Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

The calculus of what do I risk if I sell included the fact that Trader Joe’s was my Zen window on the world. I experienced the world mostly through Trader Joe’s. That’s an advantage of being self-employed. That window can never be as open while you’re an employee, even a Frederick-Forsyth rich one, even one given great discretion by absentee owners

An entire chapter, “Crime Side Retailing,” could be written because that’s how I spent half of my time: dealing with crime with before-the-fact controls, and after-the-fact with detection and action.

Human Use of Human Beings,

And there’s the element of enthusiasm. As soon as we got into Whole Earth Harry, we started to attract health food nuts who probably believed more in what we were doing than we did. To a considerable extent, they kept us on the straight and narrow: management was policed by its own employees! I noticed the same phenomenon when I began consulting fo

It didn’t help that Sol Price had sold FedMart the previous year to another German capitalist, a sale that ended in an explosive exit by Sol, and the subsequent collapse of FedMart.

One of the most important Supply Side constraints is the stamina of the Chief Executive Officer. I haven’t listed it above, but it’s there. And the sort of thing that wore down this CEO was year after year of employee theft.

This is one of the most important things I can impart: in any troubled company the people at lower levels know what ought to be done in terms of day-to-day operations.

Trader Joe’s buying objective was to get just one, dead-net price, delivered to our distribution centers. This was quite similar to the policy that Sam Walton was developing at about the same time, a practice called “contract pricing.”

My cash policy was this: we would always have cash at least equal to two weeks’ sales. (I think this is called an “heuristic” decision in business school.) Any month we didn’t meet the test, I would borrow from Bank of America on a five-year term loan ostensibly secured by store fixtures. But I wasn’t borrowing for fixtures and inventory, as I took