Wait, Trader Joe was a real guy?
Joe Coulombe, a struggling convenience store owner in Los Angeles, decided in 1967 to open a grocery chain to appeal to the small but growing number of well-educated, well-traveled consumers that mainstream supermarkets were ignoring. “I have an ideal audience in mind,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1981. “This is a person who got a Fulbright scholarship, went to Europe for a couple of years and developed a taste for something other than Velveeta” ordinary beer and Folgers coffee, he said.Coulombe recognized that international travel was about to explode thanks to the new Boeing 747 hitting the market. For the name of his new store, Coulombe landed on Trader Joe’s to evoke exotic images of the South Seas. The name was inspired by Trader Vic’s, a popular Tiki Bar restaurant started in California.The handful of stores Coulombe did open were in Southern California, which fit the demographic profile he was seeking — teachers, musicians, journalists and other professionals. In 1979, Coulombe sold Trader Joe’s to the family of Theo Albrecht, then the owner of the Aldi grocery chain in Europe. (Aldi in the United States is separately owned by the family of Theo Albrecht’s brother Karl.)Aldi executives would travel from Germany to visit Trader Joe’s about once a year, but they took a hands-off approach to overseeing the growing chain.By the time Coulombe stepped down as chief executive in 1988, Trader Joe’s had 27 California stores and an estimated $150 million in sales.It would be his successor as chief executive, John Shields, a former fraternity brother at Stanford, who led Trader Joe’s out of California and turned it into a national chain. In 1996, Trader Joe’s opened its first two stores on the East Coast, both in Boston suburbs.By 2020, Trader Joe’s had more than 530 stores and an estimated $16.5 billion in sales, according to the latest data available from Supermarket News.”My successors at Trader Joe’s have taken a 30-store chain nationwide with remarkable adherence to the basic concepts we started out with,” Coulombe said in 2010.
