Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Stil…

Sinegal explained the Costco model to Bezos: it was all about customer loyalty. There are some four thousand products in the average Costco warehouse, including limited-quantity seasonal or trendy products called treasure-hunt items that are spread out around the building. Though the selection of products in individual categories is limited, there

I liked semi-decayed neighborhoods, where the census tract income statistics looked terrible, but the mortgages were all paid-down, and the kids had left home. Housing and rental prices tend to be lower, and more suitable for those underpaid academics. Related to this, I was more interested in the number of households in a given area than the numbe

we became the best place in the world to buy a good bottle of wine for less than $2.00. That’s a position we held for the rest of my days at Trader Joe’s. It absolutely addressed our prime market, the overeducated and underpaid people of California.

We set up a program under which each employee (including some part-timers) was interviewed, not by the immediate superior, the store manager, but by the manager’s superior. The principal purpose of this program was to vent grievances and address them where possible. And I think this program was as important as pay in keeping employees with us.

I want to brag about something here: in thirty years we never had a layoff of full-time employees. Seasonal swings in business were handled with overtime pay to full-time employees, and by adjusting part-time hours. The stability of full-time employment at Trader Joe’s was due in part to caution in opening new stores, and insisting on high-volume s

He’d come to the conclusion that if you said yes to everything the customer wanted, you wouldn’t make any money. That approach would help him make enormous profits in later years, but it would also eventually result in criticism that would hound him.