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Where in the world are Trader Joe’s warehouses? (2015)
- hbcondo714 5y agoI 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!
- QuercusMax 5y agoIt'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.
- genocidicbunny 5y agoI 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.
- doublepg23 5y agoCurrently working in retail and that sounds like a nightmare of a system.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jonas21 5y ago> 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wildzzz 5y agoTrader 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.
- supernova87a 5y agoI 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-grocery-pickup-and-delivery-2020-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/trader-joes-wont-offer-groce... https://www.boston.com/food/coronavirus/2020/04/24/trader-joes-online-ordering-delivery/ https://www.boston.com/food/coronavirus/2020/04/24/trader-jo...
- ghaff 5y agoAnd 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.
- brewdad 5y agoThey'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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wodenokoto 5y agoThe 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.
- chana_masala 5y agoI 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.
- thrdbndndn 5y agoI 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.
- sdoering 5y agoIt 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.
- rmason 5y agoBack 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.
- quickthrower2 5y agoI 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.
- noduerme 5y ago>>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!
- quickthrower2 5y agoOh 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.
- Digory 5y agoClever, 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/61/29884/6252001-4273857-4273638-4276614/4 https://careers.aldi.us/employment/olathe-warehouse-jobs/61/...
- kabes 5y agoThat would mean that Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud share warehouses?
- indigodaddy 5y agoIt seems fairly unlikely doesn’t it? I was under the impression they had a fairly intense, and not so friendly, rivalry.
- picsao 5y ago
- elloworld1221 5y agoAfaik, they have been working for the last few years on cooperation, since the original brothers are now out of the picture.
- indigodaddy 5y agoAh ok, thanks, it’s been a few years since I’ve kept up..
- ahartmetz 5y agoYup - e.g. and IIRC, Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd are unifying their store brands in Germany.
- fluxem 5y agoThe distribution of stores looks like this https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
- hbarka 5y agoTrader 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.
- genocidicbunny 5y agoA 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.
- indigodaddy 5y agoSeems spot on with my experience and shopping there. Well said.
- smm11 5y agoThe frozen food section at TJ is an innovation in itself.
- heeen2 5y agoTrader 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-right-movesthe-german-grocer-sending-shock-waves-throughout-walmart-and-kroger/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/sanfordstein/2019/10/25/aldi-ri...
- ak217 5y ago
- luckystarr 5y agoK-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.
- miohtama 5y agoInteresting 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.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoOne 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
- maxhille 5y agoThey don't use the same logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi
- SeanLuke 5y agoTrader 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?
- mindslight 5y agoTrader Joe owns the stores, and he also owns the warehouses.
- netizen-936824 5y agoI think this option makes the most sense, rather than treating "Trader Joe's" as one unit that has different rules than normal language
- SeanLuke 5y agoA 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.
- mindslight 5y agoTrader Joe lives on in spirit, along with Trader José and Trader Giotto.
- alksjdalkj 5y ago"Trader Joe's" could also be being used as an adjective in this headline right?
- SeanLuke 5y agoYes, but that would change the intended meaning of the headline.
- jreed91 5y agoFunny thing. The author now has a Trader Joe’s in his hometown.
- rootsudo 5y agoI 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.
- wildzzz 5y agoI'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.
- oliv__ 5y agoLooking at the map I wonder where the CO, UT, NM stores get their supplies from? Seems like the only area without its own warehouse