(Shout out to Red Queen Podcast for introducing me to this book.)
Becoming Trader Joe is, more than any other business book (certainly any other business memoir), a turpentine book. There is interesting philosophy and retrospective here — and Coloumbe, whether through earnestness or affectation, is a more literate and flippant narrator than your standard post-exit founder — but the meat and the merit of this is the absolute smorgasboard of anecdata and fun facts. Some notes:
- Trader Joe's counterpositioned themselves early on by making deals with suppliers that their larger competitors couldn't due to supply constraints: they bought, for instance, XL eggs at sub-market prices because the Krogers of the world were unable to purchase them as they wouldn't be able to distribute them to the entire corpus of stores in an areas. This let Trader Joe's both get favorable unit economics and counterposition ("we have this unique product that nobody else has!")
- Trader Joe's spent a lot of time figuring out how to compete and innovate in an ostensibly static market due to fair trade and other regulations: for instance, being unable to market California wines at a discount (due to price controls) but instead offering complementary wine bank access to accomplish the same thing.
- Lots and lots of pivoting. (Bullets used to be one of their best SKUs: standardized, value-dense, easily shippable.)
- Trader Joe's made the explicit decision to shift from "customer focus" to "buyer focus" in order to aggressively maximize deal flow.
More than the sheer pleasure of reading — Coloumbe is a fun personality, and garnishes all of his stories with equal parts honesty and flippancy — this book strikes me as real. This is not a hagiography: it does not purport that all of Trader Joe's was a grand plan, but more of a series of strong base hits (with some misses as well) and a couple really great strategic shifts.
★★★★