. You may already have this yourself.
Oh, man. Story of my life: visit the US, go to a supermarket, grab a pack of cheese, bring it to the hotel, put some in my mouth, spit it out, notice the label: "cheese-like product made by kraft". Fly back to Europe, live happily for a few months, forget everything, visit the US again, repeat.
One trick to remember is that a lot of grocery stores have cheese in two places: near the milk and butter they have basics like Tillamook or the usually-decent store brand for cheddar, pepper jack, etc. Then over closer to the deli, there's a refrigerated table with the better cheeses.
I wonder how much of their success is built on the same nostalgia?
I emailed them a few years ago asking them to expand to the UK. No reply. Alas!
From elsewhere in the thread, I hear that they pretty much only sell their own brand - but that alone would make them similar to Marks and Spencer.
I mean, potential reader would already know half the stuff the writer was going on about, from brands being on social media to the stereotype description of "broke graduate student". Why waste reader's time on that?
Maybe I'm weird, but I don't want a friend at the grocery, just food. The flyer in the Sunday paper is far better than any of the modern alternatives.
Usually some small scale studies with unreliable methodology are chosen to back that up. Wikipedia mentions a meta analysis that looked at the issue and came to the conclusion: "Although strong instances of choice overload have been reported in the past, direct replications and the results of our meta-analysis indicated that adverse effects due to an increase in the number of choice options are not very robust: The overall effect size in the meta-analysis was virtually zero." Source: http://www.scheibehenne.de/ScheibehenneGreifenederTodd2010.p...
I haven't read the whole metaanalysis, but that should raise some healthy scepticism about the whole concept.
As others have said, I don't really want grocery stores on social media, we have enough ads already.
I shouldn't have said "parent": I assumed, and still assume, that the author was mixing up Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud. As far as I understand it, Trader Joe's and Aldi USA are not cousins: they unrelated and competing businesses with no ownership in common. Thinking Aldi Nord and Sud are the same company is a major blunder for someone presuming to pontificate on Trader Joe's.
Complaining on Twitter is one of the reasons why I do not use it and was the first thing the jumped to my head when I read the title. I cannot stand whiny people (am I whining right now? :)) or attention seekers, so I would be hesitant to put any business on Twitter/social media.