Why would you want your grocery store on social media? I don't understand the world anymore.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.