Enchanted Aisles: The Experience of Trader Joe’s
For a meager grocery store, Trader Joe’s has a supernova persona. It’s not Whole Foods, a culinary Neiman Marcus whose prices can leave you feeling mugged. It’s not Fresh & Easy, where Home Depot-style savings have been passed along by replacing workers with DIY checkout scanners. It’s certainly not Ralphs. We prize Trader Joe’s because it has auspiciously pulled off being none of the above. Yes, the parking lots are a misery, the store passageways a crush. Unless you’ve negotiated tight aisles in one of the original stores, you don’t know the meaning of “tortuous serpentine commercial space.” But for those weaned on Trader Joe’s, this is the epitome of the experience: If you can’t smash into someone while reaching for the mochi, it’s not a Trader Joe’s; all that sanctioned rubbing up against strangers produces a frisson of small-town life, the missing element in our metropolis. There’s a plucky in-house newspaper—The Fearless Flyer—offering campy stories of goings-on, and there are kids’ drawing contests, raffles, balloons (balloons!), a kitchen putting out aromatic samples of pie, and snapshots of grinning regulars pinned to the walls. All that’s needed is a knowing geezer warming himself by a blazing potbelly stove in the corner (no doubt he’s currently being product tested). Where supermarket workers suffer from an empty enthusiasm forced on them by management—“Can I help you to your car with that aspirin bottle?”—at Trader Joe’s we get genuine, convivial employees whose relationship with their stores exhibits the kind of intimacy most of us share only with our smartphones. They are nonunion but compensated better than many unionized grocery workers: Part-timers at Trader Joe’s can receive $20 an hour with full benefits, and store managers top out with an annual salary of $130,000, with matching 401Ks—pay that more than makes up for being called “first mate” and “captain” in public.
Posted by Ryan Dunphey
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