Where in the world are Trader Joe’s warehouses? (2015)
sburer.github.ioClever, but the guesses aren't useful, because "the middle" is rarely the most efficient place to get goods off trucks and rail. I know the TJs in Kansas are stocked from a Kansas Aldi distribution center, near rail and highways.
A better start might be mapping known Aldi warehouses.
https://careers.aldi.us/employment/olathe-warehouse-jobs/61/...
The corridors are similar Western NY -> DC corridor is probably served by a facility in Pennsylvania. New England to Albany to Connecticut is probably near Worcester, MA.
I know that for McDonalds and Aldi, Albany, NY is “Boston” and Utica west is “Pennsylvania”. It’s all about the transport corridors and modes.
That would mean that Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud share warehouses?
It seems fairly unlikely doesn’t it? I was under the impression they had a fairly intense, and not so friendly, rivalry.
Afaik, they have been working for the last few years on cooperation, since the original brothers are now out of the picture.
Yup - e.g. and IIRC, Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd are unifying their store brands in Germany.
A necessity in order to stay competitive against Lidl (comparable customer segment). ALDI took quite a punch by Lidl in the Netherlands (these were all of the ALDI Nord concern, but were not labelled as such), and depended on inertia (being the first and most well-established discount grocer) for too long.
Ah ok, thanks, it’s been a few years since I’ve kept up..
Trader Joe's presents an interesting punctuation problem. The most common rule, I think, for forming possessives is rule #1 of Strunk and White: "Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's. Follow this rule whatever the final consonant." But Trader Joe's already has an apostrophe. Should the proper writing of this headline should have been...
Where in the World are Trader Joe's's Warehouses?
Or should it have been...
Where in the World are Trader Joes's Warehouses?
If we swap it with Amazon, it sounds correct to say “where are Amazon’s warehouses?” But is it really incorrect to say, “where are Amazon warehouses?”
I dunno. It sounds wrong to say "where are Safeway warehouses?" -- it sounds more appropriate to have instead said "where are the Safeway warehouses?"
Trader Joe owns the stores, and he also owns the warehouses.
A reasonable parsing at the time of the article I suppose (2016), but not today: Trader Joe (Joe Coulombe) cannot possibly own warehouses, as he died in 2020.
Trader Joe lives on in spirit, along with Trader José and Trader Giotto.
I think this option makes the most sense, rather than treating "Trader Joe's" as one unit that has different rules than normal language
"Trader Joe's" could also be being used as an adjective in this headline right?
Yes, but that would change the intended meaning of the headline.
I think there's a rule you don't repeat punctuations like this... one is enough.
I have always wondered how Stunk and White would handle Carl's Jr.
It should be noted that it is a project from 2015.
But just looking at the clusters, esp. on the east coast and look at the marked known locations one can visually see that the 22 clusters don't make sense. You can visually cluster a lot of stores towards the existing warehouses and remove the need for the estimated ones in between.
But still this is an interesting approach as it helps in identifying the clusters that seem to be served by these known warehouses.
Maybe not taking the distance as the crow flies, but trying a street route could be an optimization. And then trying to find the minimal amount of clusters that still show the known locations at roughly the center.
Not sure if this would be a valid approach.
Back in the nineties a very popular East Lansing supermarket announced they were closing. A campaign was raised to get Trader Joes to locate in the space. A major campaign was raised and they gathered a pretty amazing 20-25,000 signatures online.
The organizers got a nice letter back from Trader Joes who said they really appreciated their enthusiasm but the East Lansing area was too small a municipal area for a Trader Joes but if that criteria changed they'd keep us in mind. A number of the group years later kept the campaign going and maintained an active Facebook page.
A couple of months ago Trader Joes announced an East Lansing store in that very strip mall they'd turned down decades earlier. Different store but the exact same development.
I get the sentiment: I was very excited to have an Aldi store being built near me. Great value for money and an almost “grab what you need and you wont get a shock at the till” unlike other stores that do stuff like 2 slightly different tomato varieties one double the price of the other. Another example the coke is always a good price. Other supermarkets keep rotating the 24 and 30 packs prices to pretend there is a discount at any given time.
>>stuff like 2 slightly different tomato varieties
I'm such an idiot shopper. I was on a date with a girl and going to cook her dinner but I was missing a few vegetables. Went to Fred Myer (local Kroger chain). I was picking up some potatoes and the girl found a stack for half the price that looked just as good, hidden on the other side of the produce aisle. She was like, "you don't look for good deals, do you?" Ugh. Shamed. I wish I'd had an excuse like "I wanted organic" but the truth was I'd never known there was a whole separate stack. Damn you Fred Myer!
Oh yeah thats another trick, out the cheaper ones somewhere illogical! They just are doing price discrimination based on how much time you have to hunt for the best deal.
The Norwegian groceries delivery company Oda, in their app you can sort each category (e.g. hard cheeses) view for price per item, or price per kg.
Yeah ordering online is sweet in this regard
To me the downside of online ordering is I always feel the need to tip extravagantly to make sure the delivery person doesn't get me rotten tomatoes. It ends up being a lot more expensive than just putting on a mask and trundling down to the market. If I'm in the middle of work I can justify it.
I used to enjoy going to the market. (Well, and a lot of other things that aren't fun anymore).
I don't think the delivery person has any influence on your produce - at least in the UK, pickers and delivery people are separate jobs, and I can't imagine it any different in any efficient organization. (Also nobody I knows tips for delivered groceries in the UK - the delivery charge is supposed to pay for the delivery. This might be different in the US like all things tipping.)
Responding to both comments - here in the US (at least in my city), when you place a grocery order on Instacart it only gets accepted once the shopper chooses to accept it. The higher your tip, the more likely they will accept it faster. The app then shows you a photo of the person who's shopping for you, and they will text you as they shop if something is missing. They then check out, get in their car and drive to your house, and that's the same person who shows up at the door. I definitely think the tip level makes a difference to the quality of selection you get, but also it seems like it would be very rude not to tip well. However, I tip 20% (which is standard in a restaurant) and I know a lot of people who only tip 10% on groceries. There are probably people who tip nothing. No one I talk to is quite sure what to do, because it's "new territory", just like we didn't know what to do once restaurants became take-out only for covid but the workers still had to be there, and weren't making any tips. I decided to just continue to tip 20% even for take-out.
Before I lived in Europe for a few years, I had to be physically restrained from tipping too extravagantly when I would be there.
It's because in the US we don't have much of a social safety network. Tips are like the libertarian version of social welfare. When I was a waiter in New York, for years, the hourly wage from the restaurant was $0.00 + taxes on whatever tips you made. There is no minimum wage for waiters. Waiters bought their own uniforms and their only income is on tips. And we would have Europeans come and drink coffee at a table for a few hours and leave no tip; they didn't understand that we made nothing unless they tipped. As it is now with the delivery services, the pickers and drivers are making the bare minimum; it's incumbent on us to tip them well. We understand that the service doesn't provide enough for them to live.
As a Scandinavian person living almost wholly outside "tipping culture", that worry just sounds bizarre.
Here, if you order food for home delivery from the major grocery chains, the order is not packed by the driver, and fresh produce is typically in smaller paper bags inside the large outer bag (the ones the driver carries from the truck).
There is no tipping of the driver, who just puts down the bags outside our front door.
in CA the pricing is simply different online for delivery vs online for pickup vs shopping in the store.
so are the coupons.
Eh, that's not been my experience at Fred Meyer. The produce section is open, with aisles, and while the organic and non-organic versions of a particular item are not usually next to each other (I could guess why), they're not hidden nor difficult to find. Sometimes the organic is farther back, sometimes up front, you just have to use your eyes -- it's all in plain view.
My one and only experience with shopping at Aldi was nearly rotten fruit, off-brand cardboard-tasting cereal and stale chips. The price is hard to beat, but I feel too much like a raccoon digging in a dumpster.
My experience as well. Both at Aldi and Lidl. There's also zero consistency week to week. They stock their shelves with whatever the truck happens to bring in. Granted, they're both "discount" grocery stores so I'm not expecting gourmet fare but I'll gladly spend the extra few dollars to shop at our local family owned grocery store that always has great produce, meats, and a wide variety of options.
I'm a big fan of Walmart's generic soda. 70-90 cents for a 2-liter from what I've seen. I particular Diet Dr Thunder, generic dr pepper is a litmus test for me in generic soda brands.
Their diet stuff flies off the shelves, so that HN story about diet soda "spoiling" (was it methlyation?) isn't a problem. I doubt it lasts even a day on the shelf.
Their kettle salt+vinegar potato chips, orange "yogurt" (comparable to yoplait orange cream "yogurt"), generic life cereal is all pretty good. You can tell, because those are often not in stock, I think their production is limited by agreements with the name brands I would speculate.
Aldi's generic soda was pretty bad. Meijers, most grocery generics, all pretty crappy.
TJs is the bomb. But their choice of store placement is definitely cryptic. It always seems to be a little too far for a regular grocery trip; somewhere close to a hip strip, close to a blue collar neighborhood, but not quite walking distance from either. They have a very specific demographic and I'm sure they've been making shrewd property decisions as well. Here in Oregon they have to compete with New Seasons, which mainly sells locally sourced produce and kinda straddles the upper line with Whole Paycheck, which everyone hates; and with GrossOut (Grocery Outlet) which is just... a kind of amazing place to go if you've never been there (they basically sell all the day-old food from wholesalers alongside this month's new test products that failed to launch - if you aren't picky what you're going to cook, GrossOut is inspirational).
If you’re interested in learning about how they choose locations, Freakinomics did a good episode where they cover just that. In short, they look for inexpensive locations that are rising in value, with demographics that have high education but relatively low income. (so, like, English majors.)
This is awesome. Thank you.
I feel like the location for Trader Joes in all of the places I have lived has been essentially the same. It is in the wealthy neighborhoods, but usually in a strip mall or other location that's a bit cheaper than Whole Foods. At least in Philly I think if there is a Trader Joe's there is a Whole Foods < 1 Mile away.
In SoCal, TJ's is everywhere. I had one near my house, one in between my house and my office, and one by my office. This was like a 20 minute commute. It's part of culture there, like In-n-out.
I have SNAP accepting stores loaded into a gis (JOSM really) so it was quick to check. ~1/5 of the Trader Joe's stores in the country are in southern California (just a couple fewer locations than all of the northeast). More than 1/3 are in California.
I've never had a great experience with GroceryOutlet and don't understand how they operate or even have a franchise model.
But my experiences are from the Seattle Area south to Oregon.
In the more rural / exurb parts of Portland metro they do really well. But they just have bizarre things. You can go load up on random bags of chips from a startup that's already out of business, that'll never get made again. And then one day they'll be the only market in the state that has raddichio. You have to be willing to go with it, but it's so cheap you can afford to just buy a bunch of stuff and make it work.
The couple of times I was in one (San Jose), it seemed like most of the stock was liquidated by other stores, and the extremely low frills store vibe was in full effect, so I suspect it's just a simple minimize the costs and hope. There was a pretty decent crowd, so they've got a market of IMHO price sensitive, quality insensitive customers.
TJ's is OK but it's no substitute for a full supermarket.
..like Kroger, or Whole Foods?
I would say Kroger isn't a real supermarket, it's a junk food market and pharmacopia.
>> I would say Kroger isn't a real supermarket, it's a junk food market and pharmacopia.
I cannot fathom how you've come to this conclusion. I've been to 100 Kroger stores in my life and not one fits your description.
Haven't been to Kroger, or as we used to say, Krogers, for quite a while, but I assume what this means is that much of their floor space is taken up by low-quality prepared food and over-the-counter medicines. But that's true of every large grocery in the US.
What is a real supermarket?
These days?
Meat counter, extensive selection of frozen food. Good amount of space for non-food items, like over the counter medicine, schools supplies, cleaning supplies, personal care items.
Maybe a pharmacy, maybe not, depending on the store.
In Northern California, it seems Safeway and Lucky are the top ones, and of course Costco. Also 99 Ranch, often called Ranch 99, which is aimed at Asian food customers. There are other smaller chains and individual stores.
Whole Foods, or TJ's. Can I buy a mop, a bottle of Tylenol, and two quarts of motor oil? Not a chance.
I wish Trader Joe's would start a delivery service since they don't partner with delivery vendors like Instacart. Great and unique selection of food!
> Great and unique selection of food!
I suspect that's why they don't partner with delivery vendors. Grocery stores would rather you came in person. You'll make impulse buys, they can direct you to products where they have excess inventory, and they can maintain a direct relationship with you.
Most are forced to offer delivery precisely because they don't have a "great and unique selection of food." If they don't support delivery, you'll get the same products from a competitor who does. Trader Joe's doesn't have to because you can't find their products anywhere else.
Trader Joe's definitely benefits from people walking the aisles. They put all kinds of interesting new products right next to staples so you are more inclined to buy it. If I could just browse the product offering online, I'd be able to just pick exactly what I needed and wouldn't be checking out with some new dip, cheese, beverage, or pasta sauce that had piqued my interest.
I remember in the beginning of the pandemic they were asked to comment on this, especially about how online ordering and pickup could help people in the situation.
The COO (?) specifically said that they preferred to invest in their people and store experience, not automation or such technology.
edit: ah, found the articles:
https://www.businessinsider.com/trader-joes-wont-offer-groce...
https://www.boston.com/food/coronavirus/2020/04/24/trader-jo...
And delivery runs counter to that if you deliver from one of their stores because you now have pickers for delivery clogging up the aisles.
It is an idiosyncratic store. To tell you the truth, I'm not as enthusiastic about them as some people are though I go in from time to time if they're convenient. They have a lot of prepared food and possible healthier and better quality prepared food is still prepared food which I don't eat a lot of.
They've been a lifesaver for my son in college. He's living in a dorm but the housing service has struggled the entire year with staffing, food stocks, and just generally being able to feed kids who don't have 60-90 minutes to spend standing in line.
TJ's is right off-campus and he's able to pick up meals he can prep in his dorm room a few nights a week when a lab or extra-curricular keeps him from being able to get food at the dining hall.
It's especially baffling because TJs deliberately keeps a fairly small number of SKUs, so it is actually much better placed for online orders than more traditional grocery stores that have 12 kinds of Cheerios.
I think online ordering would just be too far outside their wheelhouse. I don't know what improvements they have made over the years, but when I used to work there years and years ago they were very much a human-driven company. By that I mean that ordering was done entirely manually by people that specialized in their sections, inventory tracking was rather loosely done, and the customer question of 'do you have any of X in the back' would need to be answered by actually checking in the back.
From my experience on the customer side since, things haven't changed much at all. In light of that, I think that even now, online ordering for them would be a mess that the company just can't afford in customer goodwill.
Currently working in retail and that sounds like a nightmare of a system.
Trader Joe’s is a favorite study in trying to explain how it manages to thrive with just a small number of SKUs (~4000) relative to typical grocery stores that carry 50,000 SKUs. Perhaps this might shed light on their warehousing strategy.
A big part of this is that they are ruthless with cutting products that don't perform well. A good chunk of those ~4000 sku's are dedicated to items that are available for very short periods as they are tested.
I think a big part of Trader Joe's success is that they have a good core of staples that people are willing to come in for, and then they have a big selection of new and interesting items that people are willing to try, since they're already there. The quality of the staples allows them to fly under the radar with the rotating stuff, which is in reality pretty hit or miss. But this symbiotic relationship between the core and the experimental sides allows them to quickly iterate through the experimental stuff to find more popular items.
Seems spot on with my experience and shopping there. Well said.
The frozen food section at TJ is an innovation in itself.
Easy. You don't need ten different types of butter, yogurt, tea, etc. You can grab the single TJ branded item and have a reliable indicator it's reasonably healthy, tasty, and a good value with minimal margin.
It flips the script - make the store brands the central offering, with big names as a sideline.
Another thing I've seen is that a product might appear only once in a while, but is never discontinued - it's in rotation with other products. I've seen this a lot with frozen goods. That gives them a way to offer variety without having zillions of SKUs in stock at any given time.
Trader Joes is sort of related to ALDI and the condensed offering of ALDI and its success has been written about before
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sanfordstein/2019/10/25/aldi-ri...
But Trader Joe's uses a very different strategy compared to ALDI. It caters to an audience that demands a much more upmarket experience, and puts a lot more effort into team culture, store decor/experience, and sourcing quality white-label food SKUs for house branding.
K-means is a nice approximation but not very precise in this context. Averaged driving time and fuel usage probably played a role in determining a warehouse's location.
The author ends their analysis a little early, which is a shame, because it is a fun but also very interesting research question.
Next step would be to plot the known/suspected warehouses and give an error measurement for the best predicted locations against those more or less known warehouses.
Further steps could be to look into a pattern of how those known/suspected warehouses are placed in relation to stores, and extrapolate that into the missing warehouse locations.
I like the model he created to "detect" the warehouses, but it's much easier to see the corporations via the state corporation agency. There is also the idea that They wouldn't have pure warehouses for everything and are direct white labeled direct from manufacturers.
I'm sure many of the Trader Joe's store brand products are white label. It seems inefficient to have such a wide range of frozen products that are constantly changing. They simply find a frozen pasta dish manufacturer that abides by whatever quality guidelines and just change the label.
Another possibility is that trader Joe's does actually manufacturer a lot of their rotating products but just simply rotates the store that receive them so they don't need to have a massive production for something so small. Cacio Pepe sauce for new england area for this month, southwest region next month.
Funny thing. The author now has a Trader Joe’s in his hometown.
Looking at the map I wonder where the CO, UT, NM stores get their supplies from? Seems like the only area without its own warehouse
Interesting bit of history of Aldi, the owner of Trader Joe. The grocery chain was founded by two brothers. They could not get along, so they decided to split the world to “Aldi North” and “Aldi South” chains. Both use the same logo.
They don't use the same logo.
One of the brothers was also kidnapped in the 70s, and there was a whole court case about him writing off the ransom money as a business expense
The distribution of stores looks like this https://xkcd.com/1138/
I really enjoy this site's design. At first I thought that LocalCDN was blocking some CSS/JS but to my surprise, no - it just looks that way. I like it.
I like everything about "no-css" style except full-width column. It's just too hard to read long lines of text.
Granted, it can be fixed by resizing my window.
*I also prefer sans-serif fonts but that's just my personal preference.