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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

For maxk42: I think it should end with :

“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.

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> Trader Joe's stores are always full, even at times when "regular" supermarkets are mostly empty.

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.

Not that you don't make a fine point but I believe the original comment was referring to stores being full or empty of customers. Still, learned something new!

This must be location dependent because my TJ’s always runs out of cauliflower gnocchi and meatless meatballs and they never bother to fill in the space. Another nice thing about TJ’s is if they’re out of something you can have a manager reserve it for you and call you when it’s ready.

Many stores give the manager leeway in ordering (even Walmart) - so if theres something you want you can often get them to order extra for you.

Can be fun to get a load of soemthing still in the shipping crates.

The frozen items are restocked daily in the afternoons so it would be a waste of time to reorganize unless they know there’s a shortage for a specific item. Usually they do if that’s the case.

>the entire spice shelf consisted of one spice (onion salt), spread across like 5 shelves.

Oh good! They have plenty of onion salt for my famous ...(looks through recipe book)... meat loaf

I thought many stores did that. I've noticed that in plenty of other establishments.

pretty severe extrapolation of one minuscule data point to the behavior of a massive conglomerate. could have just been a bored child that set those spices that way

Clearly they do a lot of things right from a people perspective. [I'm sure there are exceptions.] They also seem to have picked a set of constraints that work well for them and their customers in (relatively upscale?) urban locations.

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.

Whew boy do I have some stories that might shatter your view of trader joe's being a good company.

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.

I don't understand the first item, it seems unlike the others.

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?

>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.

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.

Sure, I'm kind of saying that if they were slow to take action, but nonetheless did, then that is consistent with an ordinary mediocre corporation run by human beings, in my mind, and not evidence of being distinctly evil. In point of fact, I know stuff like that goes on elsewhere.

So putting it first was unclear to me in its implication.

> It was a super cool company up until about 20 years ago when Bane took over as CEO.

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.

It's certainly a well-worn path from "founder builds great company" to "founder sells out" to "new management are assholes" to "company goes down the tubes."

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.

You had me up until "TJ's is extremely anti-union."

Is it not? Or do you just not feel that's a negative?

I wonder if that's a regional problem. Here (Michigan), TJ's employees seem happy, and appear to be very well treated.

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.

Kroger and Kroger owned stores turn over employees like crazy - I have several friends who’ve described really horrendous conditions. I don’t think there’s a lot of benefit in their union, that or it was so awful before that even bad conditions were better. Grocery store revenue increased greatly during the pandemic but workers still had to fight tooth and nail for PPE, and never got any amount of hazard pay. Ask anyone who is/was considered an “essential worker” what that actually meant sometime. The answer: less than nothing.

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.

I feel union and non-union shops almost “need each other” to keep them both honest.

I’m sorry you had a bad experience! For me, TJs was by far the best place to shop during the pandemic.

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.

"Had a bad experience" ...?

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.

Employee have experiences too? For the most part, if you are making the space safe for customers, you are making it safe for employees. Their specific complaint was a situation that was safe for neither, and doesn't align with what I saw when I shopped there.

>Trader Joe's stores are always full, even at times when "regular" supermarkets are mostly empty.

I have been to many food stores over the past year, not once encountered stores being empty. The stuff I want is always there.

I interpreted the comment to be about the number of customers in a store as opposed to stock levels. Anecdotally, Traders Joes does seem to have a higher base level of customers at any given time. However, I readily acknowledge that perception may be to their relatively smaller footprints and reduced operating hours.

Right, I should have clarified it's "# customers."

They're not open at 2:00 am, that's for sure.

> Moreover, you almost never have to wait a long time to check out.

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.

No, I sure haven't. But come on now: Manhattan! What do you expect?

Well, other supermarkets here have much shorter lines. I explicitly avoid Trader Joes because the lines tend to be longer than anywhere else.

> Trader Joe's stores are always full,

> 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.

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