February 13, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, our own Greg Hengler (and others) tell the story of a grocery store founded in Los Angeles in 1967 that expanded to hundreds of locations across 42 states and revolutionized how we shop for groceries.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Our next story is about a grocery store founded in
Los Angeles in nineteen sixty seven and now has hundreds
of locations covering forty two states.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Here's Greg Hengler with the story.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Trader Joe's, the surfy, laid back grocery store chain with
a cult like following, known for its cheap prices and
floral print clad staff, has been a household name for years.
When you break it down to square footage, Trader Joe's
is actually selling more than double its competitors, like grocery
(00:53):
store chain Whole Foods, and when it comes to the
traditional we have everything in more mega grocery store chains,
the small Trader Joe's locations do more than simply offer competition.
They outwork and out sell these goliaths of grocery. The
question is how, after all, Trader Joe's focuses on a
(01:19):
unique selection of products under their private label rather than
a large amount of them. They don't sell the same
old things we normally see. No lays, no Hindes, no
general mills, et cetera. And whereas a traditional grocery store
stocks upwards of forty thousand units, Trader Joe's runs around
(01:39):
a mirror four thousand. In order to make this clear,
I went to my local Kroger and did some aisle
counting and compared it with Trader Joe's scaled down approach
to shopping. Kroger stocks two hundred and eighty five varieties
of cookies, Trader Joe's one hundred and fifty four Kroger
one hundred and forty four pasta saw TJ's fourteen, Kroger's
(02:03):
seventy five ice t's TJ's nine Kroger stocks, two hundred
and seventy five cerials, TJ's thirty nine, Kroger forty four
olive oils TJ's fourteen, and Kroger's stocks forty toothpastes TJ's
just four. So back to the question, how does the
(02:24):
little guy Trader Joe's compete at such a high level?
Psychologist and Trader Joe's enthusiast, Barry Schwartz coin the term
the paradox of choice and quite literally wrote the book
on it, The Paradox of Choice? Why More is Less?
Here he is to explain what he means.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects
on people. One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis
rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from,
people find it very difficult to choose at all. So
that's one effect. The second effect is that even if
(03:07):
we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice,
we end up less satisfied with the result of the
choice than we would be if we had fewer options
to choose from.
Speaker 5 (03:19):
And there are several reasons for this.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
One of them is that, with a lot of different
salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one and
it's not perfect, and you know what salad dressing is,
it's easy to imagine that you could have made a
different choice that would have been better. And what happens
is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision
you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you
(03:43):
get out of the decision you made, even if it
was a good decision. I had no particular expectations when
they only came in one flavor. When they came in
one hundred flavors, one of them should have been perfect,
and what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. Finally,
one consequence of buying a bad fitting pair of genes
when there is only one kind to buy is that
(04:03):
when you are dissatisfied and you ask why, who's responsible?
Speaker 5 (04:07):
The answer is clear, the world is responsible.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
What could you do when there are hundreds of different
styles of genes available and you buy one that is disappointing,
and you ask why, who's responsible? It is equally clear
that the answer to the question is you you could
have done better with With one hundred different kinds of
genes on display.
Speaker 5 (04:28):
There is no excuse for failure.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
And so when people make decisions and even though the
results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them.
They blame themselves. Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial
world in the last generation. I believe a significant, not
the only, but a significant contributor to this explosion of
depression and also suicide is that people have experiences that
(04:54):
are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then
when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they're
at fault. And so the net result is that we
do better in general objectively and we feel worse. There's
no question that some choice is better than none, but
it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better
(05:16):
than some choice.
Speaker 5 (05:17):
There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the
point where options improve our welfare.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Trader Joe's understands what Barry is saying, and as Barry
has said himself regarding that magical number, I think Trader
Joe's is the best example of how the world should
be constructed. The man responsible for all of this is
the original Joe, the guy behind the beloved grocery store chain,
(05:45):
who founded the company emphasizing quality over quantity, and that
quality starts with the more than forty one thousand employees
known as crew members. After all, the core of any
business is customer service, which Trader joe Is more than
excels at. Data science professionals have ranked Trader Joe's number
(06:07):
one in customer preference for two years running, with Costco
coming in at number two in Amazon in third. The
brand remains simple, with no online store, no loyalty programs,
no special car to swipe, and no sales. Here's Trader
Joe's Vice president of Marketing Product Matt Salone, Marketing director
(06:31):
Tara Miller and Joe himself discussing the company's origins.
Speaker 6 (06:37):
So it's nineteen fifty eight and Joe colombe Joe. He
takes over a small chain of convenience stores around the
LA area. These are called Pronto markets. The whole idea
is fast. It's pronto, it's quick, right, and they're convenience stores.
Before we really even know what convenience store this is,
(07:00):
before seven to eleven becomes the thing that it is,
these are little, tiny corner markets.
Speaker 7 (07:07):
The kind of place where you could get anything from
say a pack of gum, to some pantyhose to a
box of ammunition.
Speaker 8 (07:19):
I spent ten years writing prodal Markets. Towards the end
of that, I really did not like the convenience store formula.
Speaker 6 (07:31):
Joe is the classic entrepreneur. Joe's really good at looking for,
finding and developing opportunities.
Speaker 9 (07:41):
The demographics were changing in the United States because of
the GI Bill of Rights, which was the largest experiment
in mass higher education in the history of the human race,
and I thought that these people would want something different.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
The GI Bill of Rights, passed in nineteen forty four,
provided benefits such as grants for school tuition, job training,
and hiring privileges for World War two vets. So after
realizing that competition from a burgeoning chain called seven to
eleven would likely drive it into the ground, Joe decided
(08:21):
to introduce a new concept. The tiki trend was in
full swing, so in nineteen sixty seven, Joe opened the
first Trader Joe's in Pasadena, California, a play on the
name of popular tiki restaurant chain Trader Vis. That first
store is still there in the same spot, but the
(08:42):
chain now has over four hundred and eighty seven locations nationwide.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
And you've been listening to our own Greg Hengler and
others involved in this story, including Trader Joe himself telling
the story of Trader Joe. My goodness, the fact that
it does more sales volume per square foot than its
big grocery store competitors is something, and it's amazing because
(09:10):
they also don't have an online presence, that is, they
don't sell online. They don't have one of those fancy
costco cards you gotta pay and swipe. No, it's just
old school. Anyone who's ever been to a Trader Joe's
knows it. And my goodness, that whole discussion of the
choice paradox and the genius of Trader Joe's, and understanding
it before well psychologists even understood it.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
That is that less choice can be liberating.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
And how many of us haven't been in an aisle
and been paralyzed trying to figure out which of the
hundreds of brands of deodorant to buy when we come back.
The genius of Trader Joe's, the marketing and psychological genius
behind this brand. The story continues here on our American stories.
Speaker 7 (10:08):
It's milk, it's bread, It's the stuff on your list.
It's the strange little snacks you end up buying instead.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
It's the beautiful moms in their yoga clothes.
Speaker 10 (10:16):
It's our favorite place.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
It's that store, Trader Joe's.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
And we continue with our American stories and the story
of Trader Joe's telling the story is our own, Greg Hangler,
But we begin with the vice president of marketing or
Trader Joe's, Matt Sloan.
Speaker 6 (10:35):
And so Joe the founder is leading the company for
the first thirty years, and he is central casting died
in the wool entrepreneurial spirit.
Speaker 8 (10:47):
It's the quality of the people which sets Trader Jose
apart forget the virgind dive to get all the other stuff.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
It's the quality of the people in the store.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
In nineteen seventy three, a trip to Trader Joe's would
have offered you many items that you won't find today,
like pantyhose, which was sold until nineteen seventy eight. In
nineteen seventy seven, they expanded their private label with fun
names like Trader Ming's, Trader Giado's, and Pilgrim Joe, and
introduced the first reusable canvas grocery bag. In nineteen seventy nine,
(11:26):
Joe sold Trader Joe's to THEO Albrick. Albrick's company Aldi
Noord still operates Trader Joe's in the US. By the
late nineteen eighties, the chain had expanded into northern California
in nineteen ninety three. The first Arizona location opened in
nineteen ninety five brought expansion into the Pacific Northwest in
(11:49):
ninety six. The first two East Coast locations opened outside
Boston between nineteen ninety In two thousand and one, the
number of store locations quintupled and revenue shot through the
roof as they rolled out an average of ten new
items per week. During this time, they also introduced supermarket
(12:10):
innovations like putting handles on paper bags. In two thousand
and two, they introduced one of their most notorious products,
a dollar ninety nine bottle of wine produced by a
guy named Charles Shaw, a West Point graduate, and it
came to be known as twubuck Chuck. Here's wine expert
(12:30):
and wine creator Charles Shaw himself being given a blind
taste test of two buck chuck.
Speaker 11 (12:38):
So let's pour it out for get. So the first
thing we're gonna look for is aroma. The fine wine
has actual qualities of the grape, and you can smell
the fruit in this of the grape, and frankly, I
can smell some fruit in this wine. This is amazing.
I'm gonna taste it. First thing I can do is
(12:59):
put it under tongue, and I picked up some decent ascidities.
Not bad, it's a little dry, it's got some tannin.
And then we're just gonna put up my mouth and
see what I think. I think this is a very
satisfying wine.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
Some consumers make the mistake of always equating quality with price.
That was not the case that the twenty eighth Annual
International Eastern Wine Competition with twenty three hundred wines in
the competition, judges awarded a prestigious double Gold medal to
a one dollar and ninety nine cent bottle of California wine,
(13:44):
the two thousand and two Charles Shaw Chiraz and it
would happen again in two thousand and five at the
cal Expo competition and then go on to win other
awards in Orange County. Trader Joe's has sold one billion
bottles of Charlie Shaw since two thousand and two. Here's
Chris Condit, the category manager for wine at Trader Joe's.
Speaker 12 (14:08):
I'm going to give you this secret to Trader Joe's.
Here so far they've all tasted like tang, but not
the good version. If there is one one thing that
we do that sets us apart is we have a
tasting panel. There's a lot of wine out there. There
really are hundreds of thousands of wines available in the market,
so we carry about five hundred in our stores. So
(14:30):
we're tasting every day, literally every day. The ass I mean,
it's got the color of the acid.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
There's more savory than it's pretty good though.
Speaker 12 (14:40):
Here're gonna tell me it's Russian River, so it'd be
Trader Joe's twenty sixteen Russian River, the titsa of everyone
had a chance to try it, think about it. Who'd
like to see that come in excellent? And lastly, and
the source of the wine for our various private label
and control label programs might change over time, but the
wine are always going to be great because we get
(15:01):
to pick and choose. We don't have to carry every wine.
We don't have to always repeat that exact same thing
every year. If it's not good, we don't think it's
great value. We don't love the wine, we don't buy it.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Trader Joe's frozen isle is another innovative wonder of the
grocery world, compared to the frozen isle in traditional grocery stores,
which is flailing with only six percent of total store sales.
Here's Warren Thayer, who runs the trade magazine Frozen and
Refrigerated Buyer, explaining the poor numbers and traditional grocery stores.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
Forty six percent of shoppers on the typical trip, when
they spend over one hundred dollars, don't even set foot
in the frozen food department.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
According to Phil Lempert, a food industry analyst. He says
this is due to the predictable packaging of the once
novelty frozen dinners introduced in the fifties and the frosty
barrier of the frozen selection.
Speaker 10 (16:03):
The Red Lean Cuisine, the Green Healthy Choice. It's sort
of like boring that glass door. It really creates a fence.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
You don't see those glass doors at Trader Joe's, which
has open freezers. The problem with opening that ice cold
door at your traditional supermarket means you've already committed to
purchasing something, which doesn't lead to much product discovery. Compare
that to Trader Joe's low level open freezers that bring
shoppers physically closer to the products. This allows the freedom
(16:35):
to check out new products with less effort, more leisurely,
and without the blast of cold air and subsequent frosted
glass door.
Speaker 10 (16:44):
It's fun to go through that taste to see what
you're gonna find.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
Piggybacking on what Lempard said before about the unattractive appeal
from the predictable packaging of traditional brands, Trader Joe's, on
the other hand, has its own private label. They buy
stray from the supplier, which ultimately cuts cost and leads
to cheaper products for the customer. The products themselves are colorful, quirky,
(17:08):
and have a consistent branding. Here's brand building expert Denise Leang.
Speaker 13 (17:14):
Okay, so it's usually kind of hand drawn or it's
not looking like it's you know, computer generated, right, they're
usually caricatures, and then there's some descriptive copy and all
of that I think helps the person, you know, the
shop or kind of see how this product fits into
(17:35):
their knees. There's an element of discovery, like finding something,
finding a new product you didn't know existed.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
David Ziegler Vall, the former head of packaging design at
Trader Joe's, said that the hand drawn images on the
products evokes elements of trust and a human touch, also
a sense of being locally produced, hand crafted, and small batch.
Joe's has cultivated a level of trust that is really
(18:03):
hard to manufacture. Trader Joe's found success by anticipating the
needs of its customers, in many cases, knowing what the
customer would want even before they did, and selling it
to them at a low price and in a fun atmosphere. Joe,
while still alive, is no longer involved with the company,
(18:24):
but his legacy is set in stone.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
And a terrific job by the production, editing and scripting
by our own Greg Hengler.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
And what a story. Trader Joe's, the.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Quintessential startup founded by the quintessential entrepreneur. That story about
the West Point Brad Charles Shaw creating the dollar ninety
nine bottle of wine two buck chuck and it actually
winning wine competitions and they've sold two billion Charles Shaws.
(18:55):
And then that story about the freezers and how much
fun it is to dig into those freezers and find
new stuff as opposed to that antiseptic glass door. It's
just so true and so unusual, and my goodness, the
anticipation of the needs of the customers is there. And
every time I go to a Trader Joe's, I'm always surprised.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
I'm always trying new things. The story of Trader.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Joe's, the story of an iconic American brand and the
man who created it.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Here on our American Stories
And we continue with our American stories.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Our next story is about a grocery store founded in
Los Angeles in nineteen sixty seven and now has hundreds
of locations covering forty two states.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Here's Greg Hengler with the story.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Trader Joe's, the surfy, laid back grocery store chain with
a cult like following, known for its cheap prices and
floral print clad staff, has been a household name for years.
When you break it down to square footage, Trader Joe's
is actually selling more than double its competitors, like grocery
(00:53):
store chain Whole Foods, and when it comes to the
traditional we have everything in more mega grocery store chains,
the small Trader Joe's locations do more than simply offer competition.
They outwork and out sell these goliaths of grocery. The
question is how, after all, Trader Joe's focuses on a
(01:19):
unique selection of products under their private label rather than
a large amount of them. They don't sell the same
old things we normally see. No lays, no Hindes, no
general mills, et cetera. And whereas a traditional grocery store
stocks upwards of forty thousand units, Trader Joe's runs around
(01:39):
a mirror four thousand. In order to make this clear,
I went to my local Kroger and did some aisle
counting and compared it with Trader Joe's scaled down approach
to shopping. Kroger stocks two hundred and eighty five varieties
of cookies, Trader Joe's one hundred and fifty four Kroger
one hundred and forty four pasta saw TJ's fourteen, Kroger's
(02:03):
seventy five ice t's TJ's nine Kroger stocks, two hundred
and seventy five cerials, TJ's thirty nine, Kroger forty four
olive oils TJ's fourteen, and Kroger's stocks forty toothpastes TJ's
just four. So back to the question, how does the
(02:24):
little guy Trader Joe's compete at such a high level?
Psychologist and Trader Joe's enthusiast, Barry Schwartz coin the term
the paradox of choice and quite literally wrote the book
on it, The Paradox of Choice? Why More is Less?
Here he is to explain what he means.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects
on people. One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis
rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from,
people find it very difficult to choose at all. So
that's one effect. The second effect is that even if
(03:07):
we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice,
we end up less satisfied with the result of the
choice than we would be if we had fewer options
to choose from.
Speaker 5 (03:19):
And there are several reasons for this.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
One of them is that, with a lot of different
salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one and
it's not perfect, and you know what salad dressing is,
it's easy to imagine that you could have made a
different choice that would have been better. And what happens
is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision
you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you
(03:43):
get out of the decision you made, even if it
was a good decision. I had no particular expectations when
they only came in one flavor. When they came in
one hundred flavors, one of them should have been perfect,
and what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. Finally,
one consequence of buying a bad fitting pair of genes
when there is only one kind to buy is that
(04:03):
when you are dissatisfied and you ask why, who's responsible?
Speaker 5 (04:07):
The answer is clear, the world is responsible.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
What could you do when there are hundreds of different
styles of genes available and you buy one that is disappointing,
and you ask why, who's responsible? It is equally clear
that the answer to the question is you you could
have done better with With one hundred different kinds of
genes on display.
Speaker 5 (04:28):
There is no excuse for failure.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
And so when people make decisions and even though the
results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them.
They blame themselves. Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial
world in the last generation. I believe a significant, not
the only, but a significant contributor to this explosion of
depression and also suicide is that people have experiences that
(04:54):
are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then
when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they're
at fault. And so the net result is that we
do better in general objectively and we feel worse. There's
no question that some choice is better than none, but
it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better
(05:16):
than some choice.
Speaker 5 (05:17):
There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the
point where options improve our welfare.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Trader Joe's understands what Barry is saying, and as Barry
has said himself regarding that magical number, I think Trader
Joe's is the best example of how the world should
be constructed. The man responsible for all of this is
the original Joe, the guy behind the beloved grocery store chain,
(05:45):
who founded the company emphasizing quality over quantity, and that
quality starts with the more than forty one thousand employees
known as crew members. After all, the core of any
business is customer service, which Trader joe Is more than
excels at. Data science professionals have ranked Trader Joe's number
(06:07):
one in customer preference for two years running, with Costco
coming in at number two in Amazon in third. The
brand remains simple, with no online store, no loyalty programs,
no special car to swipe, and no sales. Here's Trader
Joe's Vice president of Marketing Product Matt Salone, Marketing director
(06:31):
Tara Miller and Joe himself discussing the company's origins.
Speaker 6 (06:37):
So it's nineteen fifty eight and Joe colombe Joe. He
takes over a small chain of convenience stores around the
LA area. These are called Pronto markets. The whole idea
is fast. It's pronto, it's quick, right, and they're convenience stores.
Before we really even know what convenience store this is,
(07:00):
before seven to eleven becomes the thing that it is,
these are little, tiny corner markets.
Speaker 7 (07:07):
The kind of place where you could get anything from
say a pack of gum, to some pantyhose to a
box of ammunition.
Speaker 8 (07:19):
I spent ten years writing prodal Markets. Towards the end
of that, I really did not like the convenience store formula.
Speaker 6 (07:31):
Joe is the classic entrepreneur. Joe's really good at looking for,
finding and developing opportunities.
Speaker 9 (07:41):
The demographics were changing in the United States because of
the GI Bill of Rights, which was the largest experiment
in mass higher education in the history of the human race,
and I thought that these people would want something different.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
The GI Bill of Rights, passed in nineteen forty four,
provided benefits such as grants for school tuition, job training,
and hiring privileges for World War two vets. So after
realizing that competition from a burgeoning chain called seven to
eleven would likely drive it into the ground, Joe decided
(08:21):
to introduce a new concept. The tiki trend was in
full swing, so in nineteen sixty seven, Joe opened the
first Trader Joe's in Pasadena, California, a play on the
name of popular tiki restaurant chain Trader Vis. That first
store is still there in the same spot, but the
(08:42):
chain now has over four hundred and eighty seven locations nationwide.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
And you've been listening to our own Greg Hengler and
others involved in this story, including Trader Joe himself telling
the story of Trader Joe. My goodness, the fact that
it does more sales volume per square foot than its
big grocery store competitors is something, and it's amazing because
(09:10):
they also don't have an online presence, that is, they
don't sell online. They don't have one of those fancy
costco cards you gotta pay and swipe. No, it's just
old school. Anyone who's ever been to a Trader Joe's
knows it. And my goodness, that whole discussion of the
choice paradox and the genius of Trader Joe's, and understanding
it before well psychologists even understood it.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
That is that less choice can be liberating.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
And how many of us haven't been in an aisle
and been paralyzed trying to figure out which of the
hundreds of brands of deodorant to buy when we come back.
The genius of Trader Joe's, the marketing and psychological genius
behind this brand. The story continues here on our American stories.
Speaker 7 (10:08):
It's milk, it's bread, It's the stuff on your list.
It's the strange little snacks you end up buying instead.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
It's the beautiful moms in their yoga clothes.
Speaker 10 (10:16):
It's our favorite place.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
It's that store, Trader Joe's.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
And we continue with our American stories and the story
of Trader Joe's telling the story is our own, Greg Hangler,
But we begin with the vice president of marketing or
Trader Joe's, Matt Sloan.
Speaker 6 (10:35):
And so Joe the founder is leading the company for
the first thirty years, and he is central casting died
in the wool entrepreneurial spirit.
Speaker 8 (10:47):
It's the quality of the people which sets Trader Jose
apart forget the virgind dive to get all the other stuff.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
It's the quality of the people in the store.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
In nineteen seventy three, a trip to Trader Joe's would
have offered you many items that you won't find today,
like pantyhose, which was sold until nineteen seventy eight. In
nineteen seventy seven, they expanded their private label with fun
names like Trader Ming's, Trader Giado's, and Pilgrim Joe, and
introduced the first reusable canvas grocery bag. In nineteen seventy nine,
(11:26):
Joe sold Trader Joe's to THEO Albrick. Albrick's company Aldi
Noord still operates Trader Joe's in the US. By the
late nineteen eighties, the chain had expanded into northern California
in nineteen ninety three. The first Arizona location opened in
nineteen ninety five brought expansion into the Pacific Northwest in
(11:49):
ninety six. The first two East Coast locations opened outside
Boston between nineteen ninety In two thousand and one, the
number of store locations quintupled and revenue shot through the
roof as they rolled out an average of ten new
items per week. During this time, they also introduced supermarket
(12:10):
innovations like putting handles on paper bags. In two thousand
and two, they introduced one of their most notorious products,
a dollar ninety nine bottle of wine produced by a
guy named Charles Shaw, a West Point graduate, and it
came to be known as twubuck Chuck. Here's wine expert
(12:30):
and wine creator Charles Shaw himself being given a blind
taste test of two buck chuck.
Speaker 11 (12:38):
So let's pour it out for get. So the first
thing we're gonna look for is aroma. The fine wine
has actual qualities of the grape, and you can smell
the fruit in this of the grape, and frankly, I
can smell some fruit in this wine. This is amazing.
I'm gonna taste it. First thing I can do is
(12:59):
put it under tongue, and I picked up some decent ascidities.
Not bad, it's a little dry, it's got some tannin.
And then we're just gonna put up my mouth and
see what I think. I think this is a very
satisfying wine.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
Some consumers make the mistake of always equating quality with price.
That was not the case that the twenty eighth Annual
International Eastern Wine Competition with twenty three hundred wines in
the competition, judges awarded a prestigious double Gold medal to
a one dollar and ninety nine cent bottle of California wine,
(13:44):
the two thousand and two Charles Shaw Chiraz and it
would happen again in two thousand and five at the
cal Expo competition and then go on to win other
awards in Orange County. Trader Joe's has sold one billion
bottles of Charlie Shaw since two thousand and two. Here's
Chris Condit, the category manager for wine at Trader Joe's.
Speaker 12 (14:08):
I'm going to give you this secret to Trader Joe's.
Here so far they've all tasted like tang, but not
the good version. If there is one one thing that
we do that sets us apart is we have a
tasting panel. There's a lot of wine out there. There
really are hundreds of thousands of wines available in the market,
so we carry about five hundred in our stores. So
(14:30):
we're tasting every day, literally every day. The ass I mean,
it's got the color of the acid.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
There's more savory than it's pretty good though.
Speaker 12 (14:40):
Here're gonna tell me it's Russian River, so it'd be
Trader Joe's twenty sixteen Russian River, the titsa of everyone
had a chance to try it, think about it. Who'd
like to see that come in excellent? And lastly, and
the source of the wine for our various private label
and control label programs might change over time, but the
wine are always going to be great because we get
(15:01):
to pick and choose. We don't have to carry every wine.
We don't have to always repeat that exact same thing
every year. If it's not good, we don't think it's
great value. We don't love the wine, we don't buy it.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Trader Joe's frozen isle is another innovative wonder of the
grocery world, compared to the frozen isle in traditional grocery stores,
which is flailing with only six percent of total store sales.
Here's Warren Thayer, who runs the trade magazine Frozen and
Refrigerated Buyer, explaining the poor numbers and traditional grocery stores.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
Forty six percent of shoppers on the typical trip, when
they spend over one hundred dollars, don't even set foot
in the frozen food department.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
According to Phil Lempert, a food industry analyst. He says
this is due to the predictable packaging of the once
novelty frozen dinners introduced in the fifties and the frosty
barrier of the frozen selection.
Speaker 10 (16:03):
The Red Lean Cuisine, the Green Healthy Choice. It's sort
of like boring that glass door. It really creates a fence.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
You don't see those glass doors at Trader Joe's, which
has open freezers. The problem with opening that ice cold
door at your traditional supermarket means you've already committed to
purchasing something, which doesn't lead to much product discovery. Compare
that to Trader Joe's low level open freezers that bring
shoppers physically closer to the products. This allows the freedom
(16:35):
to check out new products with less effort, more leisurely,
and without the blast of cold air and subsequent frosted
glass door.
Speaker 10 (16:44):
It's fun to go through that taste to see what
you're gonna find.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
Piggybacking on what Lempard said before about the unattractive appeal
from the predictable packaging of traditional brands, Trader Joe's, on
the other hand, has its own private label. They buy
stray from the supplier, which ultimately cuts cost and leads
to cheaper products for the customer. The products themselves are colorful, quirky,
(17:08):
and have a consistent branding. Here's brand building expert Denise Leang.
Speaker 13 (17:14):
Okay, so it's usually kind of hand drawn or it's
not looking like it's you know, computer generated, right, they're
usually caricatures, and then there's some descriptive copy and all
of that I think helps the person, you know, the
shop or kind of see how this product fits into
(17:35):
their knees. There's an element of discovery, like finding something,
finding a new product you didn't know existed.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
David Ziegler Vall, the former head of packaging design at
Trader Joe's, said that the hand drawn images on the
products evokes elements of trust and a human touch, also
a sense of being locally produced, hand crafted, and small batch.
Joe's has cultivated a level of trust that is really
(18:03):
hard to manufacture. Trader Joe's found success by anticipating the
needs of its customers, in many cases, knowing what the
customer would want even before they did, and selling it
to them at a low price and in a fun atmosphere. Joe,
while still alive, is no longer involved with the company,
(18:24):
but his legacy is set in stone.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
And a terrific job by the production, editing and scripting
by our own Greg Hengler.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
And what a story. Trader Joe's, the.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Quintessential startup founded by the quintessential entrepreneur. That story about
the West Point Brad Charles Shaw creating the dollar ninety
nine bottle of wine two buck chuck and it actually
winning wine competitions and they've sold two billion Charles Shaws.
(18:55):
And then that story about the freezers and how much
fun it is to dig into those freezers and find
new stuff as opposed to that antiseptic glass door. It's
just so true and so unusual, and my goodness, the
anticipation of the needs of the customers is there. And
every time I go to a Trader Joe's, I'm always surprised.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
I'm always trying new things. The story of Trader.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Joe's, the story of an iconic American brand and the
man who created it.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.