Sublime

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

Leroy found a hippie outfit in Venice—I think it was called Mom’s Trucking—which would package the bran. But bran is a low-value product. They couldn’t afford to deliver it. Since they also packaged nuts and dried fruits, however, we somewhat reluctantly added them to the order. And that’s how Trader Joe’s became the largest retailer of nuts and dr

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, inter

More recently, Paul Ricard, who became Marseille’s most celebrated and flamboyant tycoon—he once took fifteen hundred of his staff to Rome to be blessed by the Pope—decided as a young man to make his own brand of pastis. It wasn’t an original idea. The Pernod distillery near Avignon had turned its production over to pastis when the dangerously addi

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.