Explore the Deeply Driven nature of Joe Coulombe & how he built Trader Joe’s by defying convention—focusing on people, value, and purpose over profit.
In this episode, we dive into the incredible story of Joe Coulombe, the visionary founder of Trader Joe’s—an entrepreneur who built a cult-like brand by doing business his own way. With no retail experience and very little capital, Joe took a chance on a small chain called Pronto Markets and transformed it into something legendary.
Faced with giants like 7-Eleven and shifting market forces, Joe pivoted by building Trader Joe’s on four foundational principles: a reasonable strategy, high employee wages, product discontinuity, and serving the overeducated and underpaid. He believed in paying people well and treating vendors, customers, and employees like family. His quirky “Fearless Flyer” and unique private labels helped him create not just a store—but a movement.
We walk through Trader Joe’s evolution—from the early “Good Time Charlie” days, to the health-focused “Whole Earth Harry” phase, and finally to the laser-focused “Mac the Knife” era. Joe’s approach to leadership, logistics, and culture built something rare in retail: a business that people believed in.
This episode is a tribute to a deeply driven entrepreneur who never chased perfection—he pursued purpose. If you're building something meaningful, this one’s for you.
Books Referenced
Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys
A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market
Sam Walton: Made In America
Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX
My Life & Work – Henry Ford
https://a.co/d/iFc4jUT
Our net worth grew at a compounded rate of 26% per year. Furthermore. During the last 13 years of that period, we had no fixed interest bearing debt, only current liabilities. We went from leverage to the gills in the early days to zero leverage by 1975.
Furthermore, we never lost money in a year, and each year was more profitable than the proceeding year. I wrote this book to help entrepreneurs and would be entrepreneurs. That's why there's a lack of miracles and a surplus of marketing details, including buying, advertising, distributing and running stores,
And lots of discussion of the wages of success, how we built a successful business on high wages.
These selections are from the book Becoming Trader Joe, how I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys. An [00:01:00] autobiography by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri
Right here. We can see early on my friend that we're in for a treat. As Joe graciously walks us through his business strategies and we get a firsthand look at a true legend. This book is a beautifully composed symphony of how Joe built Trader Joe's through unconventional means and delivers for you and I a masterclass in business.
I highly suggest this book if you have the time. It's certainly a page turner. I would consider it certainly required reading.
It's packed full of brilliant insights by Joe.
Joe was a deeply driven entrepreneur that we can all learn from. He conducted business outside the mainstream and focused on creativity and resourcefulness to help him be successful. And along the way, he had a deep love and a respect for his employees, and he valued long-term growth.
He built a strong base of cult-like customers that [00:02:00] believed in Trader Joe's and what they were doing. And I just wanted to let you know that early on in the book, the timeline jumps around a little bit between the chapters. But for our discussion today, I've tried to lay out my notes in various excerpts in more of a chronological order just to keep us moving through the conversation.
How about we jump back in time and take a look at the story.
Going back to 1954. Joe would graduate Stanford with an MBA and he'd be hired by a gentleman by the name of Bud Fisher at Owl Rexel Drug Company. And he tells us few people knew or cared what an MBA was in those days. I was lucky enough to get hired for $325 a month, especially since I had never taken a course in retailing at Stanford and had no interest in retailing whatsoever.
That reminds me of the saying, life happens for me.
Cards in [00:03:00] life present themselves, when least expected, but how we play them makes all the difference. And that's what happens right here to Joe.
He is dealt a series of cards and he plays them perfectly over the next 30 years. Alright, now Owl was a chain of about 300 drug stores located on the West coast. And Joe had originally been hired to find out why their competition, who was Save On, uh, was crushing them with so much pain. And as he would say, every time one Sav On opened, three Owl Drug Stores closed.
And it would be during the course of Joe's research that he would stumble upon a little store called seven 11, uh, out of Texas. And at the time, they didn't have any locations in California.
But quickly, Joe had reached a point with this abysmal retailer, as he calls them, where he felt that he had learned everything that he could and he didn't wanna lose the value of his Stanford [00:04:00] MBA. So at that time, he started looking around and he took a job with Hughes Aircraft.
He says he was a financial planner in their semiconductor division, and he would be there for about 18 months. And he says that it grew quite nicely while he was there. But the thing that happened was he kept thinking about that seven 11 style store. It just kept ruminating in his thoughts. And then ironically, a year and a half later, his former boss, Bud would call him and tell him that he had persuaded Rexel to hire him back to Clone Seven 11.
So, I mean, what a coincidence. You're thinking about this for a year and a half, and then outta the blue, you get a phone call to come back and clone that store.
So at the age of 27, he would come back and be president of Pronto Markets in 1958. And let's look at the landscape here. At the time, there were no Seven elevens in California at the time. So the first experimental chain of [00:05:00] six Pronto's that we built was successful two years into the project. However, lightning hit Justin Dart, the famous president of Rexel
bought Tupperware against, I am told the unanimous vote of his board of directors. Within a year, Tupperware was generating a third of Rexal's profits Dart gave orders to liquidate all 1100 drug stores that he owned.
And that would include the 300 Owl stores and then the six Pronto Market locations that he was president over. Just as a quick side note here, uh, Justin Dart would go on to have great success with Tupperware and he would form Dart Industries. And at the time it merged with Kraft in 1980, they were doing two and a half billion dollars in sales.
So I think he made the right call there in terms of buying Tupperware and moving forward with that. However, for Joe Times are [00:06:00] about to get interesting. Joe would spend a lot of his time trying to take Owl public. And at that time what he had to do was compile all the financials for all of the Owl Drug Stores.
at that time they didn't have all the computers, so he had to go around and get all the financials that were written on scraps of paper and in different books. And it took him like six months to compile all of this detail
and get it all audited and ready to go. But around that time, the stock market would start having trouble in 62. And this just broke Joe's plans of taking out public. So at this point, he had two options. One was to go find a new job or try to buy Pronto and Joe's gonna play the second card right here to try to buy Pronto. And he says, I walked into the office of the Treasurer of Rexel one day in May of 1962, he was on the phone with the Wall Street Journal trying to explain why Rexel's stock had just gone [00:07:00] from 60 to 21.
I put a note on his desk that said I will buy Pronto markets for book value. He kept his hand over the phone and muttered 10,000 over book and you got it. I shook his hand. I needed to raise the money within 90 days. The problem was I didn't have any money,
but that didn't stop Joe. He would tap all of his resources to scrape together the funds he needed to purchase Proto markets. But he puts everything on the line right here. And it reminds me a little bit of the resourcefulness of Sam Walton, who used his savings and took a loan from his father-in-law to start his first Ben Franklin store in Newport, Arkansas.
This just goes to show that when you have a deep drive in a vision and you see your dream, it gives you that fuel to make anything possible. Joe says that he put the money together in the following way, $4,000 from [00:08:00] Alice's savings from teaching. Alice is, his wife, $7,000 in equity from their home that they sold.
And then they would move into a rental, $2,000 from his grandmother, and then a $5,000 loan from his father who would get paid back 17 years later for $25,000. And then half of the stock he sold to the employees at the time. And thankfully they were trusting in his vision and bought into what he was trying to do.
then hold your breath. A signature bank loan from Bank of America for the remainder,
which he seems quite surprised that they give him the loan without too much hassle. And Joe would say many years later, he would find out that they had issued him the loan based on the fact that Rexel was on the lease for all of his buildings. And they felt that Rexel wasn't gonna let him fail, so they felt that safe to go ahead and lend him the money.
Let me read for you what Joe says right here after he's [00:09:00] got the money secured. So there I was the controlling stockholder of seven Pronto Markets living with Alice who did the accounts payable at home and two kids. Now in a house we rented for $150 a month. We were leveraged to the gills, furthermore, the county had opened a massive flood control project outside our new seventh Culver City store For six months, no one could enter the store
except by walking a plank over a 20 foot ditch Culver City, along with the servicing cost of the leverage balance sheet. Was consuming all the profits of the other stores. Chapter 11 was a possibility,
After Pronto markets emerged from Rexel in 1962, Joe was severely capital constrained. And so what he would do is he would form a deal with one of his vendors Adohr milk Farms. So under this [00:10:00] deal, would get all of Pronto's milk business and Pronto would ultimately become their largest customer at the same time as they were growing.
And then Joe would get, capital from Adohr he says that this allowed him to expand from seven to 16 stores. In just three years timeframe, We can see that things are starting to grow here for Joe.
but then one day in October of 65, he would meet with his friend Merri Adamson. And Merri was the CEO of Adohr. And they would have a monthly, business lunch, and Merrit would drop a big bombshell on Joe right here on this day and tell him that he had sold his business to Southland, who was also the owner of the, uh,seven 11 stores.
He knew immediately that his financing was gonna be gone and that a competitor a thousand times bigger was coming to town. And Joe would say, suddenly [00:11:00] stone sober. I drove home, got Alice in the kids, and holed up for two days in a cabin at Lake Arrowhead in California when I tried to figure out what the hell to do.
And that's how Trader Joe's got started
Right here. We see that when faced with the stone wall, Joe would take a step back and take some time to think, and we can learn from Joe right here that in the face of radical changes in business, it's okay to take a little bit of time to step back and strategize. Lay all of our cards on the table and figure out how we wanna play 'em, and that's what Joe would do right here.
He had a few core items already figured out that he could draw from.
The first would be a reasonable strategy. And I'll elaborate a little bit more here. Let me read for you. In 1962, Barbara Tuckman published The Guns of August, an account of the first 90 days of World War I. [00:12:00] It's the best book on management, and especially mis-management I've ever read. The most basic conclusion I drew from her book was that if you adopt a reasonable strategy as opposed to waiting for an optimum strategy and you stick with it, you'll probably succeed.
Tenacity is as important as brilliance. Trying to find an optimal solution in business is a waste of time. the factors in the equation are changing all the time, but you've got to have something to hang your hat on And that would serve as the foundational core through the duration of Joe's tenure as the founder of Trader Joe's.
And he would feed it into the outline of a plan that he would write and distribute in what he called a white paper.
Let me read for you how this worked. I really love that he did this with his troops. I wrote what I called a white paper, something that I've tried to do at every important turn of [00:13:00] events. It started with the founding of Pronto Markets. In a white paper, you try to write down everything you plan to do and the reason why you think you should do it That way when things don't work out, you can't play the role of a Soviet historian and airbrush history.
The other important use of a white paper is to circulate it to the troops, to engage their support and solicit their ideas. So by putting his ideas out into the world, he was setting himself into a position where he was making a commitment towards making changes and then soliciting feedback to make things better.
Joe trusted his employees and he worked with them directly to make quick decisions, especially in those early years. He was always hands-on in the business. And that reminds me of Elon Musk in the way that he engages with his employees, especially in the early days of [00:14:00] SpaceX. As highlighted in the book Liftoff by Eric Berger, he says The following about Musk
Musk would convene his different teams in a small conference room, be it his engineers working on propulsion or structures or avionics, and run down the major issues. If an engineer faced an intractable problem, Musk wanted a chance to solve it, he would suggest ideas and give his team a day or two to troubleshoot, then report back to him in the interim.
If they needed guidance, they were told the email must directly day or night. He typically responded within minutes.
Joe and Elon are both deeply driven individuals
They teach us a firm lesson right here that we need to work closely with our employees and those that are around us. Share our ideas and corporate direction and solicit feedback and then have an immediate [00:15:00] response to your teams. If you wait a week or a month, you're wasting time and this will pay dividends for us huge in business.
allowing us to get shit done quicker and building empowerment with those team members as they strengthen their confidence and their leadership skills and ask 'em to do the same with the teams that they lead.
communication on all levels is extremely critical. So
with this core philosophy, number one, firmly in place. Joe would focus on his second core philosophy, which was to pay employees well. And he would say the most important business decision I ever made was to pay people well, And this plays out from the time he develops pronto markets all the way through the time he finally leaves Trader Joe's.
This is a theme that we're starting to see here in deeply driven entrepreneurs. Henry Ford paid his workers more than double market [00:16:00] rates, that greatly improved his productivity and caught his costs, also reduced his turnover. And on the last episode, we looked at Ed Thorpe and he paid his employees way above market rates.
With Ed saying it almost eliminated turnover and it increased productivity and prevented associates from leaving the business and going out and starting business on their own,
Let's learn a little bit more about Joe's view on how he paid his employees and the benefits that he saw as a result. I think this is pure gold for us right here. He would say. Time and again, I am asked why no one has successfully replicated Trader Joe's. The answer is that no one has been willing to pay the wages and benefits and thereby attract and keep the quality of people who work at Trader Joe's.
in addition to high pay, full-time employees also got health insurance and other benefits. And this was almost unheard of at the time that Joe had rolled [00:17:00] this out, especially in retailing and grocery. And in a quote from Joe that I love, he says, good people pay by their extra productivity.
I'm gonna read it one more time. Good people pay by their extra productivity, and that is so, so, so true.
Let's take a look at some of the benefits that Trader Joe's would see from a retention standpoint. Well, I mean, they had almost no turnover. They never had to run ads for new employees. When new employees were needed. They generally just hired from within and they had a long list of employees, family, and friends who were ready and willing to go to work.
Uh, their training costs, he said, were almost minimal. What Joe liked to do is anyone working in the store, he liked them to be able to work all positions. He didn't feel it was fair for someone to get stuck checking out all day or stuck stocking shelves all day. He really wanted people rotating through different jobs and doing different things, [00:18:00] keeping them excited and interested throughout the day.
And Joe would say that employees had a very deep pride in working at Trader Joe's and that they were highly motivated and they provided superior customer service. And this helps add to that allure of the cult, like customer following that Trader Joe's developed. The reason being is that the customers would go into the markets and they would see.
The same employees working there and employees got to know them and their families and their dogs and what they're doing for the summer and how is Christmas. And so they really became a family, , with their employees and their customers. And this really built a lot of value and trust over the years.
When customers come to the store, they know the employees that just worked out really well for them.
and I think that's a really valuable point to learn right here.
If we're in a position where we're facing directly to the customer, that we should take extra time with them, just talk to 'em. A couple of minutes of general chitchat goes a long way [00:19:00] about learning people and what they're doing and how they are just taking a few extra minutes. I mean, we could even do that on the phone or through the emails or whatever.
Just reach out.
We're all humans and it's nice to be able to connect with one another.
Joe would go on to say that employee theft was reduced greatly because, I mean, why would someone wanna steal from an employer when they're very well compensated and they've got health insurance? That job's gonna be really hard to go out and replace. So they didn't see a lot of employee theft, which was certainly a good thing.
Joe would also say that by paying people high wages, this avoided, unionization. Uh, they never really had the need to unionize 'cause the employees were genuinely satisfied. and another point that kept the unions out of Trader Joe's was that he had his field supervisors meet with each employee at least two times a year.
The field supervisors were generally over five or six different stores. So the [00:20:00] employees are jumping over the manager and meeting with the supervisor. And this allowed them to vent concerns, express frustrations, and they felt like they were heard. And then generally things would get worked out and things were to evolve for the better for employees.
So they didn't really have a need to feel like they needed to unionize. And Joe also mentions that for a long time he would take all new employees out to lunch so that he could get to know them better. So I mean, from an employee perspective, you're getting paid well, you have benefits, you have access to the field supervisors and the owner of the company is taking you out to lunch to know more about you.
And Joe was frequently in and out of all these stores. So they would see him generally, quite often.
and you can feel when you're reading the book, Joe had a really great love and respect for his employees.
, So at this point we've talked about two core tenants. First was a reasonable strategy and then we just discussed paying the higher wages. The third would come through what Joe calls product discontinuation, [00:21:00] all those lovely products, particularly that of eggs. So around 1962, he would get a visit from the Egg man who was offering extra large double a eggs for the same cost as the large double A eggs.
The extra large eggs were 12% bigger than the large,
and the supply was not big enough for the large supermarkets. So they had a major advantage right here. And let me read to you what Joe would say about this. The ads we began running revolutionized pronto markets and they helped to generate the profits I needed to stay afloat and later build Trader Joe's.
To this day, the promotion of the extra large AA egg 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 were other discontinuities out there in the suppliers of [00:22:00] merchandise. Eight years later, we built Trader Joe's on the principle of discontinuity.
The egg program would be a great success for Trader Joe's, and it would allow him to pay off art or milks quickly. And then for the first time, it gave him his own capital through his store sales. And we're starting to see a strong backbone developing here for the future of Trader Joe's. and it's really fun to see how things are shaping up for Joe.
Things seem to be going very well, but who are his core customers? You might ask excellent question. Joe would develop a deeper understanding of this through self-education and reading. And one quote, my friend, I think that carries a lot of weight, comes from John Maxwell. Readers are leaders and leaders are readers, and this is very critical for Joe.
I just wanted to read you two important articles that Joe describes as valuable for shaping Trader [00:23:00] Joe's and how he was able to tie these concepts into the way that he shaped his business. And these are based upon observations of what he was seeing through the media and then also through his in-store customers.
Remember, he is always talking to his customer and getting feedback from them about, about their lives and things that are happening. So the first is an article that he would see in a magazine called Scientific American, and Joe says, scientific American in terms of creating my fortune is the most important magazine I've ever read.
The news items said that of all the people in the United States who were qualified to go to college in 1932, in the pit of the Depression, only 2% actually did, by contrast, in 1964 of all the people qualified to go to college. 60% in fact, actually did. The big change, of course, was the GI Bill of rights that went into effect in [00:24:00] 1945.
It was the greatest experiment in mass higher education ever attempted by any society in an era. By 1965, we were into the second generation of veterans going to college, and the pace stepped up later because of Vietnam. So right here, Joe understands that when people go to college, they're more educated about things that are going on in the world and things around them, and they tend to develop more critical thinking skills.
The second news item from the Wall Street Journal told me that the Boeing 7 47 would go into service in 1970, and that it would slash the cost of international travel. It did. The real cost of going to Europe today is about one 15th of what it was in 1950 in Pano markets.
We had noticed the people who traveled even to San Francisco were far more adventurous in what they are willing to put in their stomachs. [00:25:00] Travel is after all a form of education. Anticipating Peter Drucker's advice. By more than 30 years, trader Joe's was conceived from these two demographic news stories.
What I saw here was a smart but growing demographic opportunity in people who were educated. seven 11 in thewhole convenient store genre, serve the most basic needs of the most mindless demographics with cigarettes, Coca-Cola, milk, Budweiser, candy, bread, and eggs, I saw an opportunity to differentiate ourselves radically from the mainstream retailing to mainstream people.
What I saw in those news stories were the first cracks in the homogenization,
the prodo market chain. At the time of Seven Eleven's arrival had the highest sales per store of any convenience store chain in America by a factor of three [00:26:00] thanks to the high wage policy, the strong locations, a few liquor licenses, and the beginnings of differentiation through product knowledge exemplified by the egg program.
Now, where were we going to go with it? We didn't know yet, but we were well on the road to Trader Joe's. This would be a cornerstone in Joe's long term strategic position. With Trader Joe's and what he describes over and over again in the book as serving the overeducated and the underpaid,
Joe was able to zero in on his ideal demographic and that gave him the vision to keep moving forward. And it also helped him in future store selections as we'll talk about later on. He saw that Americans had become homogenized through the radio, and more specifically the TV media in which major brands controlled the airways.
Whoever had the most money was [00:27:00] able to advertise their brands more and more and more. . So people were just getting driven into those mainstream brands.
But Joe was able to see that those who were educated could see past this Shell game. And they were seeking different types of high quality products.
In addition, he was able to offer superior products in his stores that appealed to those that cherish that sort of value and those sort of products perfectly servicing those who were overeducated and underpaid, which falls right in line with what we learned from headwind forward on the very first episode, that profit comes as a result of service.
That is so true. Profit comes as a result of service, and the service would combine with Joe's core elements of a reasonable strategy, paying higher wages, product discontinuations, and then serving overeducated and the underpaid. This would lead [00:28:00] us into the era of Trader Joe's.
He's got a strong core foundation in place. He can build everything on top of that. In August of 67, the name would be changed from Pronto Markets to Trader Joe's, and he says the name was derived to appeal to those who were.
Culturally inspired and adventurous, and it evoked themes of traveling on the South Seas. they conducted a trademark search and they didn't see anyone using the name, so it appeared to be okay. So Joe moved forward creating what he calls
a fun and memorable brand identity linked to a relaxing and adventurous image. And inside the stores they would decorate them with marine artifacts that were salvaged from the marina for what Joe says were pennies on the pound. And then all of the managers in the stores would be called captains and everybody would wear a Hawaiian shirt.
It was a really lively environment. they didn't take themselves too seriously and they [00:29:00] focused on servicing the customer and having an upbeat and positive attitude.
At this point in the book, Joe describes three major versions of Trader Joe's over the years. The first would be that of what he calls ,
good time. Charlie of 1967, and then out of good time, Charlie's would morph into Whole Food. Harry's of 1971. Then finally the last version would be called Mac the Knife, uh, starting around 1977. And I'll do my best here to walk us through each version and highlight the key learnings for you. But the first four core tenets that we talked about, these are gonna be present in each version of Trader Joe's.
And for all the fine details, I would highly suggest picking up the book or even the audio book .
So first up is good time Charlie's and those reasonable strategy ground rules. In this version, Joe outlines for us the following strategy that he [00:30:00] would take for good time. Charlie's first, he was gonna track the small but emerging group of well educated and well traveled people.
second was the correlation between education and alcohol consumption. Joe would say as education goes up, so does alcohol consumption and the sophistication in terms of what people were buying.
At the time, three distilled spirits were added to the stores, and this helped him cover the cost of those high wages that he was paying at the time. And then out of the distilled spirits, they developed what they called a three test rule for products.
Under the three test rule, they had to meet the following criteria. The product had to have a high value per cubic inch. It had to have a high rate of consumption, and it had to be easily handled. Those were the three criteria that Joe had put in place. So these reasonable strategies were about to shed more light on their growing business and how they could [00:31:00] service their customers.
The first Trader Joe's store would be open in Pasadena, and it had a footprint of about 4,500 square feet, and this was more than double the size of their existing Pano market stores. So they had a lot of extra room that they could play it with. And let me just read to you how Joe describes this location, and we can see how brilliant he was with the selection and how it fit his core objectives.
And he would take this approach with just about every store that he opens under the Trader Joe's name. Pasadena was an extended campus with Caltech, Pasadena City College, fuller Theological Seminary, ambassador College, which proved to be a major customer and American College and Ental College and Cal State LA not too far away.
The Huntington Hospital is a major employer of people with advanced degrees, as are some big engineering firms like Parsons. In short, [00:32:00] Pasadena probably had more well educated, well traveled people than any city of its size in California. That store. Fits like a glove for Trader Joe's.
Such a perfect location, and I would've loved to have been one of those first customers that frequented that location just to see how things developed and evolved over time and get to know the employees and be part of that whole culture. That would've been amazing, I think. But what are they gonna do with all the space?
Well, wine of course, and more wine. We became the first retailer to offer plenty of shelf space to tiny wineries that later became famous. To our astonishment, it was the wine program that was a big hit, helped by strong sales methods of the first Captain Jack button. And of course it was all fair traded, so we had a guaranteed profit.
Just a quick note here about the California Fair Trade Laws [00:33:00] at the time and how they worked. So, wine producers and importers would set a minimum retail price with the state of California, and then retailers were not allowed to sell below this price. And if they were caught selling below that price, there were harsh penalties for doing so.
And the laws were put in place to help protect small retailers from getting crushed by the larger markets. Joe would say that the retailer could enjoy roughly a 33% profit margin from Fair Trade wine, . With the wind at their backs, Joe converted more Pano locations into Trader Joe's.
He leased new locations and then he closed a few pano markets that didn't meet his, uh, ideal target demographics at the time. But things are about to change here. In 1970, the economy would go to all hell. During this turbulent time, Joe would describe 1970 as their most important single year in the history of Trader [00:34:00] Joe's.
In the next section I wrote in my book, always Innovating in the Margin, Joe would undertake three key initiatives to turn the tide right here. The first is that he's gonna break the price on imported wines, and this is due to a loophole in the fair trade loss. Second, he would launch the fearless flyer, which was his method of advertising.
And third, he would marry health food to good time, Charlie's party store. And this would eventually morph into whole Earth. Harry. And I'm gonna summarize the first two items for you here, and then we will talk about Whole Earth Harry and how that worked out.
Breaking the price on wine, and the key here is the loophole. This is the beginning of the legend of Trader Joe's, , in their position in wine. And Joe would say, as I learned time and again, success in business, often rest on a minute reading of the regulations that impact your business,
We had found a [00:35:00] loophole in the law, and by God we drove a truck through it. Within three years, we were the leading retailer of imported wines in California. This was the real beginning of the legend of Trader Joe's, and here's how it all started. Joe had noticed that a wholesaler posted a price on an imported wine with the wholesaler only making 6% above their cost.
This price was lower than all of the others. So we called the wholesaler who explained that they could post any price as long as it was 6% above their cost. And that intrigued Joe even more so he scoured over all the other import wines and he found different wholesalers offering different prices.
Why were they different prices you might ask? Well, that's a good question, and it comes down to the fact that each wholesaler simply has a different acquisition cost, And based upon that, by the time they add their 6%, they all have a little [00:36:00] bit different retail cost.
And he takes it one step further. We met with a great gentleman and veteran importer, Ezra Webb. Ezra had a tiny wholesale and importing company that supplied us with private label bourbon. Yes, indeed. He said our analysis was correct. Furthermore, we could buy Latif indeed. Any of the famous Bordeaux vineyards for much less than the big wholesalers were paying, and we could post the retails as low as we wanted.
Wow. Trader Joe's was uncorked, the first gleam at Mac. The knife steel now glinted in the wine glass seven years before we loosen the monster on the trade. And this is quite amazing, my friend. It's a strong reminder. Strong reminder that we should be intimately familiar with all the laws that govern our industry, state, local, federal [00:37:00] regulations, all of it.
We should be aware with all of the laws and the rules that govern our regulations, we should keep an eye open for all the possibilities around us. Even if you notice small variances, explore 'em. I think it's these small variances that generally lead to the biggest discoveries. If there's a small variance in something, there's a reason why.
And we should be exploring that because there's a reason why and we need to figure it out. And those are where we can make great discoveries. Just like what Joe did right here with wine. So with this exploration, it would be time to tell the world. And how would he do that? Well, he's gonna do it through what he calls the Fearless Flyer, or at the time when it was first started, it was called the Insiders Report because they would give, , detailings of all the wines that they were selling.
But over the years, it morphed into the Fearless Flyer. So the Fearless Flyer would be Trader Joe's Primary means of [00:38:00] advertisement. And these were available in the stores, and then they were also mailed out several times a year to all of their customers. Joe says, by the time he leaves the company, they're sending out millions of them per year.
And Joe would describe the Fearless Flyer as they caught on with the public and played a major role of establishing Trader Joe's as a different kind of retailer. One that didn't take itself too seriously at all times. I wrote the Fearless Flyer for the Overeducated Underpaid People,
and the Fearless Flyer would be just another reason why they would achieve that cult-like status with their customers.
and let me elaborate a little bit here through the words of Joe, as everyone knows. Word of mouth is the most effective advertising of all. I've been known to say that there's no better business to run than a cult. Trader. Joe's became a cult of the overeducated and underpaid, partly because we deliberately tried to make it a cult once we got a handle on what we were [00:39:00] actually doing.
And partly because we kept the implicit promises with our clientele. So Joe would never run sales, and they offered only the best value. And then the things that were advertised in the fearless flyer matched exactly to the products you would find in the store. And then also the prices in the fearless flyer matched what they found in the in the store.
So this helped drive customer loyalty because they knew what they saw advertised. Was always what they could expect. Joe says, there aren't many cult retailers who successfully retained their cult status over a long period of time. A couple in California are in an out burger and fries, electronics, and speaking of in Anout Burger, that book in an Out burger, a behind the counter look at the fast food chain that breaks all the rules by CC Perman.
That is an excellent, excellent book and I hope to [00:40:00] cover it for you here soon in an upcoming episode. I think it's a masterclass in itself in the restaurant industry if you ask me, and it has a lot of valuable lessons and I can't wait to talk to you about that book.
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But back to Joe, and he says, beware of ever betraying the true believers. The fury of a woman's scorn is nothing compared to that of a betrayed culty, which is excellent of ice from Joe. And we have to keep our customers loyal and happy. Otherwise, if we start to alienate our base, the power of the word is gonna spread much quicker to tear your business down than it did to build it up.
And that reminds me of Blackberry. I mean, people called it. CrackBerry, everyone had to have one at the time. I remember my first one, I was a CrackBerry addict also. It was quite amazing when that thing came out. But they failed to adopt, technology, specifically the touchscreen. And they [00:41:00] believed it to be unreliable and not professional for businessupon seeing Steve Jobs demonstrate the iPhone in 2007, the CEO of Blackberry, Michael Lazarus said, it's impossible.
They must be faking it.
What's to even think about that statement just blows my mind. So failure to act just costs Blackberry, their cult-like status in their market dominance. And I think it was just a couple of years, they were almost obsolete as iPhone took over the world with their impossible touchscreen as they would say.
Alright, uh, so we're in the 1970s here. , The wine market's been broken and the Fearless Flyer is bringing them to new heights, and we move into the next iteration of Trader Joe's, and it would be known as Whole Food. Harry, let's talk about Whole Food. Harry's here and see how this develops for Joe.
just a few minutes ago, we saw how impactful scientific [00:42:00] American had shaped Joe's thinking around education in America. Well,
Five years later in the September edition of 1970,
they would devote an entire issue to the environment. And after reading this, Joe would set Trader Joe's up for a major shift. Let me read to you what he said right here.
We prepared to marry the health food store to the liquor store. The concept obviously, was founded in schizophrenia. But it occurred to me that people who really thought about what they ingested, whether they were wine connoisseurs or health food nuts were basically on the same radar beam. Both groups were fragmented from the masses who willingly consume Folgers Coffee, best foods, mayonnaise, wonder Bread, Coca-Cola, et cetera.
Both groups were the kind of people who I was hoping represented a breakup of the mainstream consumption in America. And I think Joe's onto something right here. [00:43:00] The selections found in his stores were about to change. Trader Joe's first private label product would be that of granola.
And Joe would say, we installed Alta Dina certified raw milk to the disgruntlement of Southland. And within six months, we were the largest retailers of Altadena milk, both pasteurized and raw. In California.
We began price bombarding five pound cans of honey and then all the ingredients for baking bread at home. We installed fresh orange juice squeezers in the stores and sold fresh juice at the lowest price in town. By late 1971, we were moving into vitamins. So during this time, Joe would also be informed by one of his doctor friends that fiber was showing major benefits in the avoidance of colon cancer.
Joe would follow this lead and let's see how it worked out. Leroy. Leroy was , their operations manager, and Joe would call him one of the best employees that [00:44:00] he ever had found a hippie outfit in Venice. I think it was called Mom's Trucking, which would package the brand, but brand is a low value product and they couldn't afford to deliver it since they also packaged nuts and dried fruits.
However, we somewhat reluctantly added them to our order, and that's how Trader Joe's became the largest retailer of nuts and dried fruits in California. Brilliant foresight, astute marketing analysis, right here, this is key. Exploring new leads and being astute. Similar to the wine loophole Joe found earlier in my book, I wrote, stuff seems to fall out of the sky in the margin.
That's just what hit me at the time when I had read that and looking back in our business lives. It's always easy to connect the dots looking in the rear view mirror, things appear to just magically line up. But at that time, he didn't see those dots and he had to [00:45:00] go out and discover them for himself.
And this is an important lesson that we can learn right here to be observant when things don't quite fit a hundred percent to what we're trying to do. To keep an open mind and think about all of those alternatives and look for different ways ,
Many times, my friend, the dots are there, they're just hidden. And we need to look a little closer and dig 'em out and make work.
And if we do that, we're gonna have great success. Now the whole earth hairy era would shape up quite nicely for the next five or six years. But some major changes in the laws are about to reshape Joe's strategy. Once again,
two major changes would lead them into the Mac, the knife era. The first was that the state would no longer mandate minimums, uh, for retail prices on milk starting in 1977. And then the second was that fair trade alcohol would be dropped. So these price controls protected about 50% of what they were selling in their [00:46:00] stores.
This would cut their gross profit on milk from 22% down to 2%. And then the Fair Trade alcohol laws would be contested in court. This would take another two years to finally be phased out. So they had a little bit of time there to work their strategy, but basically this forced Joe to change once again, and he would say,
we were sculptors taking the first big wax off a chunk of an extremely tough granite. The subtleties could come later. The creation of Mack,
The knife was above all an act of will by my colleagues and me to survive. We violated every received wisdom in the retailing except one. We delivered great value, which is where most retailers fail.
And Joe would go on to develop what he calls a five year plan of 77 on how Mac the knife would operate. If we think back just a little bit ago when we were talking about those reasonable strategies, this is [00:47:00] what Joe would develop. And it wasn't perfect, but it gave him a path forward and it allowed them to figure out the finer details as they went along.
Let me read for you the highlights of what made up Mac the knife. There's uh, eight of 'em total here. I'm just gonna run through 'em for you. number one, they emphasize edibles versus non edibles. So Joe would eliminate film. Hosiery light bulbs, hardware, greeting cards, batteries, magazines in all health and beauty.
This allowed him a lot more room for food items because he thought that the major retailers were gonna be marking up the costs of their foods now that their revenues weren't as protected with no more milk and alcohol, fair trade sales. And this was gonna give him the space to undercut the competition.
the second item is that he would drop ordinary brands like Best Foods, Folgers, Coke, basically anything that was highly [00:48:00] advertised and highly packaged. He got rid of that.
Third was
the focus on discontinuity of supplies. So he was willing to discontinue any products if he wasn't able to offer the perfect price for them. Fourth would be a focus on Trader Joe's private label brands. , Fifth would be to carry. Individual items versus whole lines.
So they didn't carry a four, an eight, a 12, a 16 ounce size of juice. He just carried the one that had the most value. So maybe the 12 or the 16. ,
number six, he would say, no more fixtures. So they started displaying all their merchandise in stacks versus on shelves, and that allowed him to drive down the SKU counts in the stores. And then speaking of skews, uh, number seven was that each SKU would be a profit center and each one had to stand on its own and make a profit, or it would be eliminated.
And then number eight, I like this one, He would not carry an item unless it could be [00:49:00] outstanding in terms of price and uniqueness. So with all these guidelines in place, Joe would intensify his focus on buying, and Joe would establish guidelines for buying that allowed
Trader Joe's to become laser sharp. And Joe would spend a lot of time in the book talking about the various buying policies and how all of these worked. What I'm gonna do for you right here is just summarize the things that I learned and how the buying worked. He would say buyers should be paid extremely well.
In the book, he mentions that most big supermarket chains might pay the buyers $50,000 a year when they should be making $150,000 a year. Now, he didn't say how much he paid his buyers specifically, but I have to imagine that it was probably towards that second number of the 150,000. He explains that buyers should have a deep knowledge of their products.
buyers should treat their vendors as an extension of Trader Joe's. And under that [00:50:00] extension, he always paid his buyers immediately upon delivery, which was extremely rare in the retail and food industry. He gave vendors decisions within 24 hours of them making presentations or offering them products so they could operate their businesses efficiently.
And then he mentions if you find a vendor that has an entrepreneurial spirit, follow that vendor wherever they go. Those are the ones that were willing to make the best deals. They worked the hardest and they brought the best value for Joe, and he really took care of those vendors. Based upon these guidelines, Joe was able to make major shifts in his business and he was often asked, how do you set your prices?
And let me read for you how he would respond. Grocery buyers love to apply a uniform percentage gross profits to everything, but that is bad practice. During my tenure, [00:51:00] Mac, the knife happened to run on a gross profit of 23%. After distribution costs and what is euphemistically called? Shrinkage. But that was an after the fact result.
We never aimed specifically to hit 23%. Our approach when the buyers followed it was to find out what was going on with the price for a given skewand then undercut the market. At the same time. They were to consider how many dollars we made on each sale. What was relevant was that each SKU was a profit center after considering all the cost of handling it.
That's a brilliant way to look at each skew as a profit center.
If it can't carry the weight or underperformed, you get rid of the skew. There's always another one waiting in line to land on the shelf or in Joe's case to be stacked up because he didn't use shelves. We tried not to. All right. Let's, uh, keep moving forward here. , [00:52:00] next. Joe would talk about virtual distribution, and I've never heard of this concept exactly, so it was kind of new for me and it was interesting to learn.
And let me just summarize for you how this worked. So roughly in a nutshell is he would no longer accept any deliveries from vendors at the store level. And he said by doing that, they eliminated a lot of theft because These vendors would come in and stock the shelves in the store, and then they would take high value items out the back end
hidden in the cases that they were rolling out.
So that helped them cut theft.
Instead of having his own warehouses, he just outsourced them. And he would say he had like 18 warehouses in the beginning stages with like four or five of them being core or critical. So frozen stuff might go to one warehouse room, temperature stuff to another warehouse. And then when the stores needed items, they would place an order into the virtual warehouses, Joe called it.
And then he had three different trucking companies that would deliver goods to the [00:53:00] individual's stores. And then what Joe did is he encouraged all the store employees and the managers to get to know these drivers. So these drivers felt like family and he asked the employees look over the drivers and make sure they were paid well and get to know them and include them as part of the family.
That really went a long ways with all of their vendors and their suppliers and their drivers. In the book, Joe would say the following about their distribution system, we own no trucks, no warehouses, and no mainframe computers. I used to call it Leroy's lighter than air distribution system today. I can call it virtual and you'll get the point.
It's quite fascinating. , For a more in-depth view, . Even just one or two of these ideas can have tremendous benefits in your business.
We've already seen here today in the episode how much just scientific American alone had an impact on Joe, and that two articles made major impacts on the way Trader Joe's [00:54:00] operates and the way that we know them today. If Joe would've never read those articles, things would've been quite different for him.
now another major shift that we want to talk about is the use of private label products,
Joe says today, the great majority of products and Trader Joe's are private label or unknown label, like Fish Row, many of the olive oils, et cetera. Our first private label wine came in 1969,
and with this, Joe would differentiate products in some creative manner. And normally this would be done through highlighting some aspect of the product such as Concord Grape Juice from the 1981, harvest Molasses without sulfur, vanilla extract with no alcohol. Albacore caught on long lines mesa's nets.
Instead of having a one size fits all private label, I,
Joe goes on to say, instead of having a one size fits all private label, like the supermarkets, we tried to [00:55:00] individualize each label to each product. Whenever I could. Therefore I use artistic or musical or literary or historical or scientific illusions in the product names.
And I really love that approach because it stimulates the customers, it offers them great value at the same time. Trader Joe's private label would catch on with Joe saying the following.
As the private label program grew. Its growth was given additional stimulus by hysteria or a feedback loop among the private label products. confidence in one product led to purchases of another. that is key. My friend right here. That when we service our customers well with our products and the services we offer, that they have that confidence to explore our other offerings.
And this helps us to grow our client base, increase our profits so that we can service our communities and those around us and [00:56:00] take good care of our employees and everything else that it's critical for some business.
But how would Joe bring the success to new markets? Joe talks about leasing and location selection as one of their key strengths, I just wanted to cover with you some of the details that I learned from Joe Trader. Joe's almost always leased buildings, , that were existing and they would assume responsibility for the major leasehold improvements, and Joe would say.
With our heavy investment in leasehold improvements for electrical and plumbing, we had to sign long-term leases, usually 15 years. Those leasing decisions are not reversible if something bad suddenly happens.
And that puts 'em in a position where they really need to make a proper store selection and then also focus on delivering superior value to their customers. When Sam Walton first opened his stores in rural Arkansas, he quickly realized that people were willing to drive 50, [00:57:00] 60 miles or maybe even more so that they could capture a good deal.
And this really became a hallmark for Walton as he was growing his empire in these small communities at the time. It lines up with what Joe teaches us right here. My preference is to have a few stores as far apart as possible, and to make them as high volume as possible.
With Mac the Knife, we could draw people from 25 to 50 miles away. When we opened Ventura in 1983, 30% of our business came from Santa Barbara and I had to do a quick lookup to see how far that is, and it looks to be about 30 miles or so. So they're getting 30% of their base from 30 miles away. So people recognize value and they're willing to travel for that value to save money and acquire the foods that they love.
Sam Walton saw this when he first opened up in rural Arkansas, and Joe sees this with Trader [00:58:00] Joe's, and this would be reflected very well in their sales per square foot. Let's just read what Joe says. A Trader Joe's sales were a thousand dollars per square foot of total area. The supermarket average is 570, but they use sales area
and that's something that I learned. Also, the sales area figure excludes the back room. It's a slight of hand only with words and it's common to hear all these figures tossed around all the time in retail and in the restaurant industry about sales per square foot. So we just have to pay attention to the words.
Is it total area or is it just sales area? So I was curious what Trader Joe's sales per square foot of total area is today in several sources that I found quoted $2,000 per square foot of total area, which is about four times more than a typical [00:59:00] grocery store. I think that's quite impressive. , Let's keep going .
And here what Joe has to teach us about the demographics and how he looked at those in consideration for store placement. Successful retailing is demographic coherence. All your locations should have the same demographics, whether you're selling clothing or wine. We looked for our demographics. There are lots of overeducated and underpaid people in Southern California. That's why most Trader Joe's were located near a major institution of learning.
Long Beach State, uc, San Diego, UCLA, and hospitals like the Huntington in Pasadena or Long Beach Veterans and high tech corporate offices like TRW in Manhattan Beach. Which probably has more PhDs than most colleges. The second most important group of customers were retirees. Old folks are the top consumers [01:00:00] of liquor, candy, high fiber foods and vitamins.
So I paid special attention to retirement villages and trailer parks.
These would define as core customers. And then from there we learned, generally speaking, I would not look at any trading area with fewer than 40,000 households likely to contain core customers. in terms of store characteristics, Joe would look for the following. One is an excellent boulevard, access to a large number of core customers so they could get in and out easily.
And then he liked to have a large parking lot so they could park their cars. he liked to have freestanding locations if possible. And those with no co-tenants, because he said co-tenants would just get in the way they were willing to pay for a loading dock because that reduced injuries to workers from lifting heavy objects.
And it also allowed them to turn inventory faster.
With this formula in place, Joe can [01:01:00] begin to think about how many trading areas or markets do you want to open? And Joe would say, as long as you can preserve the culture of the company and as long as logistics don't kill you, go ahead.
Mack. The knife was a solid blueprint, and we can see its precision detailed with the heart and soul of a deeply driven entrepreneur in that of Joe Kalo. But there's about to be an ownership change on the horizon for Trader Joe's.
in March of 1977, Joe would fly to Europe for his yearly wine tasting trip. And prior to flying out, he had arranged a meeting with Dieter Brandes. Joe would describe him as one of the finest, smartest men that he ever came to know. Dieter was representing another gentleman named Theo Albrecht, who was one of the controlling partners of all these, especially their North American operations.
Joe is interested in his first look at Aldi [01:02:00] and their initial talks for them to take over Trader Joe's. But it takes about six months after that of meeting with Dieter on the phone. And he says finally in October of 77, he flew back to Germany to negotiate the final sale of Trader Joe's.
But he says once he landed in Germany, he had a second look at their operations and he describes what he calls an allergic reaction to what he saw. Let me just read for you how that worked out after getting a second look at all these operations. Gimme what I can only describe as an allergic reaction.
It violated every management concept that I ever held dear. It was great for the German economy and for the German culture, but I couldn't take it. I pulled out, Alice and I escaped to Paris. Theater was cross fallen.
Joe didn't want them to morph Trader Joe's into Cal Aldi, as he would call it. He thought they were gonna [01:03:00] come in and use his stores as an entry point into the California market and just tear down all of all his years of hard work and his drive to build things up and destroy his reputation as Trader Joe's, and then also do damage to his employees.
He didn't want any part of that, but they would persist and they would keep calling Joe. And he says one year later, in October of 78, they gave him a call with a radically revised offer, and let me just outline the details of that offer. , First they were sold on Trader Joe's post Fair Trade deregulation.
So basically they believed in Mac the knife what he was doing. , Second is that they would make no changes to the way that Trader Joe's was run. , Third Joe wouldn't have to sign any sort of management contract, so he wasn't stuck there long term against his will if he didn't wanna stay. Gave him a lot of flexibility.
fourth, the offer was [01:04:00] three times more than a year before. And Joe said that was partly because sales had increased a lot under Mac the knife. Plus, I believe they really wanted this extremely valuable brand.
So Joe would be acceptable. And he responded that the sales contract could be no longer than one page. I love that. Short and sweet. The deal was finalized in 79 at the beginning, I think January is what he mentions. Joe says that he basically just went back to work like nothing happened. And he would work there as CEO for 10 more years and continue to grow the business and expand it.
And he had complete control over everything. But, you know, you might be thinking, did Aldi hold up their end of the deal?
amazingly, they did. At least under Joe's watch, and I'll paraphrase very loosely what he says here. Trader Joe's would expand on their own merit, never taking any financing from Aldi. They had no buying links with Aldis. They [01:05:00] never took an active role in Trader Joe's.
They let Joe run everything. Joe never took part in any Aldi or European operations. And then Joe would just write them a report once a month, describing how things were going. He says occasionally Theo Albrecht or De wouldvisit him in California, but Joe didn't express any concern over this.
Generally it was just friendly, pleasantries and they would go and check out some stores and have general talk on business. It was just routine stuff and Joe said it was all friendly and everything was good. So it does appear that they held up their end of the deal quite nicely and allowed Joe to run Trader Joe's as he had always done before.
But why would Joe sell? And he outlines his thinking force in the book. I just wanna read you through this section. I ran Bernie McDonald's risk calculus. What do I risk if I sell? What do I risk if I don't? The calculus of what do I risk if I don't? Inter spousal death [01:06:00] taxes, which included President Jimmy Carter's threat to end capital gains tax preferences in 1980.
A threat that would have increased capital gains taxes for me from 33% to 73%, a tax that could bankrupt a now leaderless company. The calculus included the fact that our after tax proceeds from the sale would be large enough to permit us to be free of economic worry for the rest of our lives, assuming I didn't do something stupid with the money.
Now on the other side of the coin, the calculus of what do I risk if I sell?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 open while you were an employee, even a Frederick Forsyth rich one. Even when given great discretion by an absentee owner, the calculus of risk also included the [01:07:00] fact that I knew I would be selling my shadow. In short, I ran Bernie McDonald's risk calculus and sold. We have led a very comfortable life ever since.
It's just that my shadow, the persona of Trader Joe's is owned by the Alre.
I'm sure that had to be an extremely difficult decision for Joe.
as outlined. Joe approached it very methodically and with a proven approach that could give him some visibility into his situation. But just for a moment, put yourself in his shoes. Do you think that you would've sold?
It is a hard decision, live comfortable for the rest of your life while still running the company that you built. but as Joe says, that entrepreneurial spirit is gone. You don't get that as an employee no matter what. And I think Joe was blessed that he could continue as CEO for 10 more years, and that Albrecht honored his contract with Joe.
In the book, [01:08:00] Joe talks about exit strategy and gives his thoughts, and I think these are valuable for us to hear. I just wanted to read for you what Joe says. I detest the term exit strategy when I hear young entrepreneurs bragging about theirs as if a business is something one builds and casts off.
Amen. Joe, I can't agree more. my financial exit strategy had been the employee stock ownership plan at the time of sale, Joe was planning to turn over 75% of the company to the employees over a prolonged period of time. But when free trade deregulation happened, the auditors that he was working with at the time were able to give him, uh, an appraisal on the business.
So therefore he wasn't able to put the employee stock purchase plan in place and that really blew up Joe's. Plans to do so. Now, I'm sure that over a long period of time, things would've worked out and he would've been able to do that. But it's also during this time that he had met Theo and [01:09:00] Dieter
and he had taken that trip overseas to meet with them. And Joe would go on to say, I never planned to exit by the way of sale to outsiders. In fact, in the year just prior to deregulation, I had turned down offers from two major supermarket chains. I said I would never sell to a big American corporation.
They would make me write all kinds of reports. Worse. They would strip Trader Joe's cash reserve, pulling it my employee's jobs, and my name at risk. That was something I liked about the Alre. They were as financially conservative as I was,
do things for cash except for real estate. My personal exit strategy, pre-sale was to work in the business as long as I was able, and this didn't change with the sale because I thought I would spend the rest of my career reporting to Dita Brandes, who was 10 years younger and with whom I had such remarkable rapport.
Joe would finally resign and step down from the [01:10:00] company in 1989, Joe tells us the main reason right here. I sense that my prerogative of complete control, the prerogative of an entrepreneur posing as an employee was being progressively eroded as the user interface eroded.
But when asked if he regrets quitting, Joe says no. The succeeding 10 years were so full of fascinating experiences that I'm glad I exited. Furthermore, I simply do not make a good employee. In 1989, I went back to my own entrepreneurial character and have been self-employed ever since. But did he regret selling?
Yes, I admit it to my own self. I was not true when I sold. I regret not having had the guts to write out the loss of the surtax exemptions, the employee ownership problem, the threat of death taxes, Carter's [01:11:00] threat to eliminate capital gains preferences, and all the other fears, real or phantom of late 1978.
I have to admit the truth that I regret having sold Trader Joe's and I have had to pay something for this beyond the loss of my shadow. Thanks for listening, Joe Kelo
With these wise words will end my friend. This book really is a masterclass. I would consider it required reading, especially if you're in the retail, in the grocery space, or just in general. There's so much advice and wisdom packed into here. Like I mentioned earlier, just one or two ideas from this book can make a world of difference in your business.
My focus today was really to capture the deeply driven spirit of Joe and how he started built and grew Trader Joe's
so that I could share these lessons with you, and I hope they
came across as you [01:12:00] listened. Remember to take some time today and reflect on those things you've learned.
Take five minutes to just think back. On the two or three things you learn most from this episode, you'll be amazed at how long those things will stick around in your memory, reflection builds deeper connections. I've enjoyed spending this time with you, and I hope you've enjoyed the episode and learned a few things along the way.
Until next time, make it a beautiful day in the neighborhood, my friend.