“Here’s a good question: Given my need to get away from convenience stores, why did I stick with small stores? If in 1967 it was justified because I had eighteen of them already, surely it was no longer justified in the 1980s when Trader Joe’s had become a powerful, successful operation. The answer was verbalized for us in In Search of Excellence, Tom Peter’s best-selling book on management that appeared in 1983. He called it “The Power of Chunking”: The essential building block of a company is the section [which] within its sphere does not await executive orders but takes initiatives. The key factor for success is getting one’s arms around almost any practical problem and knocking it off. . . . The small group is the most visible of the chunking devices.”