A few years ago, for Salesforce, I did a paper on "employee experience" - how employees rate their jobs and employers. To measure it, I scraped ratings from Glassdoor. Trader Joe's had the highest rating of any grocery retailer.
Then I contrasted the Glassdoor ratings with customer experience - how customers rate shopping there. Ended up with a 2x2 scatterplot where the upper right quadrant is companies loved by their customers and loved by their employees. You can see the scatterplot here:
One thing it shows is that there's a strong correlation between employee love and customer love. When employees are happy, customers are too.
The next step was seeing if customer and employee experience had any relationship to revenue growth. Surprise surprise. Companies that fell in the upper right quadrant were growing like crazy. Cue Trader Joe's. (As Mr Phan notes, it's a private company, so it's really hard to get revenue numbers, but I did the best I could.)
I love this article, which added context to everything I've learned about Trader Joe's, where the employees are insanely nice and the customers are practically dancing in the aisles. I love the place too, and I understand why you miss it.
Reminds me of Aldi actually. For a long time they provided only white labelled good quality products at a fair price. And they only have one kind of each product, you just take the waffles they have and you know they’ll be pretty good.
In recent years they added brands like Coca Cola. I guess it’s so people can have a one stop shop where before, they needed to go to another supermarket for their Coke addiction.
I moved to a city without a Trader Joe’s in 2017 so I feel your pain. I now live within 1.5. miles of two TJs so life is good again. I was just there this morning! Nice article.
Good stuff. I have the Trader Joe book but haven't read it yet. I so wish Canada had Aldis or Trader Joes to bring some much needed competition and innovation to the space.
I like TJ's but they certainly have escalated their prices in the past year or so. Yeah, I know, everyone else has also, but still...
Their 7oz bag of potato chips with olive oil used to be $1.79. Then it jumped to $1.99 (the max I will pay for 7 oz of chips). Then it took a 50 cent jump to $2.49. The other day, In noticed that they were now up to $2.99. For just 7 ounces of one of the cheapest and easiest vegetables to raise! Sheese.
I was also really disappointed with TJ's when they cancelled their quart size mango sorbet last year, priced at $4.49. I don't know why it is so difficult to find sorbet in CA supermarkets? Safeway has some but they charge up to $5.49/PINT!
Note also that you won't find a scale in TJ's. TJ's sells fresh fruit and veggies only on a per piece basis. On a per/lb basis, TJ's prices are usually quite high.
A few years ago, for Salesforce, I did a paper on "employee experience" - how employees rate their jobs and employers. To measure it, I scraped ratings from Glassdoor. Trader Joe's had the highest rating of any grocery retailer.
Then I contrasted the Glassdoor ratings with customer experience - how customers rate shopping there. Ended up with a 2x2 scatterplot where the upper right quadrant is companies loved by their customers and loved by their employees. You can see the scatterplot here:
https://ddarmstrong.github.io/DS1.html
One thing it shows is that there's a strong correlation between employee love and customer love. When employees are happy, customers are too.
The next step was seeing if customer and employee experience had any relationship to revenue growth. Surprise surprise. Companies that fell in the upper right quadrant were growing like crazy. Cue Trader Joe's. (As Mr Phan notes, it's a private company, so it's really hard to get revenue numbers, but I did the best I could.)
I love this article, which added context to everything I've learned about Trader Joe's, where the employees are insanely nice and the customers are practically dancing in the aisles. I love the place too, and I understand why you miss it.
Reminds me of Aldi actually. For a long time they provided only white labelled good quality products at a fair price. And they only have one kind of each product, you just take the waffles they have and you know they’ll be pretty good.
In recent years they added brands like Coca Cola. I guess it’s so people can have a one stop shop where before, they needed to go to another supermarket for their Coke addiction.
Great piece! Can confirm, Trader Joe's knocks Indian food out of the park.
I moved to a city without a Trader Joe’s in 2017 so I feel your pain. I now live within 1.5. miles of two TJs so life is good again. I was just there this morning! Nice article.
Good stuff. I have the Trader Joe book but haven't read it yet. I so wish Canada had Aldis or Trader Joes to bring some much needed competition and innovation to the space.
I like TJ's but they certainly have escalated their prices in the past year or so. Yeah, I know, everyone else has also, but still...
Their 7oz bag of potato chips with olive oil used to be $1.79. Then it jumped to $1.99 (the max I will pay for 7 oz of chips). Then it took a 50 cent jump to $2.49. The other day, In noticed that they were now up to $2.99. For just 7 ounces of one of the cheapest and easiest vegetables to raise! Sheese.
I was also really disappointed with TJ's when they cancelled their quart size mango sorbet last year, priced at $4.49. I don't know why it is so difficult to find sorbet in CA supermarkets? Safeway has some but they charge up to $5.49/PINT!
Note also that you won't find a scale in TJ's. TJ's sells fresh fruit and veggies only on a per piece basis. On a per/lb basis, TJ's prices are usually quite high.