Pronto Markets, every mention

Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired Oct 27, 2025 · 28 mentions

• ▶ 16:06 David Rosenthal So at age 27, he comes back to OWL slash Rexall as the new president of the newly christened Pronto Markets.
• ▶ 16:17 David Rosenthal Pronto.
• ▶ 16:21 David Rosenthal They build six pronto convenience stores in the LA metro area as a pilot and off to the races, as you would expect.
• ▶ 18:33 David Rosenthal So he goes to Rexall and he says, hey, rather than just selling off Pronto as part of all the drugstore operations, what if I
• ▶ 18:44 David Rosenthal Buy just these six pronto markets from you.
• ▶ 19:12 David Rosenthal So if you can scrape together 25,000 dollars, I will sell you pronto markets.
• ▶ 20:06 David Rosenthal He goes to the current employees of the six Pronto stores.
• ▶ 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.
• ▶ 21:05 David Rosenthal That employees owned about half the company.
• ▶ 21:12 David Rosenthal At least a quarter, if not a third of the company is owned by these early employees.
• ▶ 21:37 David Rosenthal But even more importantly, though, almost nothing from Pronto Market survives to Trader Joe's today.
• ▶ 24:05 David Rosenthal Debt financing, and Pronto will exclusively carry ad or dairy products, you know, milk, ice cream.
• ▶ 24:39 David Rosenthal Pronto becomes Ador's largest retailer.
• ▶ 25:47 David Rosenthal And I said it a minute ago that Pronto, still relatively little Pronto markets in LA, is Adhor's
• ▶ 29:25 David Rosenthal So Pronto Markets is toast.
• ▶ 29:28 Ben Gilbert Seven 11 is at least a thousand times bigger, and any landlord is gonna wanna sign them over little pronto markets.
• ▶ 29:46 David Rosenthal And the operating history, yeah, you're a landlord, would you rather have seven 11 be your tenant or start up pronto markets?
• ▶ 30:10 Ben Gilbert And so the core insight is that Pronto Markets is effectively just an empty vessel to sell the same products.
• ▶ 30:23 David Rosenthal So in other words, pronto markets is toast.
• ▶ 38:37 David Rosenthal Pronto markets.
• ▶ 46:44 David Rosenthal So, back to Joe and his pronto dilemma, and what's gonna become Trader Joe's here.
• ▶ 52:42 David Rosenthal His store, the newly survived Pronto Markets, should create a new tagline designed for this target new customer base.
• ▶ 53:12 David Rosenthal So, he knows this is a wholly different unique retail concept versus Pronto.
• ▶ 56:06 Ben Gilbert And was this one of the Pronto markets before?
• ▶ 1:05:10 David Rosenthal He used to have the shop next to one of their other pronto markets here in LA.
• ▶ 1:43:48 David Rosenthal My years at Pronto Markets convinced me
• ▶ 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
• ▶ 1:57:51 David Rosenthal The only valuation that ever happened was the 25,000 dollar transaction when Joe bought Pronto.