I believe that the sine qua non for successful retailing is demographic coherence: all your locations should have the same demographics whether you are selling clothing or wine. We looked for our demographics: there are lots of overeducated and underpaid people in Southern California.

Given the number of households, I would judge the degree of suitability based on my experience since 1954 in looking at California real estate, and then based on driving the area thoroughly. I would never trust a broker’s judgment. If I saw lots of campers and speedboats in the driveways, I’d ax the location. People who consume high levels of

My cash policy was this: we would always have cash at least equal to two weeks’ sales. (I think this is called an “heuristic” decision in business school.) Any month we didn’t meet the test, I would borrow from Bank of America on a five-year term loan ostensibly secured by store fixtures. But I wasn’t borrowing for fixtures and inventory, as I took

I began the transition of Pronto into Trader Joe’s. I resigned at the end of 1988. During those twenty-six years, our sales grew at a compound rate of 19 percent per year. During the same twenty-six years, our net worth grew at a compound rate of 26 percent per year. Furthermore, during the last thirteen years of that period, we had no fixed,

Yet it cuts a wide swath in food retailing thanks to Intensive Buying, which is what the 1977 Five Year Plan boiled down to, which I formally named by the end of that plan, and which stressed mobility, irregularity, and adaptability.

Lighting, I think, is one of the key elements in successful retailing.

In 1962, Barbara Tuchman published The Guns of August, an account of the first ninety days of World War I. It’s the best book on management—and, especially, mismanagement—I’ve ever read. The most basic conclusion I drew from her book was that, if you adopt a reasonable strategy, as opposed to waiting for an optimum strategy, and stick with it,

Human Use of Human Beings,

The people in the stores were long-tenured, partly because most of our full-timers had risen from the ranks of the part-timers; and partly because of the slow growth of the number of stores, so there weren’t scads of promotion opportunities.