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Comment by jordanmorgan10 | Hacker News Reader

Unless it's Trader Joes, in which case I leave noticeably happier than I was pre-grocery shopping.

Opposite here: I dislike Trader Joe's. I call it "bougie safeway". Trader Joe's is great if you like boxed, prepared food, but it isn't much better for anything else. Their produce is meh and overly wrapped with packaging.

I concur. I can't find anything other than all purpose and wheat flour. No bread flour, or anything more obscure like rye, spelt, etc. Similarly, they sell a single sea salt, alongside tons of trendy mixed salts. Want iodized salt? Go find a big grocery store. I do find tons of snacks and TV dinners, which I enjoy. But if I'm stocking up on essentials, I'd rather go to a big store. And yes, I do find obscure flours at big stores, most recently 00 and rye.

But that's exactly why TJs is cheaper. You gain price and sacrifice variety.

It's not just food either, trader joes is lacking many of the non-food goods that other grocery stores almost universally have. Need aluminum foil or parchment paper? You can't buy those at trader joes.

> trader joes is lacking many of the non-food goods that other grocery stores almost universally have.

It's almost like their business model is “don’t devote lots of floor space to stuff you can get anywhere so price competition drives margins to zero”. .

I'm aware.

This is indeed why Trader Joe's could never be my entire grocery shopping experience. Even staples like dry black beans are unavailable. God forbid you want to bake something...

They have a couple interesting products that I can't get elsewhere, and they don't have lots of products that I can get at literally any other grocery store.

What are you using the dried black beans for that a can won’t suffice?

Not OP, but the texture is different. Soak some black beans overnight then cook them, and compare them to rinsed canned beans. The latter are slipper and spongy, the former are lighter and have better texture.

They're cheaper, take up less space, no processed crap from all the goo in the can, you can cook them to whatever firmness you want...should I keep going?

They taste differently, it us very noticeable. So, soups and sauces. The dried beans soup is my favorite, canned beans soup is crap.

I couldn't even find plain white sugar the last time I looked. They have small bags of "raw" sugar, which is fine for putting in coffee, but not good enough for many baking needs.

Way off topic here, but Anna napoletana tipo "00" changed my life.

00 flour is great for baking and pizzas!

I had to adjust my hydration when switching from all-purpose to 00, but it is definitely a superior structure, especially with a 48-hour ferment and a little diastatic malt.

Someone said that his favorite part of shopping at Trader Joe's is afterwards when you go to a supermarket to buy all the stuff you need.

Safeway has everything I'd want from Trader Joe's at this point, and I don't have to do two trips.

TJ's for us is "we need these specific store brand items" or "I need to restock my Blackthorn cider." And unfortunately TJ's has removed three store brand products in the past two years, so the number of reasons to go there is rapidly diminishing for our household.

On a side note: Purchase a bag of vital wheat gluten, a 2lb/1Kg bag will last a very long time. The difference between AP flour and bread flour is the gluten content. You can bring any regular AP flour up to the highest gluten level that a high gluten bread flour brand like King Arthur will produce. One tablespoon of vital wheat gluten exchanged for one tablespoon of AP flour for every two cups/240 grams/2.4oz of AP flour is a provides a good high gluten ratio. I use it regularly in my bread recipes and pizza dough recipes. I only keep bread flour on the shelf for those days when I am feeling lazy or need a very specific brand of bread flour for one specific recipe.

I also find that adding gluten to rye-heavy doughs makes them rise far more easily (and generally just behave better).

I agree that there's way too much plastic on the produce, but some of the boxed prepared food is really, really great.

TJ's is significantly better value and less margin than Safeway. The opposite of "bougie."

I'm not convinced that the value is better. Most of the stuff at TJ's is reasonable quality, but the prices are often lower only because there's less product in the package. I'd have to sit down and compare unit prices before I could be assured you were getting a better value for your money.

TJ’s may be lower margin on what they carry than Safeway would be on comparable items; they achieve that by avoiding carrying lots of the low-margin items every other grocery store spends lots of money devoting floor space to.

(But those are things people tend to also need a lot, so TJ’s ends up being an extra shopping trip, instead of a replacement.)

TJ's processed/frozen stuff is often better, and always way cheaper, than either the name brands or supermarket generic brands. So I get those things at TJ's (sometimes along with stuff like milk and eggs), and buy grains, produce, meat and everything else from Ralphs.

The local paper did comparison shopping and found Safeway to be about the same price for a weekly trip as Whole Foods. Trader Joes was significantly cheaper in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It's hit or miss, but usually just because the stuff I don't like their is not my taste, not that it is poor quality. Some of their products I think are really great, both in quality and bargain. Plus, they work on a space efficiency model: products that don't sell popularly won't be kept in stock. Sometimes that's what I'm optimizing for when I want to try new products: what are other people voting for with their dollars?

Agreed. But to be fair, I've yet to see somewhere with a better cheese selection.

Well, I live in Berkeley, so I'm pretty damn spoiled when it comes to cheese shops. But I can see that being helpful if there are no cheese stores, import stores, or specialty foods stores in your town.

Man I miss the Berkeley Bowl, I spent years within walking distance..

Is Cheese Board still in business?

Our Kroger has a pretty nice cheese selection. Not quite Whole Foods but it's way, way cheaper

I think a lot of it is because it's novel to me. I'm in the Midwest, and I just don't have any close to the greater Springfield, MO area. I'm told it's just beyond their supply chain. You have to get around St.Louis before they show up.

We have HyVee though, and I quite enjoy it there.

Probably an unpopular opinion––and I love TJs––but I feel like the quality and type of things you can buy there is akin to a Dollar General. The produce is often covered in plastic and subpar quality. The selection isn't great. Honestly, its greatest perk is the frozen food section and snacks.

Their food is whatever, but their long, slow checkout lines that obstruct other shoppers and generally customer-hostile layout often pushes me to the border of rage. The only thing that keeps me level are those dark chocolate peanut butter cups.

I don’t understand, can you elaborate?

The dark chocolate peanut butter cups are really really (really) good

If you go there when it's busy, the checkout lines can get pretty large (they don't have dedicated baggers) and crowd parts of the store. With that said, I've noticed a similar trend at bigger stores by me lately as they added more self-checkout lines.

I've generally found that checkout times at TJs are much less than the local supers.

Price- and quality-wise they totally win on cheese and pasta by a huge margin. Supermarket cheese is generally pretty awful (the only cheeses we get at the super are Mexican cheeses that TJs doesn't stock. I’ve occasionally bought, say cheddar at the super and it’s awful and costs more than TJs).

The big thing for me for the last two years is that the clientele and staff at my local TJs have done a much better job of taking Covid seriously than the same at Whole Foods¹ or any standard super.

⸻

1. I was in Whole Foods earlier today and was rather appalled to see a sign saying that customers are welcome [italics mine] to shop without a mask regardless of vaccination status. This while local Covid rates are on the rise. It seemed like they were encouraging people to go maskless.

> It seemed like they were encouraging people to go maskless.

What year is it!?

Can you tell me by looking at this photo what section I am in and what else I might find in this aisle?

https://i0.wp.com/www.dailycal.org/assets/uploads/2021/09/TJ...

It's the cookies and crackers and frozen food and hot sauce and candy and coffee aisle, of course! Next one over is the soap and pasta and canned goods and spices and dog food and olive oil.

There’s like 6 aisles, it’s not hard to remember which products are where. It’s not like one of those 20 aisle stores with unrelated endcaps. There are gas stations bigger than Trader Joe’s.

I find their checkout to be the fastest of any store I go to, but I suppose it probably depends on the location.

I've only been to a handful of their stores, but every single one just feels way too small. It also feels like the majority of the people there are employees restocking shelves and just generally being in the way. They are friendly and it's nice there's always someone I can ask if I need help finding someone, but it can be annoying to always have people in your way.

The small store sizes are all almost surely one of the factors that enables the low prices other comments have mentioned.

Try ringing the bell next time the lines are slow. That'll get their attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbafXjG9ROA

I'll also add their slowness is partly due to their clientele (moreso that standard stores) bringing their filthy reusable grocery sacks, which throw off the flow of the line.

The staff use these to communicate. There’s no intercoms so this is how they know when to open more registers, come to the front of the store, etc. Don’t ring the bells, they will not appreciate it.

Source: past TJs employee

I love Trader Joe's, but checkout there just takes too long. I want to grab products and leave, and not to spend 15-30 minutes on line.

Y'all must go at peak times or something, I've never waited at the checkout at my TJs

I grocery shop with my toddlers first thing in Saturday morning and our first stop is TJs. I only buy about a dozen different products at TJs but they're all staples in our weekly meals / snacks. Checkout is never a problem early in the morning.

I'd attribute that to the selection of choices for any individual item being very low there. There aren't 48 brands of meatballs to choose from.

They also do not want self checkouts, coupons, apps, etc.

> coupons, apps

Good? Apps are just extra margin places like Safeway tack on. Coupons are just taking things from fat margin to TJ-level margin.

Oh I love it. I try to buy almost everything at TJs.

I feel like Trader Joes is good for snacks you don't see else where but I can never _just_ go to trader joes and come home with some meals to make.

I realize they sell microwave boxed meals, but yuck. Thankfully they are right next to whole foods so it's not much harm to stop in.

They have an interesting design principle where they only put stores in places where you feel like you're going to hit someone in the parking lot. I suppose it promotes biking to the store.

Trader joes is basically just a larger version of the "grocery" aisle at a drug store wrapped up in some nice marketing. Hard pass.

Trader Joe's originated as a spin-off of the Rexall drugstore chain, so you're closer than you think.

I don't know where you get that from, but, um, no. Not remotely true.

From Wikipedia:

> Also in 1958, Rexall employee Joe Coulombe was asked to test the launch of Pronto Markets, a store brand to compete against 7-Eleven. After running six Pronto Markets in the Los Angeles area, Rexall asked Coulombe to close them down. Coulombe decided to buy them out instead, and eventually renamed the chain "Trader Joe's".

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexall#Growth)

I think of it as the place to get frozen Indian food and salad kits. Do drugstores have those?

Yeah, usually (at least the ones near me). There's usually a freezer section with stuff like that in it.

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