Trader Joe's, every mention
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tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 202Ben Gilbert 140David Senra 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Trader Joe's comes up
The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:23:15 Ben Gilbert Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 4:23:19 David Rosenthal Trader Joe's Donald Duck.
- ▶ 4:23:21 Ben Gilbert Trader Joe's original milk supplier before they got bought by Trader Joe's competitor, Seven 11.
- ▶ 4:23:27 David Rosenthal And of course, Trader Joe's itself was in part inspired by the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland.
Vanguard: The communist capitalist who saved investors a trillion dollars (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 31:22 Ben Gilbert And today, listeners, we are going to talk about something that we mentioned last season on the Trader Joe's episode, Supply Chain Finance.
- ▶ 2:07:24 Ben Gilbert You see it in the NFL with Coca-Cola, with Trader Joe's.
The NFL: How small-town teams became America's most valuable sports empire (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:16:16 Ben Gilbert And recent ones on Coca-Cola and Trader Joe's that were super, super fun.
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 33:24 Ben Gilbert Whereas when we do something like Trader Joe's, someone says, what are you working on?
- ▶ 33:29 Ben Gilbert And we're like, Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 33:30 Ben Gilbert They're like, I love Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 33:45 David Rosenthal Like people didn't understand Trader Joe's, or people didn't understand Google, we thought.
- ▶ 1:30:59 Ben Gilbert Meta, Rolex, Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 2:17:55 Ben Gilbert Like if, if you come in with a point of view and you come in, let's say we try to, I was so afraid when we were making Trader Joe's that we were going to remake the Costco episode.
Coca-Cola: The Complete History & Strategy (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:33:24 Ben Gilbert For new listeners to the show, and there are many of you, thank you so much to all of you who shared the Trader Joe's episode with friends and family.
- ▶ 3:52:13 Ben Gilbert If you liked this episode, go check out our episodes on Berkshire Hathaway, Standard Oil, Rolex, or Trader Joe's.
Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 0:01 Ben Gilbert I decided today needed to be an all Trader Joe's day.
- ▶ 1:19 Ben Gilbert These are a few of the items I picked up this week on my trip to Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 1:28 Ben Gilbert I don't think I've ever spent more money at Trader Joe's because I just said yes to everything.
- ▶ 1:39 Ben Gilbert Listeners, America seems to have an obsession with this grocery store, Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 1:55 Ben Gilbert And they break every rule in grocery retailing.
- ▶ 2:00 Ben Gilbert They don't stock all the things you need to buy each week.
- ▶ 2:14 Ben Gilbert I mean, every Trader Joe's I've ever been to.
- ▶ 2:25 Ben Gilbert There's never any sales or discounts, and they don't offer any coupons.
- ▶ 2:29 Ben Gilbert They sell almost none of your favorite known brand names.
- ▶ 2:33 Ben Gilbert And their produce leaves a lot to be desired.
- ▶ 2:36 Ben Gilbert And yet, people love it.
- ▶ 2:40 Ben Gilbert I mean, in an era where most grocery chains are being disrupted, Trader Joe's cult following has driven it to be more successful than ever, as far as we can tell, from the outside at least, because it is an intensely private company.
- ▶ 2:51 David Rosenthal Yes, it is.
- ▶ 3:05 Ben Gilbert Trader Joe's is not the best grocery store, but it might be your favorite store.
- ▶ 4:59 David Rosenthal Well, I wish that you and I had investments in this company, but unfortunately, only one person in the world does, and he's deceased, as we will see at the end of the episode.
- ▶ 5:19 David Rosenthal Because you can't separate Trader Joe's from Trader Joe.
- ▶ 13:02 David Rosenthal For context, Trader Joe's today in twenty-twenty-five has 600 stores.
- ▶ 13:39 David Rosenthal Well, speaking of completely obvious, back to Joe and the Trader Joe's story.
- ▶ 16:58 David Rosenthal This is not the Trader Joe's that you know today.
- ▶ 21:37 David Rosenthal But even more importantly, though, almost nothing from Pronto Market survives to Trader Joe's today.
- ▶ 22:00 Ben Gilbert A thing you commonly hear about Trader Joe's today that he did right away is we're gonna have some of the highest paid employees in the industry, and we're gonna attract the best talent by just effectively overpaying for everyone.
- ▶ 22:11 David Rosenthal Basically every employee at Trader Joe's get paid between 40 and a 150% over what average compensation is for their roles in retail.
- ▶ 22:52 David Rosenthal Every Trader Joe's you go to,
- ▶ 30:56 David Rosenthal And that plan would become Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 31:07 Ben Gilbert And listeners, this episode with Trader Joe's, supply chain is much more important than your typical acquired episode.
- ▶ 32:12 Ben Gilbert Well, supply chains like Trader Joe's prioritize simplicity, which spoiler alert, that is like a huge thing that we're going to talk about later in the episode.
- ▶ 33:30 Ben Gilbert So, David, the origin of Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 35:46 David Rosenthal This is the hilarious thing about Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 39:03 David Rosenthal I mean, there's an alternative world where Trader Joe's basically becomes
- ▶ 39:18 Ben Gilbert Listeners, I did sort of a brief history of supermarkets in America to come up to speed on what Trader Joe's does differently and how we got here.
- ▶ 42:42 David Rosenthal Note, all companies and products that you're not gonna find in Trader Joe's today.
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 46:44 David Rosenthal So, back to Joe and his pronto dilemma, and what's gonna become Trader Joe's here.
- ▶ 52:11 Ben Gilbert I didn't realize how important basically being a liquor store was to the Trader Joe's story.
- ▶ 52:16 Ben Gilbert The rest of Trader Joe's kind of falls out of selling liquor.
- ▶ 52:33 David Rosenthal And soon to be wine, thanks to Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 54:52 Ben Gilbert It's very Trader Joe's-ian looking.
- ▶ 55:41 David Rosenthal And we're gonna call it Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 55:45 David Rosenthal So in August, 1967, Joe opens the first Trader Joe's on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena, California.
- ▶ 56:12 David Rosenthal And when it opens, August, 1967, it's got a lot of the elements of Trader Joe's today.
- ▶ 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?
- ▶ 59:38 Ben Gilbert At this point, it's not branded products, really, the way that Trader Joe's is today.
- ▶ 1:00:09 David Rosenthal This is the dual pillars of Trader Joe's target customers.
- ▶ 1:01:14 David Rosenthal That's Trader Joe's right there.
- ▶ 1:01:29 Ben Gilbert Yes, and then, of course, vitamins, and you walk into a Trader Joe's today, you can almost feel that
- ▶ 1:01:43 David Rosenthal Yes, and Trader Joe's today average about, call it 15 thousand-ish, maybe a little less square feet per store.
- ▶ 1:01:58 Ben Gilbert And back then, Trader Joe's was like 4000 square feet.
- ▶ 1:02:21 Ben Gilbert So much of Trader Joe's's business stems out of this, that they are unwilling to start doing things that are hard to handle, that are logistically difficult, and they kind of have this ethos of,
- ▶ 1:02:47 Ben Gilbert Something that Trader Joe's can be outstanding in terms of price or assortment.
- ▶ 1:03:00 David Rosenthal So this last strategic cannon is, I think, most perfectly, perhaps in Trader Joe's entire history, exemplified in the first new product category that they add beyond liquor to this official new first Trader Joe's store.
- ▶ 1:03:27 David Rosenthal Target square footage size for the new Trader Joe's store concept was like, 4045 hundred square feet.
- ▶ 1:04:33 David Rosenthal So they move in, got the Trader Joe's concept with hard liquor being the cornerstone sort of first.
- ▶ 1:06:20 David Rosenthal Right there in the Trader Joe's store, and the world's greatest variety was 17 different kinds of wine from different wineries in Napa.
- ▶ 1:06:50 David Rosenthal It's Trader Joe's that makes it a thing.
- ▶ 1:06:53 David Rosenthal Because by God, it becomes a huge hit, as you could imagine, with the Trader Joe's target demographic.
- ▶ 1:09:15 David Rosenthal I think this probably becomes the most important factor in Trader Joe's success.
- ▶ 1:09:26 David Rosenthal This is the unlock for thinking about Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 1:11:09 Ben Gilbert And Trader Joe's is, like, a few years into being the number one seller of
- ▶ 1:11:22 David Rosenthal So the early days of the Trader Joe's wine program were unbelievable.
- ▶ 1:11:36 David Rosenthal You know, essentially guys in the garage at this point in time, they bring it back to Pasadena, they get Heights, Fremark Abbey, like some of the best wines and winemakers in the entire world in history are being sold for 10 bucks a bottle…
- ▶ 1:12:44 David Rosenthal So by 1970, the year they launched the Insider's Report, and three years after this first Trader Joe's launches on Arroyo Boulevard,
- ▶ 1:12:52 David Rosenthal Trader Joe's becomes the largest wine retailer in California.
- ▶ 1:12:58 David Rosenthal Which is, on the one hand, completely insane, but on the other hand, shows just how young and new the wine-drinking market was in America, and that Trader Joe's was the one making it happen, starting in California.
- ▶ 1:14:00 David Rosenthal And so Trader Joe's was just like,
- ▶ 1:14:44 David Rosenthal Then, pretty quickly, wine collecting starts to become a thing, and Trader Joe's is just blowing out wine.
- ▶ 1:15:13 David Rosenthal Trader Joe's does not have wine banks today.
- ▶ 1:16:27 Ben Gilbert That people know it's just one more great thing you'll get from coming to Trader Joe's is one more thing that we only have here that you can't get anywhere else, and you're going to get a great value by doing it.
- ▶ 1:16:43 David Rosenthal So all that takes us through the early seventies in this sort of first era of Trader Joe's on the back of liquor and then wines.
- ▶ 1:16:54 David Rosenthal Somebody needs to do the eras tour of Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 1:17:42 Ben Gilbert It is astonishing how he had his finger on the pulse and how he was willing to either change what Trader Joe's was
- ▶ 1:17:50 Ben Gilbert Or adapt it and add a new layer on top to turn Trader Joe's into the next version of what it needed to be.
- ▶ 1:19:46 Ben Gilbert I'm telling you, this whole book is just beautiful prose, but that's a great encapsulation, and when you layer on top that intelligence with that interpersonal ability, and then this thing you're talking about, David, this seemingly…
- ▶ 1:22:11 David Rosenthal So this is how on the pulse
- ▶ 1:23:02 Ben Gilbert There's this amazing story of someone comes to visit Trader Joe's saying, hey, I have a whole bunch of extra large eggs that I just can't sell to the supermarket chains.
- ▶ 1:23:57 Ben Gilbert Trader Joe's is like,
- ▶ 1:24:47 David Rosenthal So for this whole Earth Harry era of Trader Joe's, these health foods
- ▶ 1:25:59 David Rosenthal The really strategic, critical element of adding health foods to Trader Joe's isn't just that it also fits all
- ▶ 1:26:10 David Rosenthal The same criteria that wine does, and that it's a perfect fit for the Trader Joe's target customer.
- ▶ 1:26:41 David Rosenthal And thus emerges the opportunity for Trader Joe's to start introducing their own product brands.
- ▶ 1:26:50 David Rosenthal But first, before we tell the story of Private Label and Trader Joe's, this is a great time to thank good friend of the show, Sentry.
- ▶ 1:28:57 Ben Gilbert What was the very first Trader Joe's private label product?
- ▶ 1:29:01 Ben Gilbert Also, it's crazy to imagine Trader Joe's without private label.
- ▶ 1:29:04 Ben Gilbert I mean, you walk in today, you look around, over 80% of the stuff is Trader Joe's.
- ▶ 1:29:37 David Rosenthal You can still buy Trader Joe's granola today.
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