Trader Joe's nifty niche
The window shoppers have cleared out of Trader Joe’s. This is good news for people like me, who think of grocery stores as means to an end rather than as experiences in themselves.
The experiences are supposed to come later, when the food is cooked and eaten. The buying part is a chore that must be handled in a disciplined way. You make out a list and stick to it. You march down the aisles, pick up what you need and head to the checkout line. You don’t let food that’s not on your list seduce you into buying it. So what if the figs are plump and brown, the bread is pinchable and fragrant and there’s a flavor of ice cream you never knew existed. Just say no.
If you do your regular grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s it’s a lesson that must be learned. The food itself is endlessly alluring and inexpensive. Frugal shoppers can do well if they stick to the program. They cannot allow themselves to leave with twice the number of items they planned to buy.
My wife and I like to do our twice-monthly big grocery shopping together. We go to a restaurant and make out a list while we eat. Then we make the rounds of two or three stores. When Trader Joe’s came to town things changed. The store was crowded with people who were there just to hang. Sure, they would leave with something in the store’s brown paper bags with the sturdy handles, but their tiny yield hardly justified their obstructiveness.
I guess if you think of your visit to Trader Joe’s as something apart from normal shopping you will escape the temptation to buy too much on impulse. But the window shoppers drove me crazy. For about three months, I stayed away. After my wife and I finished our list, she’d go to Trader Joe’s and I’d go to the other grocery stores. But a couple of weeks a go, she reported that the store had become much less busy. So on our last shopping day, I rejoined her. She was right. The only congested spot was the frozen foods section, where the employees were unpacking boxes they’d placed in the middle of the aisle.
It didn’t take us more than about a 45 minutes to make our way through the store, filling up our cart. The checker told us we were the top-spending customers on his shift. The best thing is that we stuck to our list. The items we’d piled high in our cart were all on our official menu.
I’ve gone on record as being critical of some chains and franchises, especially in a place like Chico, which prides itself on its special identity. What a loss if all of Chico were to end up looking like Big Box-land at the south end of town.
But grocery chains are here to stay. I don’t see Mom and Pop stores making a resurgence, just holding on in a few specialty niches. Produce markets, bakeries, butchers and natural food stores will always be with us, but they will never dominate the market.
I like Trader Joe’s niche. It’s hard to beat a place that sells specialty goods at low prices.