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Joe Cool – Why isn’t Trader Joe’s on social media?
- samsolomon 11y agoTrader Joe's reminds me of the specialty grocer in the small beach town I went to as a child. They carried no brands and had a few local options for jam and other things you'd buy. The company has been able to recreate that same feel, but stock stores with well-selected generic food items (in non-generic packaging). I wonder how much of their success is built on the same nostalgia?
- Aleman360 11y agoWhy would you want your grocery store on social media? I don't understand the world anymore.
- olympus 11y agoWhile it does sound silly for a grocery store to have a facebook page, several stores make good use of facebook/twitter/etc to offer coupons and encourage people to go to their store. My mom and sister are the primary shoppers in their families and they are heavily influenced by which stores are offering deals. So it's not really about getting likes and "engaging" with customers, it's more of a delivery vehicle that allows you to have a targeted audience-- nobody is going to the Kroeger grocery store facebook page because they like them, they are specifically going for coupons and that audience becomes a known quantity.
- acdha 11y agoI think this also illustrates why Trader Joe's doesn't need to – most grocery store chains are pure commodity businesses, where the average shopper could do most of their shopping at any of the stores and will pick the store either because it's the closest or due to a coupon. Trader Joe's doesn't isn't as sensitive to that because they sell a bunch of products which are their own brands or not commonly carried by traditional supermarkets. Coupons and sales are still useful but far less critical because odds are you'll be stopping by anyway.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoI understood that "their own brand" was rebranded/repackaged commodity product. Their 'own pasta' is the same as Aldis but with "Trader Joe's Own" printed on the label. Think about it: they're not a food manufacturer. They can't actually make anything.
- cwyers 11y agoNot just that. Lots of their stuff is the same as national brands. All of the Trader Joe's hard ciders are made by the people who make Woodchuck. I think their Joe's Os and mac and cheese are made by Annie's. So, you're right, but at the same time, I think your typical Trader Joe's shopper would rather have what TJ repackages than what most other stores do. (Also, Aldis and Trader Joes also have the same corporate parent, sort of, so it makes sense that they share suppliers for stuff.)
- germanier 11y agoActually they don't share the same parent company, they just both happen[1] to have the exact same name "Aldi Einkauf GmbH & Compagnie, oHG". To differentiate they are usually called Aldi Nord (owner of Trader Joe's) and Aldi Süd (owner of US Aldi). Although they cooperate closely (and therefore seen as one entity by the antitrust authorities) they are legally, financially, and organizationally completely seperate. [1]: They split up in 1960 for unknown reasons (it's speculated that it was a dispute about selling cigarettes). They only have stores in the north and south of Germany respectively, hence the geographic names. They also divided the rest of the world between them with the US being the only other country in which both operate.
- cwyers 11y agoI did say sort of for that reason. What I was told, and I have no idea if this is true, is that Aldi split in half so each of the owner's sons could have a company -- Theo Albrecht does run Aldi Nord and Trader Joe's and his brother Karl owns Aldi Sud and the US Aldi's chain.
- roymurdock 11y agoThis is explained in the article: Aldi is happy to dole out recognition to individuals who want to engage with it, playing the attention game where consumer praise is awarded with publicity from the Aldi feed. The consumer endorses the brand, and in turn the brand validates the consumer. The opportunities for this quasi-reciprocal participation in brands is presumed to catalyze customer loyalty. Some people like to share their appreciation through social media. It can also be nice to know that the company that you patronize has responsive staff monitoring public conversations to service your needs. I think you can understand that, you just don't see the value in it, which is fair enough because I don't either. That's probably one of the (subconscious) reasons I shop at TJ's - decent food at a great price, and no marketing BS that detracts from my experience with the brand.
- EliRivers 11y agoSurely no marketing bullshit is part of their marketing bullshit.
- roymurdock 11y agoWell yes, the absence of something can be considered something in its own right. There's probably a more eloquent way to put that but it escapes me at the moment.
- bad-joke 11y ago"Say little and do much." - Pirkei Avot
- bmm6o 11y agoThere's a story who's details I can't recall well enough to even google for that's relevant here... There was a philosopher (Sartre?) who was to meet his friend at a cafe in Paris. His friend was late, and as the philosopher sat drinking coffee and waiting, he realized that his friend's absence was present, and this this absence was different from the absence of all the other people who also weren't at the cafe.
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- Finnucane 11y agoYeah, srsly, who's sitting there thinking, "you know what I want from social media? _More advertising_. I'm not seeing enough advertising on the Internet. Can I have some spam in my twitter feed, please?"
- hullo 11y agoLiterally hundreds of millions of people. McDonalds alone has 62 million followers on Facebook. If half of the people on Facebook or Twitter follow a brand, that's over a half billion.
- mtberatwork 11y agoI have to assume at least a good chunk of those followers did so in order to enter some promotional, giveaway event. But even if we assume half did so to win something and account for bots, that's still millions of people who voluntarily decided to follow a fast-food chain. I'm with the grandparent, I just don't get it.
- golergka 11y agoTwitter is often the fastest way to contact support in many companies.
- meeper16 11y agoBecause there are individuals and companies that simply do not benefit from "social media". They do however benefit from being in Google's search index.
- forgotAgain 11y agoYep, type in Trader Joe's and get a map to the nearest direction. Excellent outcome for a retail establishment.
- padobson 11y agoThe article starts off by saying that having too many choices can paralyze us, increasing the fear that we will choose wrong. I completely understand this from my own life, and I've found that good categorization, rather than fewer choices, is the key to stopping the paralysis. Good categories, preferably on some sort of spectrum (from cheap to expensive, from funny to tragic, from mild to spicy) allow me to do the equivalent of a quick binary search in my head. I like my buffalo wings hot, so I'll immediately gravitate to two or three choices on that end of the spectrum. Grocery stores and restaurants should setup their shelving and menus, respectively, to accomodate their customers in this.
- CaptSpify 11y agoI've always been skeptical of the "Paradox of Choice". I'm not saying it's bunk, but I don't see it in my own life. My only problem when choosing, is when there is no list of differences easily available for the choice I have to make. I wish I could apply an "online shopping filter" to real-world situations: "give me mac and cheese" "OK, now, only ones with white cheddar" "remove anything made by kraft", etc. I guess you could say it's an interface issue.
- wpietri 11y agoI spent a couple of years working on a product that was about purchasing decisions, and it's definitely a real phenomenon. One useful way to break down choices is on the satisfice vs optimize continuum. For some choices people make, they're optimizers. When I'm buying a laptop, I will put hours and hours into picking the best one for me. But when I go to a new bar and am faced with 30 beer taps, 2/3rds of which I've never tried, I don't care about getting the best beer, just a satisfactory beer. The paradox of choice shows up mainly with satisficing choices. Before phone cameras were common, for example, a lot of people just wanted to buy a digital camera. They didn't care much about megapixels or features; they just wanted to take pictures of the kid's birthday party next week. But each camera was working hard to differentiate itself. That meant the buyer was facing a ton of information to evaluate even though most of the cameras would be just fine for them. It made people crazy. If you want to notice paradox of choice in yourself, pay attention when you're on the satisficing end of the spectrum: when you just want a thing, but you have a bunch of options to wade through. Common places for people to experience this: large restaurant menus, picking vacation destinations, choosing wine off a large wine list. You may not be noticing it because you already have a good default strategy. After learning about this, I developed one for myself: pick the first thing that looks like it will do. E.g., with a large restaurant menu at a new place, some people will agonize. But I just scan down until I find something that sounds good, skim a little more just to be sure, and go with my first choice. If I come back to the restaurant in the future, I can invest in optimizing by trying different stuff. But in the general case, I've optimized my overall experience by having a low-load satisficing heuristic. You may already have this yourself.
- groceryshiopper 11y agoDid I just read an ad for TJs?
- nkoren 11y agoApropos of nothing: I moved to the UK eight years ago, and damn, I still miss Trader Joe's. For the most part, I find mid-scale urban British grocery/retail to be much better than its American counterpart (where the industry is too focused on big-box suburban shopping, and to figure out how to do mid-scale/urban right) -- but damn, Trader Joe's is really is the best. I emailed them a few years ago asking them to expand to the UK. No reply. Alas!
- NLips 11y agoFor a Brit who's never been to the USA, please can you explain the unique (compared to UK supermarkets) factor(s) Trader Joe's has? From elsewhere in the thread, I hear that they pretty much only sell their own brand - but that alone would make them similar to Marks and Spencer.
- gphil 11y agoFrom an American who's been to Trader Joe's a lot and a Marks and Spencer grocery exactly once, I think they are pretty comparable except that the food items are more aligned with their respective nation's typical dietary preferences.
- nkoren 11y agoMarks and Spencer is not a bad comparison, product-wise. But M&S is more distinctly up-market, whereas Trader Joe's is more generally a bargain. (This is appreciated, because although I'm not actually an unemployed PhD student, I'm probably not overly far from that demographic...). Also, Marks and Spencers are pretty generic, whereas the Trader Joe's staff are encouraged to heavily personalise each store, with hand-painted signage and their own product recommendations and the like. This kind of place-making builds a loyalty towards the brand that can be hard to shake!
- dec0dedab0de 11y agoAldis does though, that's interesting.
- joe_momma 11y agoI can't wait for the thing/word that comes after social media. Please whatever it is, someone usher that era in.
- detaro 11y agoSeems to me like messaging could be it. All those "text us and we do X" startups...
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- ideonexus 11y ago> Social-media messaging would only muddle the company’s effort to sell its massively popular corporate brand as a neighborhood secret. I think this is key. Being "local" is important. I saw this in the comic/gaming shop I volunteered in. We had a web presence and facebook page, but no one used them except for memes and news links. The money was made with people coming into the store and impulse-spending during a Friday Night Magic tournament or RPG sessions. Conversations and real-life interactions with people are why these shops have survived the move to online and big-box outlet stores. I've recently become aware of how problematic the lack of "local" news is in my community. Our local papers have vanished, so that we rely on a patchwork of blogs and government facebook pages to know what's going on--but those get drowned out in the ocean of other national-news posts and facebook filters. My wife and I have made it a point to always attend our town hall meetings each month so we can know what's going on in our neighborhood. Our local government is getting away with some pretty outrageous things now because social media fails to inform local citizens about what's going on. People have strong opinions about national politics, but have no idea how their local politicians are bringing down their quality of life. Local is important, it's what's going on around our immediate area and it's where we can make the biggest difference in the world. Unfortunately, the World Wide Web has us so focused on global oftentimes that we are ceding our localities to other to our own detriment.
- haimez 11y agoSo far we've got social and local, and everyone knows how important mobile is. SoMoLo.
- cookiecaper 11y agoAgreed, and the lack of local content is something that has been noticed by media companies. AOL spent tons of money trying to address it with Patch. It'll be cool to see someone else tackle it one of these days, and hopefully it'll eventually stick. May be a good vertical for something like Nextdoor.
- rdtsc 11y agoWe shop there. I obviously don't think it is local. I've been to huge Trade Joes with large multistory parking garages nearby (in LA), I've been to them in other cities, by where I live etc. What they have going for them in an image of a healthy, wholesome, quality foods for reasonable prices. I think initially they started to appeal to the Whole Foods crowd who couldn't quite afford the prices. It is interesting that a lot of the food at TJs is not organic. But by clever marketing, using brown paper bags, imagery/graphics with a turn of the century feel to them, they impart the idea that there they are healthy, natural and good for you. In reality it probably is not no better or worse than the food you'd get a Kroger, Giant, Safeway or other such traditional grocery stores.
- peter303 11y agoTJ has a Silicon Valley connection. It was started by a Stanford grad, before sold to a German grocery chain.
- Spooky23 11y agoI think a better question is "why is any grocery store on social media?" Maybe I'm weird, but I don't want a friend at the grocery, just food. The flyer in the Sunday paper is far better than any of the modern alternatives.
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- imgabe 11y agoIf all the grocery stores moved onto facebook and stopped filling my real life mailbox with flyers I throw immediately in the garbage, that would be great.
- SeanLuke 11y agoThis article goes on about Trader Joe's "cousin" Aldi USA, seemingly misunderstanding that the two companies do not share a parent.
- elthran 11y agoDo you share a parent with your cousin?
- SeanLuke 11y agoHey, that's personal, bub. I shouldn't have said "parent": I assumed, and still assume, that the author was mixing up Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud. As far as I understand it, Trader Joe's and Aldi USA are not cousins: they unrelated and competing businesses with no ownership in common. Thinking Aldi Nord and Sud are the same company is a major blunder for someone presuming to pontificate on Trader Joe's.
- germanier 11y agoTo be fair both Aldis have almost the same strategy and work closely together. So it's logical to ask why they operate differently in this regard.
- theandrewbailey 11y agoThe article also says "Unlike with other American big-box grocery stores (and Trader Joe’s parent company, the German supermarket chain Aldi)..."
- DiThi 11y agoThat Aldi is not the same as the other Aldi. There are two independent Aldis (Nord and Süd) since the 60s, and typically only one of them is present in each country. The USA is an exception so one of them is called Trader Joe's.
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- meggar 11y agoTrader Joe's used to have a fun iOS app with animations and new product info.
- golergka 11y agoInteresting article, but makes me wonder: did it actually need this many word to describe Trader Joe's strategy? I mean, potential reader would already know half the stuff the writer was going on about, from brands being on social media to the stereotype description of "broke graduate student". Why waste reader's time on that?
- donretag 11y ago"there is no direct way to complain to the company" Complaining on Twitter is one of the reasons why I do not use it and was the first thing the jumped to my head when I read the title. I cannot stand whiny people (am I whining right now? :)) or attention seekers, so I would be hesitant to put any business on Twitter/social media.
- Animats 11y agoSure there is. They have a "contact us" page on their web site, and store phone numbers.
- Zpalmtree 11y agoI really love how that website utilized a whole 1/5th of my horizontal space... As others have said, I don't really want grocery stores on social media, we have enough ads already.
- headShrinker 11y agoSimply put: Because my mom was excited about the store before I was... It's simply not cool to shop there.
- headShrinker 11y agoSimply put: Because my mom was excited about the store before I was... It's simply not cool to shop there.
- mapgrep 11y agoThis piece seems to miss a lot of basic info about Trader Joe's, starting with the supply chain. Trader Joe's is basically a direct discount operation, like Wal Mart but with two crucial differences: It deals in spoilable goods and relabels upmarket products as generic. If you live in an area with a TJ's and least one high quality artisanal baker, for example, there is a very good chance the bread stocked at Trader's is from the high end baker but covertly rebranded as generic. If you pick up some well-aged Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano at $10 or $12/lb, I guarantee you it was not curated by some Trader Joe's affineur in Europe but by an Italian cheesemaker that normally sells at closer to $18/lb and wants some marginal revenue growth without diluting the original brand. Another important question to ask is "Does Trader Joe's have sales or coupons to promote" and the answer is "No." The company says on its website that it considers sale "a four-letter word". The article spends all this time talking about how discount grocery chain Aldi has a big social media presence without noting that Aldi DOES have weekly sale specials to advertise on social media (they traditionally use newspaper but seem to have some sales on Twitter now). In this light the different social media strategies make sense. Basically TJ does not have the usual retail things to gain through social media but it DOES have things to lose (like questions/speculation on identities of its covert generic conversion partners). Not to say they won't ever do it but you have to look at specific possible motives instead of intellectualized theories like "it seeks to generate brand loyalty through its silence" (what?) and "Trader Joe’s is counting on capturing successive generations of its target consumers by being the choice for no-choices" (WHAT?).
- DaveWalk 11y agoExcellent points: thanks for the cool splash of water on the article's subjectivity. Trader Joe's marketing is what causes the author to say saying something like "the lines and packed lots themselves can be reassuring, that you have come to the right place." But it's Trader Joe's business model that makes it come across as a "low-priced gourmet-cum-health-foods store" (original owner's words). It doesn't seem to me that social media has anything to do with it. On a side note, does anyone actually think Trader Joe's "Frequent Flier" handout is useful? It looks to me like an amateur, Microsoft Publisher-designed handout. They could use some modernism in that department. Unless it's ironically bad as the point?
- hannob 11y agoLarge parts of the article circle around the idea of the "Paradox of Choice". However this whole idea is based in very flaky research. Usually some small scale studies with unreliable methodology are chosen to back that up. Wikipedia mentions a meta analysis that looked at the issue and came to the conclusion: "Although strong instances of choice overload have been reported in the past, direct replications and the results of our meta-analysis indicated that adverse effects due to an increase in the number of choice options are not very robust: The overall effect size in the meta-analysis was virtually zero." Source: http://www.scheibehenne.de/ScheibehenneGreifenederTodd2010.pdf http://www.scheibehenne.de/ScheibehenneGreifenederTodd2010.p... I haven't read the whole metaanalysis, but that should raise some healthy scepticism about the whole concept.
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- quadrangle 11y agoI went out of my way to contact Trader Joe's and let them know how happy I am that they never have stupid discount sales, gimmicks, privacy-invading "member cards" or all the other bullshit. I don't care that they are imperfect otherwise. I get a better experience. The biggest concern I have about Trader Joe's is that I can't 100% rely on them always staying this way, I can just hope. I do wish they were a co-op though.
- mixmastamyk 11y agoDefinitely, I despise privacy invading tracking cards, and would rather have a fair price than sales. Thankfully the Albertson's on our block stopped that shit.
- awqrre 11y agoCan't most stores track you just as easily with your credit card information?
- mixmastamyk 11y agoYes, though I normally use cash unless I've run out, small trips, instead of large.