“We fundamentally changed the point of view of the business from customer-oriented to buyer-oriented. I put our buyers in charge of the company. From 1958 through 1976, we tried to carry what the customers asked for, given the limits of our small stores and other operational parameters. Each store manager had great latitude in what was carried and from what supplier it was ordered. There was very little central distribution except for Trader Joe’s labeled California wines or imports. Each store probably had access to ten thousand stock keeping units (SKUs), of which about three thousand were actually stocked in any given week. By the time I left in 1989, we were down to a band of 1,100 to 1,500 SKUs, all of which were delivered through a central distribution system. The managers no longer had any buying discretion and there were no “DSDs,” or direct store deliveries. And along the way not only did we drop a lot of products that our customers would have liked us to sell, even at not-outstanding prices, but we stopped cashing checks in excess of the amount of purchase, we stopped all full-case discounts, and we persistently shortened the hours. We violated every received-wisdom of retailing except one: we delivered great value, which is where most retailers fail.”