Grocery Update #58: Fearless Flyers.

Adventure On The High Seas At Trader Joe's.

Fearless Flyers.

By Errol Schweizer, Grocery Nerd.

I walked in at 9 pm on a Thursday evening. The place was packed. Loud and bustling. Mostly younger folks, even out here in the upscale suburbs, with occasional slow moving boomers or soccer moms towing along their booger picking horde. Plenty of staff working too, signaled by the regular ringing of a bell to switch out between stocking groceries and staffing checkouts. The store was bright, well stocked with fresh and colorfully packaged merchandise, mostly own brands, i.e., private labels. It smelled fresh and clean, no funk or decay. This was well scrubbed commerce. The signage evoked the locality where I was shopping, like it always does to make sure you don’t feel like you are in some faceless, cookie-cutter, corporate megamart, with stylized pictures of familiar bridges, buildings and parks adorning the four walls.

Décor, signage, overall vibes were nautical, tourist-chic, palm trees, ocean worthy sailing ships, tossed waves, sunglasses, wide brimmed sun hats, sandals and cargo shorts, design elements lifted out of an old Rick Steves Mediterranean travel guide. Signs for their Fearless Flyer everywhere, in black and white Victorian fonts, like a steampunk Sears Roebuck catalog via Jules Verne, talking up this or that product or seasonal merchandising display in accessible, playful language and illustrations, inviting you along for the adventure.

We are all fearless flyers now.

Everybody loves Trader Joe’s these days. I get it, really I do. Despite the epic three part Fast Company expose written by a young and hungry journalist sharpening his University of Texas-honed investigative skills on this unique, bizarre, two faced, mixed up, private-label heavy, heavily centralized but playfully executed business model of the German heirs to Californian Trader Joe Coulombe, this first cousin to Aldi, the sexual harassment issues, the rampant union busting, as if it is so damn difficult to sit down with an ambitious group of self-organized employees and hammer out a decent contract, the frequent, startlingly awful pathogenic and contaminant-heavy food safety issues and supply chain snafus that should be top of mind for their tasteful, progressive, discerning customers that glom onto Fearless Flyers drops like blood-starved leeches, or maybe gnocchi-hungry locavores, and so the place was packed. At 9 PM on a school night, in the boring-ass ‘burbs.

People love Trader Joe’s. AKA TJ’s. They’re casual here.

Did you know? TJ's stocks produce. That should be obvious, with a substantial assortment as you walk in on the right. But it wasn't always this way. TJ's produce section was previously known for being a bit… underweight. Mostly ignored. They have since course corrected. It is now thorough, compelling and illustrative of their merchandising savvy. A long bin of apples, loose conventional for .69 a pound on top, two pound bags of organics below, in the $2.99-3.99 range. Nothing special in the assortment, and nothing rare or local or interesting. This ain't Central Market. Just the usual suspects. Grannies, galas, fujis, even opals now that those are popular, not my thing, though, too sweet. But priced to sell.

Adjacent are stacked boxes of more ambient, round fruits. Bagged organic fuyu persimmons, they taste like a low key mango won a plum tomato look alike pageant, $3.99 for a couple pounds. They are overripe but I think my son will like them, so I grab a bag, it is not a terrible splurge. Korean pears, aka Asian pears, probably the butterscotch variety, just one kind, unlike the rows upon rows of Asian pear options at Berkeley Bowl or 99 Ranch, plus bags of rainbow pears, loose Boscs and Bartletts, plus a healthy pile of softball sized bright reddish purple organic pomegranates.

The next table over is more tropical, with packages of medjool dates, big underripe Keitt mangos for $1.99 a pound, stacks of kiwis and pineapples, plus a whole section of lemons and limes, loose and bagged, conventional and organic, 4/$5 loosies, $1.99-$2.99 bagged. Decent prices for sure. Plus avocados, still green and three to four days away from guacamole, 2/$4 conventional and $2.49 organic, bags $4.49 and $5.49 respectively, market-setting prices that any store in the guac game must chase, even Fiesta. A big table of potatoes, winter squash, garlic, onions and other root vegetables, and you could be in any mid-sized grocery store. All branded with their ubiquitous, eponymous private label, in various styles, fonts, colors. Trader Joe’s.

The price signs all look handwritten in thick liquid chalk or rainbow sharpies. A similarly stylized sign clarifies that all produce bags are compostable, how responsible. Cardboard acorns strung along jute ropes, emphasizing the low key nautical vibes. The overall effect is chill, beachside, seaside, port town, Cape Joe, a little kitchy but not showy, belying the centrally planned nature of this vast operation. Combined with frequent signs advertising products offered in the Fearless Flyer, with those black and white gilded age fonts and Victorian steampunky graphics, you feel the weight of well thought out, intentional branding, its own little subcultural niche, bordering on cultish.

The upright produce cooler is filled with a complete bagged and bunched produce assortment, a full pantry mix, with options across almost all purchase occasions demanded by consumers, from the expected to the innovative, 50/50 assortment blend of organic to conventional, with 30-50% price gaps between attributes, pricing strategy 101 executed flawlessly. Perfectly rationalized and optimized, priced scientifically well below competitors who are also working to secure this educated, trend-forward demographic with less and less disposable income every day, all to lure them in and make sure they keep coming back for more, Fast Company fact finding fading fast into the rearview.

In typical grocery math, produce is a mid-priced, mid-margin play, not a volume driver like center store nor a basket builder like meat, but surely a need to have, especially when it comes to first impressions, acquisition and retention. Not sexy, but necessary. Tightly packed out green zucchini, green beans and haricot verts, Brussel sprouts, carrots, baby carrots, shredded carrots, fresh corn on the cob, celery, red peppers. Rainbow cauliflower florets, English peas, baby corn, button mushrooms and king oysters. Pico, salsa, and guac because we are in Texas and these are condiment, appetizer table stakes.

And "Asian" stir fry vegetables, because it would not be Trader Joe's without some awkward Orientalist descriptors of non-Anglo-American cuisines that would make Edward Said choke, not as if Asia doesn't stretch from Ankara to Colombo to Kamchatka, and inclusive of regions of China or Japan that may imply actual an "stir fry" on the menu, regardless of the dozens, probably hundreds of other non-“stir fry” Asiatic culinary traditions, let alone the dozens of regional cuisines just in China based more on dumplings, baos/buns, soups, hot pots, barbecue. But all seems forgiven because the prices are amazing, the products are freshly stocked and rotated, with busy crew members packing out bags of carrots and cauliflower even at 9:15pm on a Thursday evening and a big handwritten-ish sign across the top of the cooler clarifying that all produce is 100% Non-GMO. How thoughtful.

Kitty corner to all the highly nutrient dense, minimally processed freshness is the legendary Trader Joe’s bagged nut selection. Legendary among competitors, at least, who scramble, to source, price and merchandise up to the Trader’s market leadership. Almonds, cashews, walnuts, pistachios, sold ambient and shelf stable, not ideal for what are ostensibly fresh foods that should be refrigerated, but nonetheless turning inventory so fast at such competitive prices that no one is the wiser to the potential rancidity that lurks within. The price and quality matrix is important here, because Trader Joe’s has created an expectation that packaged nuts and seeds can be priced so reasonably and so unrealistically low while being of the freshest crop, high quality specifications and good visual appeal. Their competitors fret those nuts.

Whole Foods tacks its nut pricing to Trader Joe’s, but no longer maintains better quality and sourcing requirements, they just don’t get the credit from customers, no one cares they were pricing gorgeous non-pareil supreme almonds at the same price per ounce as Joe’s tiny but mighty carmels. Sprouts not so much, with competitive pricing, but the chips, nicks, breaks, and dents in many of their analogous items usually hinting at cut corners or lower spec sourcing standards that their customers don’t seem to mind considering their store growth. But still, not Trader Joe’s.

With the nuts comes the trail mix assortment. Another section of very reasonably priced snack mixes that so effectively thread the needle between nutrient dense health food and the junk food that your mom would never let you eat after school. The flavored and glazed almonds, the trek mixes, the omega trail mixes, the rainbow’s end, enough caloric density, sweet/savory balance, fat, sugar and salt to motivate you to hit that trail, the elliptical, maybe the Smith machine to burn off enough kilocalories to justify this next purchase that you will heartily consume in lieu on an actual well-balanced meal. Enrobed Valencia almonds, pretzel nuggets, sugar coated cranberries and mini chocolate peanut butter cups, the four food groups, maybe the four horseman of the trail mix apocalypse. Trail mix is also a category that has invited plenty of me too imitators in the industry, with similarly big, creatively branded, candy, peanut and pretzel heavy, colorful and wildly flavored trail mix sections blooming at Wegman’s, Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, Sprouts and Aldi/Lidl. No one but hippies and hikers cared about trail mix until Trader Joe’s made it required merchandising.

Nuts and trail mix also make a strategic transition section between the small but bounteous produce aisles and the rest of the Trader Joe’s assortment, dominated by snacks, frozen foods and a diverse/kitchy/tacky but highly rationalized and slimmed down assortment of extremely ultra processed and frozen shelf stable pantry staples, priced to undersell your local supermarket or actual health food store, always with organic and natural options in every sections but not always 100% Non GMO like their produce braggadacio. That health and specialty foods halo for Trader Joe’s is as much a false flag as their mass produced/handwritten signs, or the Fearless Flyer that looked like it was hand-cranked mimeographed in pre-digital era heat transfer triplicate, but was really just concocted on an Adobe platform by their corporate marketing wonks deep in the air-conditioned bowels of their sunny Southern California headquarters. Trader Joe’s is a craveable bait and switch operation fully immersed in large scale, centralized procurement, manufacturing and distribution of cleverly packaged analogues of all your Big Food favorites, branded to evoke the colors, fonts, stylistic elements and ethnic stereotypes to make sure everyone knows exactly what they are imitating.

Pasta and sauce evoking Tuscany and Liguria, olive oils at market share category killer prices, bottled to look like branded competitors that you could find at a specialty shop on Arthur Avenue, most of which they sell as first cold pressed, sometimes organic, from Italy, Sicily, California, Greece and the really affordable stuff from the “Mediterranean”, which usually means a blend from Tunisia on the African side of the sea. But calling olive oil “African” would take some explaining even to their highbrow lowbrow loyalists. That’s a step too far, even for the Orientalists.

East Asian sauces and condiments leaning a little too heavy into cultural stereotypes and tropes so even the most basic middle American has no confusion that this is “ethnic” food. And without the slightest sense of irony, some of their trendiest “ethnic” products have been documented in the food media as being literally pirated, just ripped off the ideas, branding, recipes and creativity of producers authentically recreating flavors of their diaspora.

But the place is packed, carts and baskets stocked full, prices cheap enough at good enough quality that customers can’t get enough, don’t seem to mind the nefarious business practices that Fast Company and Eater relentlessly uncovered, nervously chuckling at the uncomfortably colonial-chic nostalgia for a time when American may or not have been great and cutely un-woke branding evoking a Late 19th century Victorian era and its discontents. But they keep coming back for more.

The line for cash registers wraps its way around the perimeter of the store and I have to apologetically cut across to get between aisles. I even get spotted by a fellow customer as I am snapping photos on my iPhone, while narrating the shopping experience to my wife, a fellow grocery nerd, telling her all about my visit on my Apple earpieces. “You Grocery Nerd?”, my dude inquires. I brace myself. But he is a fan, a reader. We chat briefly. Good times.

TJ’s cereals, all private label, with similar designs, fonts, colors, ingredients, nutrient panels, packaging styles to all the usual national brand equivalents, so that you know exectly what you are in for, perfect approximations, category managed imitations, even including organic varieties, but with none of the visual clutter of also having those branded items each placed on shelf to the left of their private label equivalent like you see at all the bigger and more sku heavy competitors, Walmart, Randall’s, Sprouts, Amazon Fresh. O’s, corn flakes, raisin brand, frosted flakes, “fruity cuties”, and a couple token branded skus on the bottom shelf, Puffins and Envirokids, because why the hell not, everyone loves Puffins. On the top shelf, Trader’s organic toaster pastries, irresistable.

Trader Joe’s also sells meat. Pretty standard assortment comparable to Sprouts or Whole Foods in attributes and quality, not up to Natural Grocers standards but likewise lacking the worst examples of large scale concentrated animal feedlot production. Meat is sold as a self-service case with no in-store butchers to pay or butcher case shrink to manage and budget for, and hence, typically quite a bit cheaper than elsewhere. All natural, organic and grassfed options for beef, 80-20 grounds just $4.99/lb, while some filet mignon at $29.99/lb, possibly the priciest thing in the stores besides wine. Chicken is even more compelling, with pricing, packaging and merchandising clearly segregated between natural and organic options, all natural thighs at $4.99/lb, organic at $5.99, all natural breast $4.99, organic $6.99, and some pre-marinated options filling the bottom bunker at $6.99 or so. Their corporate HQ category managers execute this pricing strategy like pros, perfectly segmented and communicated by cut and attribute.

Kitty corner is the deli case, with organic packaged sandwich meats at $5.99, easily two to three bucks cheaper than branded versions elsewhere, while conventional, “all natural” versions hover at $3.69, 1995 prices. The specialty cheese case is a European farmer’s market in miniature, with prices more reflective of continental European Euro price thresholds than normal U.S. grocery stores, chevre logs at $2.99, chevre wheels at $3.39, gouda at $11.99, Jarlsberg at $8.99, grated Parm for $5.99, shaved Parm for $5.99, Parm wedges for $8.99 that you can take home and shave or grate yourself, Gruyere at $16.99 and baby Swiss for $4.99, alongside domestic options from U.S. cheese capitals Wisconsin, Vermont and California, with the bottom well stacked with small tubs of cheese spreads, because bread and crackers, including gluten free, are right across the aisle from you.

The display is laid out perfectly, nothing out of place, the store’s grocery clerks’ highly skilled sense of colors, space, contrasting shapes completely undervalued in their role of convincing you that this is all so special and precious, you are special and precious and this is all a great deal and you must absolutely impulse purchase that log of seasonal cranberry goat chevre for $4.99, even though you can’t stand cranberries and hate the funk of goat cheese.

The dairy case is a wall of Greek yogurt, with a vast array of tubs and cups at .99 or $2.99 or $5.49 each depending on size, alongside quarts of organic non-greek, norm-core yogurts at $3.99, always with the usual whole milk, non-fat and French vanilla options, just like the best-selling national brands, as well as a handful of plant-based cashew and almond options lining the top shelf. Gallons of organic milk for $6.29, blocks of organic butter at $6.29, to the right of half-gallon plant-based, trend-forward options such as oat milk for $3.99 and almond for $2.99, crowned by a shelf of lactose free and goat milk options. Overnight oats, $1.99 a cup, cheap, tasty gruel for us, a fastidious and discriminating peasantry.

From the dairy case, it is but a few brief steps to the middle aisle of Trader Joe’s, the real reason for the season, the main course, the spine of the store, the main event, the two sided run of bunkers and racks with all manner of frozen foods, cookies, confections that really have no peer on this side of the Atlantic.

Ultra processed nirvana, an expertly curated culinary garage sale on a budget, playing by the same rulebook as first cousins Aldi, the four pronged discounter strategy for global dominance.

First, limited assortment. By keeping the number of skus down, Trader Joe’s ramps up their production and order volumes of each item per category, shaving quite a few points off their costs of manufacturing, logistics, distribution. Next is their everyday low price strategy. No markdowns, no sales, no “rollbacks”, no promotional pricing, just best prices every day, negotiated at large volumes with suppliers who pull all trade spend, couponing, advertising, digital marketing, into that lowest possible cost of goods without the suppliers losing their shirts. Third is store labor, one half to a third lower than their competitors, even without self-checkouts, even with a fully staffed store with dozens of clerks on shift, all hands on deck, no full service cases, no butcher case, no deli clerks, no fresh sandwich makers, staff switching out between stocking the dairy case, slinging produce, ringing up shoppers, packing out bags of nuts, shift changed by the ringing of the bell while paying industry competitive, but not necessarily living wages. And fourth is the central planning involved in making it all appear so easy. Centralized in the brutalist, modernist, Peter Drucker corporatist sensibility, with financial planning, analytics, inventory management, human resources, purchasing, logistics, warehousing, category management, product development and innovation, supplier managment, private label branding, store signage and Fearless Flyer development all handled through one humble yet productive corporate headquarters organizational chart and an archipelago of co-manufacturers and co-packers along with consolidation and distribution centers located geographically close to their store density, each of these steps incrementally bringing down costs and increasing control over the brand, the vision and the execution, even with all their distasteful little product quality, sexual harassment and employee organizing issues gumming up the works, Trader Joe’s is as centrally planned economy as has existed in history.

This is no cuddly local food hub or regional mom and pop feel good operation. This is corporatism, just with cuter branding. Like Aldi, you can’t Aldi-Aldi. Trader Joe’s takes some liberties applying the same logics and disciplines to bring down costs and increase consistency of execution. Trader Joe’s too is a fixed point, a basis of comparison, a finely honed, yet firmly flawed business model that packs out this anchor tenant in a quiet suburban strip mall on a Thursday evening. Packed.

All of these pieces add up to some of the steepest cost savings in grocery retail.

Prices that beat Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, on par with cousin Aldi. A product assortment that is tasteful, discerning, adventurous, adequate, basic, just enough to do a complete shop on a budget. Quality that you won’t write home about, but not bad enough to really complain much, given the prices. Small stores, in and out in a few minutes. Well-lit, clean, safe, well-stocked and mostly friendly, the staff all wearing bright flowered shirts and diverse in race, gender, tattoo designs. The stores are efficient, austere, frugal. The business ambitious, expansionist, future-proof.

Whole Foods spent twenty years chasing Trader Joe’s on price and assortment, seeing that their discerning customer was easily lured away by treats and snacks at 30% cheaper for analogous items. Even when their comparative sales growth flatlined and EBIDTA tanked and they cut labor from 80/20 FT/PT to a brutal 40/60 ratio, even when Kroger’s Simple Truth and Costco’s Kirkland and Albertsons’ Safeway O lapped Whole Food’s 365 in private label sales volumes, household penetration and annual growth, Mackey and Co. couldn’t help but chase the rainbow at TJ’s, even after Amazon bought the Austin cosmic cowboys for pennies on the dollar, Whole Foods still couldn’t resist the magnetic pull, tacking price and assortment, even sourcing spec to the sundry sweet and savory eponymous bagged and boxed galleria at Trader Joe’s. And still do. Like the customers waiting on line fifty deep at nearly 10 PM on a Thursday. In the ‘burbs.

Rows of ice cream tubs, the logos a mix of supermarket-standard generic font and color and old-timey nostalgia design elements, curly cue-letters, bold frames, delectable product shots of melted ice cream, upside down cones on counter tops as if to evoke a trauma response of that time when you were three that you dropped your Baskin-Robbins triple scoop pistachio vanilla chocolate-cone on the hot pavement on Central Park Avenue in Yonkers.

Non-dairy options from coconut milk, with too-obvious tropical visual designs. The flavors are ice cream standard, after all this is the highly thought through, slimmed down assortment, chocolate, chocolate mint, English toffee, vanilla, French vanilla, vanilla flecked. Boxes of frozen ice cream cones, with congealed one-piece ice cream and cone just like you got from that sketchy Good Humor truck at the Waring Avenue playground, with dairy and non-dairy options, alongside other boxed, frozen, handheld confections, bon-bons, ice cream sandwiches, chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwiches, all private label, all branded as Trader Joe’s, but each item or product segment designed differently, to break up the underlying monotony and fool the eye into thinking this is a diverse, playful garage sale of ice cream confections.

Nearly everything is under five dollar price thresholds, many of them under four dollars, an astounding feat in the inflationary era, surely noted by the droves of doting customers picking and choosing treats from the bunkers and their accompanying shelf displays, which include squeezy bottles of chocolate syrup and glass jarred caramel sauce (and why is one a sauce and one a syrup, what is the food marketing rationale?). The ambient shelves above the bunkers are arranged in receding bleacher fashion, with chocolate bark, chocolate covered raisins, almonds, almond cups, sunflower butter seed cups, sea salt butterscotch caramels, espresso beans, cherries, whatever “powerberries” are, even real honeycomb from bee hives, in plastic bags and plastic tubs and the occasional glass jars.

Trader Joe’s is all in on frozen mochi, with half a dozen options in identical boxes, color coded by flavor in vaguely pastel colors, before the section segues into frozen macarons, cheesecakes, lava cakes, pie crusts, pies and pastries, pancakes and waffles, the shelves likewise transitioning into starchier chocolate covered pretzels, almond butter pretzel nuggets, and other carb-heavier snack mixes, mostly sweet but some savory too. Beyond pastries, the theme becomes breakfast, with hashbrowns, both the ones you stir fry on a flat top, and the oblong ones you get at McDonald’s, plus potato pancakes and various meat and carb breakfast bowls, the shelves above presenting more toaster pastries but then oddly jumping right into candies like gummies and jellies, suggesting that there is little culinary daylight between toaster pastries and candy.

Across the frozen bunker aisle, the ambient shelf stacks are relentless snack havens, with biscotti, waffle thins and almond thins, all in diverse Trader Joe’s branding exercises, while the bunker is all about frozen meat and seafood, particularly imported shrimp in various size counts, frozen chicken thighs for $8.99, pricier than fresh, and grilled and breaded chicken, with bottles of spicy honey sauce coyly merchandised right above. Frozen salmon, wild and farmed, along with branzino, sword fish, scallops and a paella blend, no messaging about seafood sustainability or method of capture or what the fisherfolk were paid for their efforts, but the words “paradise” signed in big cursive fonts on the glass bunker, almost subliminally placed diagonal to your line of sight, in front of processed fish sticks, tempura shrimp, salmon burgers and various breaded filets because processed fish is what you eat in paradise, just don’t tell Jimmy Buffet.

The frozen fish are placed beneath a long run of orzo, which undergirds a run of cookies, including fig, butter shortbread, stroopwafels, ginger snaps, windmills, grahams, and wafers and the ubiquitous, eponymous chocolate sandwich crème-filled Joe-Joe’s in all their glory, ably knocking off Oreos by utilizing the same commercial co-manufacturers that everyone else uses for their silly Oreo knockoffs, like Kroger’s Kaleidos or Simple Truth sandwich crème cookies, or Great Value or 365 or Open Nature or Lucerne or Safeway O or Good and Gather or Aldi, the imitation game of private label merchandising alive and well.

Everyone sells sandwich crème cookies, in their own little packaging designs, usually with the usual varieties of vanilla crème, gluten free, double stuffed or chocolate mint crème. Trader Joe’s has hitched their sails big time to the imitation game, the $230+ billion private label, store brands industry.

From this little stack of cookies atop the frozen bunker, the frozen fish leads into the main courses of the main event, some of Joe’s best sellers and most obsessed over products, the bagged and boxed selection of colorfully designed salt, fat, carbs and protein, their industry leading frozen entrees. Trend forward, savory, satiating, fried rice, more Asiatic stir fries, noodles, each of the package designs unique and eye catching with expertly prepared product shots, ensuring when you cook them up that nothing will resemble what’s in the package, but all priced far below comparable branded items at the supermarkets, as fun as anything you can get at H Mart or some cheap takeout joint, with jars of hoisin sauce placed within reach, because of course. Sriracha is so 2010, save it for Walmart. Bulgogi is the new black. Bulgogi is the new teriyaki. K-Pop and your new favorite marinated meat, Orientalism to go.

The horizontal runs of bunkers are broken up by vertically merchandised upright freezers, one full of frozen snacks and sides, while past the upright freezers, the East Asian category management fetish continues, including wontons, potstickers and more noodle entrees. Dinner packaged as exploration, brave traders sailing the seven seas in search of new sources of wealth, looking for the spice islands and the Silk Road, the Passage to Bangkok, mistaking the West Indies for the East Indies. This postmodern expropriation, private labeling, privateering is after all piracy, just blessed from above, the Queen of England granting rights and privileges of her Royal Subjects to raid, pillage, acquire and accumulate on behalf of the crown.

The real history of exploration and discovery unimaginably violent, brutal and expropriative, drowning at sea, deck pizza, peglegs climbing the topsails, shark bait, smallpox blankets, sunstroke, slave quarters, prison camps, rickets, scurvy, maggot infested hardtack, rum, sodomy and the lash, forced recruits enclosed and evicted from the fenced-off soils of Sussex and Dorset and Cornwall, just expendable conscripts, ripe cannonball fodder for Her Royal Majesty, the Middle Passage gorging on the human capital of Senegal, Benin, the Niger delta, the Gambia, slave revolts birthing Maroons and Palmares, Captain Cook’s lifeless corpse on a tropical beach, the Opium Wars, the Golden Triangle and the Boxer Rebellion, all wound through the British East India Corporation, a joint stock enterprise cosplaying as a nation state, foreshadowing the 21^st century globalized economy run by and for the largest Anglo-American corporations, all here in the grocery aisles reduced to bright, flowered shirts, nautical décor, wink and nod Orientalist branding stereotypes, and the innovation concepts, recipes, style highlights ripped off creators in the most obvious cultural appropriation that fits such a legacy of corporate privateering, pirating ideas and wealth for private gain, an all-natural, stevia sweetened nostalgia for adventure, a mythical freedom on the high seas.

But that selection of frozen blueberries! Easily best in class for variety and price, making the market chase the Trader for organic for $2.99, regular for $2.49, Organic and wild for $2.99, wild Boreal from the deep north for $3.49, alongside the usual strawberries, raspberries, mangos, berry blends, acai purees from the rainforest and various smoothie friendly mixes, all well under five dollars a bag, a miracle of modern frozen storage and logistics, pricing strategy plus low labor costs especially cheap, cheap farm and processing labor, a centrally planned margin mix, industry leading store productivity and a functioning electrical grid, which in Texas, can be a lot to ask for, thank you crypto currency A.I. data center energy vampires.

The fruits transition guilelessly into frozen vegetables, even more fantastically cheap, with perennial fan fave broccoli for $1.99, organic for $2.49, Belgian-specific brussel sprouts, because obviously, $1.49 a bag, green beans, peas, spinach, all well under three dollars a bag, a testament to the skills of those frozen food processing workers toiling in subzero temperatures around the clock with hair nets, face masks, safety shoes, multiple layers of sweatshirts underneath their white lab coats, dazzling with the knife skills and physical dexterity to pack thousands of bags an hour of perfectly sterile, individually quick frozen (IQF), neatly bagged green vegetables harvested, processed and packed at the peak of ripeness, BRIX content and nutrient density.

Modern miracles, that despite Trump Treasury Secretary and former George Soros apparatchik Scott Bessent insisting in the most tone deaf “let them eat cake”-ism since Marie Antoinette lost her noggin, that capitalism will no longer guarantee cheap consumer goods. But you don’t need to eat Bessent’s cake, you can still eat plenty healthy with your Trader Joe’s frozen vegetables selection, cheap as hell, at least for now.

The bump out freezer in the middle of the line of bunkers announces in hot pink liquid chalk, all caps, “AIN’T NOTHIN’ *BUT* A PIZZA PARTY”, complete with a yellow, triangular slice of pizza that absolutely resembles nothing in said freezer. But this side of cousin Aldi, the most reasonable caloric density in the pizza category, with full organic frozen pies, for $4.99, meat heavy options for $5.99, nothing over six dollars, just in case you were in the frozen pizza business with your Totino’s and Amy’s, Trader Joe’s is your Tombstone. Get it? Tombstone… is frozen pizza. Relax, my first and only frozen pizza pun.

Gnocchi is also the new black, with sweet potato, butter and sage, Cacio E Pepe, cauliflower or stuffed versions for those little pockets of carbo-happiness. Or maybe frozen mac and cheese is your happy place, with an “ooey gooey” Joe’s Diner sku for $2.99, plus gluten free, Hatch Chile, pepperoni, “reduced-guilt” options, catering to every assumed mac and cheese micro-demographic that Kraft, Annie’s and Lean Cuisine have not fully captured. And “reduced-guilt” will only get you so far up this aisle, with cheese bread sticks and nautically themed gift boxes of sea salt caramels, chocolate passports, and an actual English Fudge collection, the British East India reference no longer feeling so clever or insightful. And Jingle Jangle for $9.99, dark chocolate enrobed, salty crunchy everythings with an ingredient list as long as an Encyclopedia Britannica entry, ultra processed AF. Beneath, the Italian themes continue, with meatballs, lasagna and various pasta iterations, followed by shepherd’s pie and steak and stout pies for the Anglophiles and then a row of the best of the most basic Tex-Mex assortment this side of Chuy’s, with Chile rellenos, tostitos, tamales, burritos, taquitos, even some birria, because the kids these days love their birria, this one made with beef, because legit goat birria may be polarizing even for the most seasoned Fearless Flyers.

And it wouldn’t be a frozen bunker without processed potatoes, mashed, sweet fries, handsome cut fries, waffle fries, wedges, roasted and Trader’s Potato Tots, as good as anything from Lamb Weston, Conagra, Simplot or any of the other allegedly price fixing frozen potato mafia that make 90+% of all frozen processed potatoes, and probably most of these here, but at least nothing is over four dollars, with a row of organic ketchup, $2.29 for 24 oz of nature’s optimal gifts of tomatoes, salt, sugar and vinegar, monoculturally grown and produced at obscene scale. Because no one really likes artisanal ketchup.

Ketchup, the ideal industrial, mass market food, perfect for processed potatoes, the bizarre transmogrification of a southeast Asian savory sauce originally made from rotting fish heads into a Love Apple-based condiment the eternal favorite of the young at heart, dousing the steaming delightful starchiness of indigenous Andean nightshade root vegetables grown in Idaho monocultures, the UPF marriage of the century ordained by five hundred years of conquest and exchange, international trade, high speed manufacturing and world-shrinking, time-freezing, frozen and ambient logistics. Ketchup and taters. Yum.

Plant-based for the win, segues into the actual plant-based meats, with quinoa veggie burgers, the ubiquitous South Asian-themed veggie burgers, meatless nuggets, meatless meatballs, chickenless mandarian orange nuggets and actual, IRL Impossible Burgers, the savoriest meatless burgers thanks to their creative repurposing of industrial cattle feed, just simple soy and wheat byproducts laced with glyphosate, definitely not 100% Non GMO, cleverly juiced with an umami-heavy blood analogue carefully extracted from genetically modified microorganisms, the real billion dollar IP play here, dozens of lawsuits to prove that molecularly programmed microorganisms can shit fake blood to make your veggie burgers taste like the real thing, or even better, just don’t ask for those investor-grade risk assessments to peel back the layers on the science and who cleans up the byproducts. I fucking love science. Crowned with a row of TJ’s organic Kansas City Style BBQ Sauce, the T and the J shaped like longhorns to evoke the cattle runs of barbecue lore, with a stack of several varieties of chocolate truffles further vertically up the line of sight, a blue sno-globe, non-sequitor sign extoling you to “DECORATE YOUR CHEESE BOARD with treats”, ok Joe, will do.

And the intersection of cultural appropriating interest groups, both natural foods spiritual guru hippy-dippy South Asian fetishization meets the primitive accumulation of the British East India Corporation and the cheeky British branding of South Asian cuisine as “curry”, a concept that had not heretofore existed in the vast Indian subcontinent with its thousands of complex and delicately spiced sauces and stews, a boxed assortment of frozen vindaloo, chana masala, baingan barta, vegan tikka masala, chicken curry, palak paneer and the required chicken tikka masala, all between just three and six dollars, half of what most branded options are selling for at comparable level of microwaveable quality, framed with a stack of jarred eggplant, garlic, sweet pepper spread, more of a Ottoman, Mediterranean vibe but I mean it’s still on the Silk Road, right?

The exoticization can occasionally get tiresome, it is relentless. Edward Said, actual author of “Orientalism” and distinguished Palestinian scholar, who documented how this construction of “the Orient”, the exotic yet inferior East, serves to legitimize the status quo of Anglo-American cultural and economic dominance, an essentializing force that rips off, steals, strip mines the Orient and appropriates it for profit. The old Columbia professor would have had a field day here. Larry McMurtry, Texas Pulitzer prize winner and bibliophile, wrote “Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen”, thinking about what the exiled German Jewish philosopher would have thought of space, community and commerce in quiet, rural Texas. But “Edward Said At The Trader Joe’s”, amidst the tasteful, youthful hustle and bustle. That would have been fun.

Said’s Orientalism isn’t just a quaint theory, dreamt up by this brilliant, dissident Ivy League scholar trying to understand the experience of alienation and diaspora.

Orientalism is also a living political economy, these quirky, chic cultural stereotypes on food packages that provide thousands of jobs to category merchants, logistics and retail clerks and sundry packaged food suppliers, this vehicle for power and wealth accumulation, this colorful product assortment that is also big, big business, privatizing profits to some far-off family owners in Germany whose retail math means they must keep labor costs down and stores union-free, that managing low prices amidst higher costs of production sometimes means cutting corners on basic food safety, supply chain diligence or cold chain integrity, and always taking advantage of a woefully underpaid farm labor economy afraid of deportation at any time, that the curly-cue liquid chalk signage and Victorian-steampunk fonts of the ubiquitous Fearless Flyer, a cheeky nostalgia for this peak period of blood soaked, naval-powered colonialism, the wars and late Victorian holocausts, the famine in Bengal, the Great European powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884 building on the Treaty of Tordesillas to divide up their global spheres of influence like massive geographical slices of blood pudding, this stylized retail fetishization of overseas empire building and resource extraction, especially of food and agriculture labor, from the fertile flood plains of West Africa to the spice plantations of India, to the co-packers of the Rust Belt Midwest, Eastern Europe or special economic zones in China, this hip kitchiness still requires a heavily centralized authority, fiscally accountable and highly pressured category managers, corporate organizational structure and intensive financial planning to implement and manage effectively on a day to day basis and guarantee that it is all somehow a fun, inviting and cost effective place for millions of people to shop daily, ensuring the relentless cycle of production churns on and on and on.

Our frozen food sojourn at an end, we round the corner to the bagged snack aisle, where instead of the standard 40 or 50 linear feet of Frito Lay, Snyder’s and assorted UNFI/Kehe chip assortments, we get a pretty modest run of the Trader’s best tortilla chips, potato chips, popcorn, pretzels, various salty, cheesy, poofy things and whatever else the corporate buyers have decided meets their fearless demographic, perfectly sku rationalized down to the most common, high volume denominators and industry leading sales per square feet metric. Snacks lead into an excessive assortment of booze, with hundreds of varieties of wine and beer mimicking every popular varietal, denomination, appellation, taste profile, packaging style and yeast spore subspecies, all with price points 40-50% below comparable branded products, led off by the ever present reddish purple swill of Charles Shaw, formerly known as Two Buck Chuck, inferior even to Manischewitz Passover grape juice in taste profile, and hardly deserving of the glass it is bottled in, but damn do they sell a shit ton of it.

If you can resist the alcohol urge, the checkout line is ready for you. A windy loop of customers loosely herded together by low rise shelving packed with two and three dollar bars of organic, fair trade chocolates, a refreshing absence of Orientalist branding styles, bags of sour gummy jelly thingies, malted milk candies and more chocolate drizzled nuts and espresso beans, more stacks of the vino formerly known as Two Buck Chuck, cans of vegetarian and/or Turkey Chili, one of which I buy, strange are my temptations, a small section of health and beauty aids, balms, soaps, creams, sprays, powders, serums, tonics, face washes, various Victorian-era style snake oils, shampoos and conditioners, a few rows of pills and gelcaps and herb bottles, the world’s smallest and silliest pet food section, I mean, why even bother, a few shelves of paper goods and cleaning products, as if laundry and the dishes should be an afterthought or maybe they know you will most likely just get your Charmin, Dawn and Tide Pods at Walmart so this really a just-in-case assortment scenario, then yet more candies and treats and heavily ultra processed, calorie dense, yet somehow labeled as “all natural” snacks, more stacks of Jingle Jangles, various seasonal necessities that change out on a Fearles Flyer-ly basis, a sad yet very competitively priced micro-assortment of protein bars, mostly mass brand favorites like Clif and Kind and GoMacro, and then row after row of reusable shopping bags with all kinds of art deco, hippy chic, modern, postmodern, canvas, burlap, plastic, recycled, locally branded, really the only local anything in the whole store, both urban and pastoral design elements, each for .99 or $3.99 or $5.99 if you are feeling adventurous, something for everyone else who surely must be ready to check out and get the fuck out of Joe’s already, my exhaustion of shopping at almost 10 PM tempered by a young, friendly, talkative and genuinely engaging cashier with facial piercings, full sleeve tattoos and energized like they just got out of pilates, asking how my shopping experience was, and I can’t help but smile and chill out, momentarily surrendering to the stylized palm trees, topsails and tossed waves lightly decorating the walls around me as I fork over a few bucks for a bottle of seltzer, some canned chili and Non GMO corn chips for a “frito” pie, and some cheap Fuyus for my kid.

Enough faux overseas adventure for one shopping trip. Until next time, Joe.

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