Trader Joe Wrote a Memoir
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
“A deeply troubled company is always the fault of the CEO, the board of directors, and the controlling stockholders who appoint these worthies,” he writes. “It is never the fault of the frontline troops.”
How true that is. I've noticed that the lower-level employees of a terrible company can always get an interview: no one blames them for it. Unless they stayed there long enough to become a lifer. Moral: if you're at a garbage company, get out while you can.
Trader Joe's stores are always full, even at times when "regular" supermarkets are mostly empty. Moreover, you almost never have to wait a long time to check out. It's really a miracle how good they are.
They actually employ a neat UX trick to make it appear this way! When a product is sold out, they'll remove the sign for it and rearrange the existing products to fill the space, making it seem like there's nothing missing.
I realized this when I visited once and the entire spice shelf consisted of one spice (onion salt), spread across like 5 shelves.
Can be fun to get a load of soemthing still in the shipping crates.
Oh good! They have plenty of onion salt for my famous ...(looks through recipe book)... meat loaf
Also a very deliberate rollout strategy. I remember when they were I think only in California. There was a time when I was going out to Orange County a lot and our engineering manager one day doing some vaguely crazy driving to get to a Trader Joe's before heading back east on a plane.
Prime example: my store captain, Jeff, got busted having an affair with a crew member that he was a direct supervisor of. Granted, Jeff was an asshole from the day I met him, he did everything he could to hold up my (and many others) promotions and pay raises just because he could, but the thing that got him finally fired was dipping his pen in the company ink.
I was personally denied safety equipment multiple times, like lift belts and new blades for my box cutter.
I know of a another store Captain that got fired for kicking out customers that weren't wearing masks when they tried to come in.
TJ's is extremely anti-union and anti-union propaganda is posted all over the employee areas and handbook.
Trader Joe's corporate will turn a blind eye to ANYTHING, as long as a customer doesn't complain or it doesn't open up the company to some kind of liability. It was a super cool company up until about 20 years ago when Bane took over as CEO. Since then it has been a cavalcade of hiring shitty management and unsustainable growth. TJ's has lost it's original weltanschauung and Joe Coloumbe would be horrified to see how the company is run now.
As I understand it, the reason you're not supposed to do what Jeff did, is because of exactly what you say in the next sentence - favoritism and bias, that undermines morale and leads to a dysfunctional team and good people leaving.
That first paragraph sounds to me like you are not connecting the affair with the "assholeness" and you think it's bad he got fired. Which doesn't go with everything else you write.
If your point is that they waited too long to do the right thing, well, that doesn't seem like systemic evil to me, even if there is other proof they aren't a "good company". I wouldn't put it in the same category of all the rest of the stuff you describe.
Everybody knows about the allegation that TJs wouldn't let people wear BLM apparel, right?
My reading was that the poster was indignant that it took the actual outing of the affair to bring about change, when the actual workplace problems caused by them were evident beforehand.
So putting it first was unclear to me in its implication.
Your experience is the opposite of mine working for the company. Many of the most kind and competent managers I've had were from there.
But... I left the company 15+ years ago so things might have changed a lot since then. I will say that the stores were run pretty independantly back then so I wouldn't be surprised if experiences varied quite a bit.
What's worse, it's not always apparent from the outside. But I don't really know if TJ is going down that path, and you haven't presented clear evidence that it is.
As opposed to employees at Kroger - which is unionized (UCFW). But workers there appear darn scarce, often unhappy, and sometimes volunteer tidbits on just how horrible management is. And it felt weird just how much "help wanted" signage Kroger had, even pre-pandemic.
That cashiers still have to stand up has always been the bellweather to me about whether a grocery store takes any care of their employees.
Strict capacity limits, a clearly marked, spaced queue outside the store, and they’d wipe down the carts right in front of you so you knew it was clean. Masks were ubiquitous on customers and employees. It was relief to shop there compared to other stores.
The comment you're replying to was an employee, not a customer! It sounds like the main point is that TJ exploits its employees and is willing to turn a blind eye to their wellbeing in order to make a good experience for customers, which isn't a healthy strategy.
I have been to many food stores over the past year, not once encountered stores being empty. The stuff I want is always there.
They're not open at 2:00 am, that's for sure.
Haha, I take it you haven't been to the ones in Manhattan?
I would go to Trader Joe's much more often if not for the mandatory 15+ minutes of waiting in line.
> Moreover, you almost never have to wait a long time to check out.
Uh, maybe in your store, at the time of day you go shopping?
Our store has probably ten checkout lines and all the time if I go at the wrong time of day, I'm standing in line for several minutes. Even when they were limiting #'s in the stores for pandemic reasons checkout lines were stretching into the aisles. Other times I stroll in and it's a ghost town, same time of day, same day of the week I usually go.
Further, the fact that, other than wine, the entire store is only "Trader Joe's" brand seems like it's working to put 1000s of small businesses out of business (the 1000s of brands that stock normal markets).
Worse, I really liked one of the "Joe's spaghetti sauce"s, and recently it disappeared without warning, which is really common for items at Trader Joe's. You have to treat anything that isn't exactly something you could buy elsewhere as a limited time offer.
The bigger problem is just how sort of homogenized the US grocery system is, and with such vast distances to cover and the expectation to have basically the exact same things on the shelf quality takes a huge dive, and often the prices are not great. Even in areas like California or Washington with very large agricultural footprints “local” means almost nothing in a chain grocery store.
For example, their jarred tomato sauce, which is pretty good quality, is $1.99 - the grocery store closest to me has bad tomato sauce starting at $4.99, the pretty good ones are more like $6.99 to $8.99.
While not everything is this good of a deal, this is what makes it worth dealing with their crazy lines and limited selection!
I guess there’s always exceptions but Shoe Dog is an all-time best seller and is basically just the CEO recounting his version of events for 300 or so pages.
Still enjoyed it though!
Onward by Schultz (zzz), Jobs by Isaacson (not bad), the various Bezos and Ma books, etc. all seem to top lists.
Bezos, Jack Ma, Jobs, Schultz are known as the person not just the company they [co]-founded, but for their industry as a whole while also being revered. Schultz might be an exception there. Not sure since his takes of getting into politics as an out of touch billionaire is the thing that comes to mind now.
Similar approaches of "all store brand products" but Aldi focuses more on price and value while TJs focuses on "romance the hell out of it."
Edit: https://www.aldireviewer.com/aldi-trader-joes-related/
Yeah. TJs optimizes for things that are of far more interest to me than what Aldi does. (Not that TJs is anything like a one stop shop for me.)
Aldi seems more do to the “what can we buy cheap and where this week.”
If you’re looking for the rest of Trader Joe’s story, then that’s what’s in the rest of the book.
I thought The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr was pretty good.