The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

by Benjamin Lorr

The story of Charles Shaw—the notorious red wine Trader Joe’s rolled out at the mind-blowing price of $2 a bottle and sold into essentially unquenchable demand (up to 6,000 bottles a day per store, coming to represent a solid 12 percent of the total California wine market all by itself)—is almost a perfect embodiment of Joe’s entire ethos. It was built on the knowledge acquired by their wine program, and stares with a bull’s-eye back at their target audience—so devoid of character it achieves an almost frictionless drinkability, yet neither too sweet nor thin to inspire scorn. The buyer involved in the deal presented it to me as one deal among many, a longtime distributor pitching them an idea and TJ’s refining it to better hit their customers’ perception of value. And that seems exactly right: this was not some freakish stab in the dark that got proven right. Whole Foods, Walgreens, or Kroger all could have put out a $2 bottle of wine; none would have had the success of TJ’s.