Becoming Trader Joe Quotes

“Each private label product, therefore, had to have a reason, a point of differentiation.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“The willingness to do without any given product is one of the cornerstones of Trader Joe’s merchandising philosophy.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Supermarkets tend to sell all seafoods from their meat departments, usually in thawed (so-called fresh) form, sometimes packaged, sometimes in bulk from a service case.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“The rules of warfare seem to go in cycles alternating from neat rows—the Roman square, the French knights at Agincourt, the fixed battles of the early eighteenth century, the trenches of 1915–18, and the Maginot/Siegfried lines—to rules that stress mobility, irregularity, adaptability—Attila the Hun, the English longbowmen at Agincourt, the colonial guerrillas in 1776, both sides in our Civil War, the German panzers, the Viet Cong, and the Afghan guerrillas.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“I remember one creamery sales manager so grizzled that he had lines on his wrinkles, a Dorian Gray with no surrogate in the attic. Young and bumptious, trying to make the newborn Pronto look good to Rexall, I asked for both illegal fixture financing and illegal discounts on milk. “You can’t milk both ends of the cow, Joe,” he replied softly.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Originally, we distributed the Fearless Flyer only in the stores and to a small but growing subscriber list. Doing a mailing to individual addresses, however, was a rotten chore: Americans move about every three years. In 1980, I attended a marketing lecture that taught me that, when someone moves, someone just like them is likely to occupy the same address. This proved to be correct. By mailing to addresses rather than to individuals—by blanketing entire ZIP codes—we were able to tremendously expand the distribution of the Fearless Flyer. The ZIPs to which we mailed, of course, were chosen on the basis of the likely concentration of overeducated and underpaid people.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“When we first opened Good Time Charley, it was open 7:00 a.m. to midnight, like Pronto. As time went on, we progressively shortened the hours down to 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Each time we shortened hours, we made more money: there were fewer “shifts” and more interaction among the staff.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“The fundamental “chunk” of Trader Joe’s is the individual store with its highly paid Captain and staff: people who are capable of exercising discretion. I admire Nordstrom’s fundamental instruction to its employees: use your best judgment.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“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.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Even the man who attempts to rule with janissaries depends on their opinion and the opinion which the rest of the inhabitants have of them. The truth is that there is no ruling with janissaries. As Talleyrand said to Napoleon, “You can do everything with bayonets, sire, except sit on them!” (The Revolt of the Masses, chapter 14, “Who Rules in the World?”)”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Most of my ideas about how to act as an entrepreneur are derived from The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset, the greatest Spanish philosopher of the twentieth century. Although it was published in 1929, the year before I was born, I believe this book still offers the clearest explanation of the times in which we live. And I believe it offers a master “plan of action” for the would-be entrepreneur, who usually has no reputation and few resources.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself. —Pareto’s comment on Kepler, quoted by Stephen Jay Gould in The Panda’s Thumb”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“You might think of Trader Joe’s as one of the more esoteric cable channels; the supermarkets as NBC-CBS-ABC.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“As a result, supermarket merchandising has always been brand-oriented. One result of this has been that supermarkets have rarely been known for their product knowledge, about what they sold. Indeed, the supermarkets of the 1930s usually operated only the dry grocery department, which was mostly branded goods; bakery, produce, meat, and liquor were usually concessions.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Shopping centers” are mostly a post–World War II phenomenon. The supermarket was then perfected by yet another set of wheels, when the shopping cart was invented in 1937.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“The brands had to advertise. Print media was all that was available, and the great mass-circulation magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s rose on the strength of brand advertising, such as George Washington Hill’s immortal “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” Newspapers also thrived on brand advertising.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“In the meantime, the Kraft brown paper bag was invented about 1870, making it possible to put all your store-bought purchases in a paper bag, a phenomenon that even today is unusual in Europe.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“The pace quickened after the first automatic glass bottle machine was built in the 1890s, making possible the soft drink brands like Coca-Cola (as opposed to being dispensed in bulk from soda fountains).”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“In response to Napoleon’s problems with feeding his huge army, Nicolas Appert invented canning in 1809. This was the first step away from bulk retailing. About thirty years after Waterloo, America had its first branded canned food, which was probably Underwood’s deviled ham. During the Civil War, which also stimulated food technology, Gail Borden invented canned milk, and after that an avalanche of branded food products appeared: Royal Baking Powder, Baker’s Chocolate, et al.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“A second news item, one from the Wall Street Journal, told me that the Boeing 747 would go into service in 1970, and that it would slash the cost of international travel. (It did: the real cost of going to Europe today is about one-fifteenth of what it was in 1950.) In Pronto Markets we had noticed that people who traveled—even to San Francisco—were far more adventurous in what they were willing to put in their stomachs. Travel is, after all, a form of education.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“When we left Stanford, my father-in-law, Bill Steere, a professor of botany, gave me a subscription to Scientific American. In terms of creating my fortune, it’s the most important magazine I’ve ever read.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“To this day, the promotion of Extra Large AA eggs is one of the foundations of Trader Joe’s merchandising, not just because of the program per se, but because it set me to wondering whether there weren’t other discontinuities out there in the supplies of merchandise. Eight years later, we built Trader Joe’s on the principle of discontinuity.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Early in my career I learned there are two kinds of decisions: the ones that are easily reversible and the ones that aren’t.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“The one core value that I chose was our high compensation policies, which I had put in place from the very start in 1958. This may sound like a strange way for polarizing a business, but I did not want to destroy the faith that Pronto Markets’ then-handful of employees had in me and in our common future. After all, they had just ponied up half the equity money needed to buy out Rexall.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Twenty-eight years later, the Economist of November 10, 1990, put it this way: . . . non-convex problems . . . are puzzles in which there may be several good but not ideal answers which classical search techniques may wrongly identify as the best one.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“In 1962, Barbara Tuchman published The Guns of August, an account of the first ninety days of World War I. It’s the best book on management—and, especially, mismanagement—I’ve ever read. The most basic conclusion I drew from her book was that, 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”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“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.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong. —Carveth Read 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.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“If all the facts could be known, idiots could make the decisions.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys