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

All of us would take our lunch breaks in a room above the store. This was before stores commonly installed security cameras, so the room was also a great way to observe customers and catch them stealing. Boy, was that an eye opener. I found out just how dishonest people could really be sitting above that store. That little old lady that you never t

It was time to make a major business decision. That decision wasn’t whether we were going to roll out VB2 to all the yards—that decision was obvious, even to the auctioneers who would lose their jobs. So we had to figure out what our job was. We literally sat in a room and wrote the words, “What is our job?” on a board. We decided our job was to he

It seems to Zak and me that for most companies to thrive over the long-term, one constituency must be looked after before all others and, contrary to what some on Wall Street or in Westminster may suggest, that constituency is the customer.

The pricing of new products is an important and challenging exercise. Often a product will be introduced to the market at a price too low to make an adequate short-term profit. The thinking is that “we’ll get our costs down and that will enable us to make a good profit”— either next month, next quarter, or next year. But that time seldom, if ever,