• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, March 2, 2020

Joe Coulombe, who opened the first Trader Joe’s with a mix of exotic but affordable foods, a dash of panache and a lot of exuberance in Pasadena, California, in 1967, died Friday at age 89. 

“Coulombe envisioned a new generation of young grocery shoppers emerging in the 1960s, one that wanted healthy, tasty, high-quality food they couldn’t find in most supermarkets and couldn’t afford to buy in the few high-end gourmet outlets,” the AP’s John Rogers writes  for the Chicago Tribune.

“So he found a new way to bring everything from a then-exotic snack food called granola to the California-produced wines that for flavor compared with anything from France. And he made shopping for them almost as much fun as sailing the high seas when he created Trader Joe’s, a quirky little grocery store filled with nautical themes and staffed not by managers and clerks but by ‘captains and mates,’” Rogers adds.

Coulombe sold Trader Joe’s to German grocery retailer Aldi Nord in 1979 but continued leading the company until his retirement in 1988, when there were 19 outlets. There are now more than 500 stores in 42 states.

With an MBA from Stamford, Coulombe went to work for Rexall Drugs in 1958, “where he was tasked with creating a group of convenience stores similar to 7-Eleven. He worked without pay in a grocery store to better understand the business. The new chain was called Pronto Markets, and when Rexall eventually decided to shut it down, Coulombe bought the locations and ran the stores himself,” Charisse Jones writes  for USA Today.

“But in 1967, 7-Eleven was opening more locations in California. Rather than taking them on, Coulombe decided to launch a new, vastly different chain,” Jones continues. 

“Part of Coulombe’s strategy was producing a store brand of as many products as he could, cutting the cost of production and delivering those savings to customers. He would also stop selling an item if it wasn’t in season or easily available, meaning the store’s stock was always changing,” Meryl Kornfield writes for The Washington Post.

“Trader Joe's helped change the way Americans shop for groceries, introducing markets stocked with staples and novel food items from private labels, with most packages carrying the Trader Joe's moniker. Some items became so popular they earned their own nickname, like ‘Two-Buck Chuck,’ the Charles Shaw brand of wine that sells for less than $3,” writes  Victoria Cavaliere for CNN Business.

“Coulombe prided himself on paying his employees well and on an ever-changing display, one of the things that set him apart from supermarkets…,” Neil Genzlinger writes  for The New York Times. “Another point of pride for Mr. Coulombe was that someone taste-tested what he sold. Sometimes it was a staff member. Often it was Mr. Coulombe himself.”

“I must sample about 4,000 wines a year,” he told The New York Times in 1987. “Of course, we don’t buy them all.”

“Beth Kowitt, who reported on the company for Fortune magazine, explained the company's process to NPR in 2010,” writes  NPR’s Colin Dwyer. “‘They buy directly from producers whenever possible, which takes out a lot of costs. So there are no middlemen involved. So they're not going through distributors,’ Kowitt said. ‘Also, because they’re buying in such large volume, they can secure large discounts from producers.’”

“In the end, the names, the types of products, the exotic decor -- it continued to have a particular consumer in mind,” Dwyer continues.

“‘All this stuff aimed at the subliminal,’ Coulombe said in 2005, ‘so that when the well-educated person walks down the aisle they know, without anything shouting at them, they know that they are in an outlet aimed at the well-educated person.’”

Indeed, retail consultant Giovanni Rodriguez believes that Traders Joe’s “most important innovation and contribution to food retail [is] if you happen to be one of its loyal customers, chances are you actually enjoy shopping there. 

“You like the general-store feel and vibe. You like the nautical themes (cf. Starbucks), which unconsciously stimulate your sense of adventure when sailing through the aisles. You like that the staff wears cheap Hawaiian shirts, so boldly defying corporatism and color palette. And, chances are, you also like that your fellow travelers are sometimes just as silly as the staff, like the creator of this 2009 unauthorized video. Who needs advertising? The customers are the agency, another innovation presaged by TJ’s,” Rodriquez writes for Forbes.