Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

by Patty Civalleri

If all the facts could be known, idiots could make the decisions. —Tex Thornton, cofounder of Litton Industries, quoted in the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1960s. This is my favorite of all managerial quotes.

if you adopt a reasonable strategy, as opposed to waiting for an optimum strategy, and stick with it, you’ll probably succeed. Tenacity is as important as brilliance. The Germans and French both had brilliant general staffs, but neither side had the tenacity to stick with their prewar plans. As a result, the first ninety days of war ended in four years of bloody stalemate.

good people pay by their extra productivity. You can’t afford to have cheap employees.

I believe in the wisdom that you gain customers one by one, but you lose them in droves.

where there is no competition today there will be tomorrow. Except for rare geography and even rarer honest city councils, you must assume that competitors will open all around you.

You should price a product where you think it should be in terms of the market and stick with it. We never cut a price to meet a competitor. If we had done our job of Intensive Buying correctly, and a competitor undercut us, that was their decision.

When you deliver value, you don’t have to worry about in-store convenience.

This is one of the most important things I can impart: in any troubled company the people at lower levels know what ought to be done in terms of day-to-day operations. If you just ask them, you can find answers. In the case of Thrifty Drug, those poor, beat-up store managers gave me an earful. A deeply troubled company is always the fault of the CEO, the board of directors, and the controlling stockholders who appoint those worthies. It is never the fault of frontline troops.