Sublime

He kept tuning his catalog and inventory to meet designers’ needs, and he scoured the world for unique furniture.

As we evolved Trader Joe’s, its greatest departure from the norm wasn’t its size or its decor. It was our commitment to product knowledge, something which was totally foreign to the mass-merchant culture, and our turning our backs to branded merchandise.

During my years at Amazon, everyone understood that our goal was to be an Everyday Low Price leader. To do that, we had to make sure our prices matched those of our image competitors—Walmart, Best Buy, and Target. During one S-Team meeting, someone opined, “If the retailer with the lowest price doesn’t have the item in stock, then we shouldn’t matc

To this day, the promotion of Extra Large AA eggs is one of the foundations of Trader Joe’s merchandising, not just because of the program per se, but because it set me to wondering whether there weren’t other discontinuities out there in the supplies of merchandise. Eight years later, we built Trader Joe’s on the principle of discontinuity.

IAA would show up wearing suits and riding in limos. I showed up wearing cowboy boots and driving a rental car. Some owners were wooed by the flash of IAA. Some were put off by it. For other owners, it came down to the bottom line—who would pay more? I had the advantage there. IAA bought companies the Wall Street way—based on pretax or after-tax ea

The television episode was the foundation of another official award at Amazon, this one presented to an employee who identified an activity that was bureaucratic and wasteful.

Above all we would not carry any item unless we could be outstanding in terms of price (and make a profit at that price per #7) or uniqueness.