Joe Coulombe, every mention

Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired Oct 27, 2025 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 5:12 David Rosenthal We start with Trader Joe himself.
• ▶ 5:17 David Rosenthal Joe Colombe.
• ▶ 5:19 David Rosenthal Because you can't separate Trader Joe's from Trader Joe.
• ▶ 5:23 David Rosenthal Joe Colombe was born in 1930 in San Diego, California.
• ▶ 5:42 David Rosenthal Joe's father was an engineer at Convair, an aircraft manufacturer in Southern California in the defense industry there, and his mother was a school teacher, and perhaps inspired by his mother, Joe is a very good student.
• ▶ 6:20 Ben Gilbert This is not one that people are walking around quoting, you know, Joe Colom was a GSB alum.
• ▶ 6:35 David Rosenthal And reflecting that, Joe goes to get a job after GSB, and the only job he can get is back in Southern California at the lowly owl drug company.
• ▶ 7:10 David Rosenthal So Joe gets hired by an executive named Bud Fisher, who specifically wanted to bring in a recent MBA grad to research alternatives for turning around Owl.
• ▶ 7:24 David Rosenthal So Joe goes off and he scours the country and comes across
• ▶ 13:39 David Rosenthal Well, speaking of completely obvious, back to Joe and the Trader Joe's story.
• ▶ 14:00 David Rosenthal Joe travels to Texas, and they're like, there is absolutely no reason that this won't work in California.
• ▶ 14:30 David Rosenthal So then, this is like the path almost taken for Joe.
• ▶ 15:00 David Rosenthal And Joe actually jumped ship for 18 months and goes and works at Hughes, and he's basically like the CFO of their semiconductor division.
• ▶ 15:07 Ben Gilbert Joe works in semiconductors?
• ▶ 15:20 David Rosenthal There was this whole alternative path that Trader Joe might have actually been like a Traderous Eight or something.
• ▶ 16:52 Ben Gilbert Tobacco selling what Joe calls girly magazines.
• ▶ 17:05 David Rosenthal Joe might have built the Seven 11 of the West Coast, except that the parent company, Rexall, had a couple different irons in the fire for turnarounds here.
• ▶ 18:19 David Rosenthal So this leaves Joe, you know, he's 27, 28.
• ▶ 18:48 Ben Gilbert But of course, Joe has no money.
• ▶ 19:22 David Rosenthal Joe and his wife Alice sell their house to raise money for this.
• ▶ 19:37 David Rosenthal Instead of a yellow tuxedo, uh, you know, Joe is wearing a Hawaiian shirt here.
• ▶ 20:50 David Rosenthal Summer in 1962, they close the deal, and Joe and the employees become the owners of the newly incorporated Pronto markets.
• ▶ 20:59 David Rosenthal Joe writes in his great, great, great, great autobiography called Becoming Trader Joe that came out a couple years ago.
• ▶ 21:21 Ben Gilbert I was doing the research and I tried to figure out the total return since Joe bought in.
• ▶ 21:33 Ben Gilbert Would have beat Joe by, you know, almost two X.
• ▶ 22:24 Ben Gilbert I say overpaid, but Joe's philosophy on this is it's not overpaying.
• ▶ 24:43 David Rosenthal And then in October of 1965, Joe goes to meet Merritt for his monthly lunch meeting with him.
• ▶ 25:03 David Rosenthal And Joe's like, all right.
• ▶ 27:09 Ben Gilbert And then third, there's another thing happening, which is, it's not just Joe who realizes that seven-eleven is a good idea in California.
• ▶ 27:26 David Rosenthal Well, after the fourth drink, the news that Merritt finally shares with Joe is
• ▶ 27:44 David Rosenthal That's troubling enough to Joe.
• ▶ 30:27 David Rosenthal So Joe has some soul searching to do.
• ▶ 33:34 Ben Gilbert Joe is there in St.
• ▶ 34:26 Ben Gilbert As I really dug into this, Joe's somewhat of a macro economist who, once he realized where all the world was going, he places his bet in the form of a highly opinionated grocery store, and then he would execute much of that vision himself.
• ▶ 34:47 David Rosenthal Okay, so Joe comes back from this vacation, and what does he do?
• ▶ 37:23 David Rosenthal Like, Joe can be much more nimble.
• ▶ 38:38 David Rosenthal Basically transforms into a liquor store and it buys Joe a couple of years to figure out the bigger business plan and stave off the invasion from seven-eleven.
• ▶ 44:43 David Rosenthal And the net of all this for Joe and Trader Joe's and being about to get into this market is that supermarkets basically become real estate companies.
• ▶ 46:02 Ben Gilbert It's funny, when I finished reading Joe's book,
• ▶ 46:44 David Rosenthal So, back to Joe and his pronto dilemma, and what's gonna become Trader Joe's here.
• ▶ 47:01 David Rosenthal So after a year or two of stabilizing the ship, Joe's ambitious.
• ▶ 49:21 David Rosenthal And in Joe's mind, these
• ▶ 50:02 Ben Gilbert Back in 1970, trader Joe Colom looked at the grocery industry and saw two paths.
• ▶ 51:16 Ben Gilbert But the thing that's not obvious that takes a Joe Coulomb to, like,
• ▶ 52:39 David Rosenthal So Joe decides that
• ▶ 53:22 David Rosenthal So in another almost completely foreign thing to today, the culture back then, especially Joe's target market of educated, soon to be traveled folks,
• ▶ 54:33 Ben Gilbert And Joe Colom says the Jungle Cruise was one of his two inspirations for embracing this traitor idea, this tiki traitor thing.
• ▶ 54:54 David Rosenthal And then the final piece of this sort of branding stew in Joe's mind
• ▶ 55:33 David Rosenthal Joe gets the idea.
• ▶ 55:45 David Rosenthal So in August, 1967, Joe opens the first Trader Joe's on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena, California.
• ▶ 55:57 David Rosenthal Joe decides that
• ▶ 59:14 Ben Gilbert What are the choices that Joe made when he opened that first Trader Joe's in Pasadena, other than, of course, putting everyone in Hawaiian shirts?
• ▶ 59:31 David Rosenthal Joe has his sort of folksy shorthand for this in the book of the overeducated and underpaid.
• ▶ 1:01:05 Ben Gilbert Anything before 19 oh six is public domain, so this is just Joe being cheap.
• ▶ 1:01:17 Ben Gilbert And so he really comes up with this thing he calls the four tests, which is, one, we want to stock goods that are high value per cubic inch.
• ▶ 1:02:08 David Rosenthal He wanted them to be 4000 square feet.
• ▶ 1:03:25 David Rosenthal Joe's
• ▶ 1:03:55 Ben Gilbert And he was meticulous about location picking.
• ▶ 1:05:35 David Rosenthal So this manager, this captain is like, well, Joe, alcohol's, you know, our sort of core product here.
• ▶ 1:05:44 David Rosenthal Joe's like, all right, great.
• ▶ 1:05:46 Ben Gilbert Meanwhile, Joe doesn't drink wine.
• ▶ 1:05:51 David Rosenthal He would become a huge anophile, unophile, how do you pronounce it?
• ▶ 1:06:04 David Rosenthal So Joe's like, great, let's try it.
• ▶ 1:11:28 David Rosenthal Joe and all the employees, they start learning about wine, going up to Napa, conducting tastings, meeting all these winemakers who are
• ▶ 1:14:55 David Rosenthal At one point, Joe decides he's gonna set up a wine bank for his customers.
• ▶ 1:15:36 Ben Gilbert But what you're starting to see here with the ability to find clever ways to do regulatory arbitrage or sell below the fair trade price, Joe is a master of reading all the regulations, not trusting what anybody tells him of like, oh, this…
• ▶ 1:17:01 David Rosenthal And that leads into the next era that Joe also sort of in goofy fashion calls Whole Earth Harry, the health food era of Trader Joe's.
• ▶ 1:17:11 David Rosenthal So I think you could say about Joe that he was a genius at many, many things.
• ▶ 1:17:57 Ben Gilbert You mentioned some attributes on Joe himself.
• ▶ 1:18:06 Ben Gilbert Joe is a man frequently described as a genius by other very smart men.
• ▶ 1:18:21 Ben Gilbert The fact that he talks about Joe this way actually has a lot of credibility.
• ▶ 1:18:49 Ben Gilbert And describe wanting to wake up early in the morning to race to work because they can't wait to hear what Joe has to say.
• ▶ 1:19:17 Ben Gilbert The genius of Joe that impresses me most is his ability to project this integrity and decency when he wants to.
• ▶ 1:20:44 David Rosenthal Another one of those directions was the organic health food movement, and for Joe and the target audience of
• ▶ 1:21:12 David Rosenthal Joe has this amazing quote on this.
• ▶ 1:22:11 David Rosenthal So this is how on the pulse
• ▶ 1:22:27 David Rosenthal Joe sees all the things that John would then see and create whole foods and he saw him five plus years before.
• ▶ 1:23:16 Ben Gilbert And Joe says, sure, what's going on with them?
• ▶ 1:24:18 Ben Gilbert So this begins what Joe calls intensive buying.
• ▶ 1:30:34 David Rosenthal And so Joe and Trader Joe's on a whim because their vendor of bran also offered it decided like, hey, let's get some nuts and dried fruit in here too.
• ▶ 1:37:27 David Rosenthal And in Joe's mind, and I think even through the next generations of Trader Joe's CEOs and all the way up through the company today, that practice of the supermarket CPG industrial complex is just, like, gross.
• ▶ 1:42:57 David Rosenthal So Joe decides, all right, end of fair trade and deregulation.
• ▶ 1:43:19 David Rosenthal Joe says, our way out is, of course, operational excellence.
• ▶ 1:43:40 David Rosenthal Joe writes in the book, friends, Mac the Knife has no competition.
• ▶ 1:45:21 David Rosenthal So heading into this Mac the Knife era, Joe institutes a rule that I assume is still in effect at Trader Joe's to this day, which is that, okay, everybody, obviously private label, that's the strategy, that's for the future here.
• ▶ 1:47:42 David Rosenthal Well, we'll get into after Joe's era, how Trader Joe's changes a bit as it scales.
• ▶ 1:49:46 Ben Gilbert There's also a funny thing where at first, Joe was resistant to doing it for two reasons.
• ▶ 1:50:13 Ben Gilbert And so that one is great because Joe just realized, well, actually, if I'm so good at targeting neighborhoods that have disposable income and are highly educated, like I have a very particular sense of who my customer is.
• ▶ 1:51:04 David Rosenthal Which today is part of the charm, but yeah, was done by Joe himself back in the day.
• ▶ 1:51:52 David Rosenthal Asks Joe to come on once a week.
• ▶ 1:52:22 David Rosenthal It's gonna be Joe written himself, speaking himself, telling the product story of one singular product in every ad, and we're always gonna end with thank you for listening.
• ▶ 1:52:35 David Rosenthal Joe basically discovered the power of podcasts to reach your audience back in the 19 seventies.
• ▶ 1:54:22 David Rosenthal There was one other thing, though, that Joe did as a sort of strategic hedge against all the chaos that the, uh, repeal of fair trade unleashed in the California retail sector.
• ▶ 1:54:35 Ben Gilbert Yeah, he sold the company.
• ▶ 1:54:40 David Rosenthal Yeah, he sold the company.
• ▶ 1:54:45 David Rosenthal In 1979, Joe and all the other employee shareholders completely sold out.
• ▶ 1:55:11 David Rosenthal The even crazier twist, though, is that Joe remained as the CEO of Trader Joe's for another 10 years after selling the company until he retired in 1988.
• ▶ 1:56:13 David Rosenthal So as we said, when Joe did the management buyout of Pronto Markets, the predecessor entity to Trader Joe's from
• ▶ 1:56:23 David Rosenthal Joe was the founder and the largest shareholder, but about like a quarter to a third of the company was owned by the other early employees.
• ▶ 1:56:56 David Rosenthal So, Joe and the company know this is a problem coming, and during the mid-seventies, they spent a couple years setting up a whole