Trader Joes

What Makes trader Joes so successful and different from any other grocery store? Trader Joes is a unique grocery store that provides a collection of healthy and organic foods for low prices.  Trader Joes has slowly grown into a 8 billion  dollar retail company! By limiting its stocks to specilaity products at low prices  trader Joes sells twice as much per quare foot than a regular supermarket. Trader Joes  has many secrets to its success., basically trader joes has a taken a regular old boring gorcery store and redesighned the industry to a mulitcolored creative unique shopping enviormet.

        There are many other reason that make TJ's a success. TJ's has realized that customers want fewer choices. At TJ's the store is smaller and the choices are much fewer but that happens to be what customers like!  Since the store is smaller TJ's are able to have low prices for high quality products. There is also no bargaing at TJ's; 80 percent  of of the store stock bears the comapny brand.Customers trust the brands and do not second guess what they are purchasing.
What I think makes's the store so successful is they are not follower, they think out of the box and are unique in there own way. Customers want something different not the same old trends. What TJ's does it makes there products different from others and gives the world a taste of what organic actually is.The store is also a friendy enviorment and emplyes has there own ways of doing things. My experience at traders Joes has always been very good.. When I need to know where something is in the store insetad of the employee just telling me they actually direct me to where the product is. You can also bring you own trade Joes Grocery bag in so when you check out you are able to put your name in for a raffle. The idea is having your own bag is helping saving paper and attracting more customers.  The follwing is an article that explains more about the employees and envioment of Traders Joes if you have never been.

By Beth Kowitt, reporterAugust 23, 2010: 1:16 PM ET

FORTUNE -- Apple's retail stores aren't the only place where lines form these days. It's 7:30 on a July morning, and already a crowd has gathered for the opening of Trader Joe's newest outpost, in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. The waiting shoppers chat about their favorite Trader Joe's foods, and a woman in line launches into a monologue comparing the retailer's West Coast and East Coast locations. Another customer suggests that the chain will be good for Chelsea, even though the area is already brimming with places to buy groceries, including Whole Foods and several upscale food boutiques.
But Trader Joe's is no ordinary grocery chain. It's an offbeat, fun discovery zone that elevates food shopping from a chore to a cultural experience. It stocks its shelves with a winning combination of low-cost, yuppie-friendly staples (cage-free eggs and organic blue agave sweetener) and exotic, affordable luxuries -- Belgian butter waffle cookies or Thai lime-and-chili cashews -- that you simply can't find anyplace else.
Employees dress in goofy trademark Hawaiian shirts, hand stickers out to your squirming kids, and cheerfully refund your money if you're unhappy with a purchase -- no questions asked. At the Chelsea store opening, workers greeted customers with high-fives and free cookies. Try getting that kind of love at the Piggly Wiggly.
It's little wonder that Trader Joe's is one of the hottest retailers in the U.S. It now boasts 344 stores in 25 states and Washington, D.C., and strip-mall operators and consumers alike aggressively lobby the chain, based in Monrovia, Calif., to come to their towns. A Trader Joe's brings with it good jobs, and its presence in your community is like an affirmation that you and your neighbors are worldly and smart.

    The privately held company's sales last year were roughly $8 billion, the same size as Whole Foods' (WFMI, Fortune 500) and bigger than those of Bed Bath & Beyond, No. 314 on the Fortune 500 list. Unlike those massive shopping emporiums, Trader Joe's has a deliberately scaled-down strategy: It is opening just five more locations this year. The company selects relatively small stores with a carefully curated selection of items. (Typical grocery stores can carry 50,000 stock-keeping units, or SKUs; Trader Joe's sells about 4,000 SKUs, and about 80% of the stock bears the Trader Joe's brand.) The result: Its stores sell an estimated $1,750 in merchandise per square foot, more than double Whole Foods'. The company has no debt and funds all growth from its own coffers.

You'd think Trader Joe's would be eager to trumpet its success, but management is obsessively secretive. There are no signs with the company's name or logo at headquarters in Monrovia, about 25 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Few customers realize the chain is owned by Germany's ultra-private Albrecht family, the people behind the Aldi Nord supermarket empire. (A different branch of the family controls Aldi Süd, parent of the U.S. Aldi grocery chain.) Famous in Germany for not talking to the press, the Albrechts have passed their tightlipped ways on to their U.S. business: Trader Joe's and its CEO, Dan Bane, declined repeated requests to speak to Fortune, and the company has never participated in a major story about its business operations.

Some of that may be because Trader Joe's business tactics are often very much at odds with its image as the funky shop around the corner that sources its wares from local farms and food artisans. Sometimes it does, but big, well-known companies also make many of Trader Joe's products. Those Trader Joe's pita chips? Made by Stacy's, a division of PepsiCo's (PEP, Fortune 500) Frito-Lay. On the East Coast much of its yogurt is supplied by Danone's Stonyfield Farm. And finicky foodies probably don't like to think about how Trader Joe's scale enables the chain to sell a pound of organic lemons for $2.

Do you think the uniqueness of a store will attract more customers?

In Response to Kristen Begin

JCPenny

Until I read this blog I wasent aware that JCPenhny had an online catalog or took the time to look at it. I would sometimes fliiped through the pages quickly if I got a catalog in the mail. Since I saw this blog I read up on how syccessful this online catalog as been. It has gotten great reviews and customers find the online catalog to be a lot easier. For many reason this online catalog  will help JCPenny become more successful and profitable than they already are., however cancelling theire regular catalog was a risk.Many cutomers may relyedon the regular catalog and may not want to go on a computer or for that matter may not own a computer to do there shopping. Although most people today rely on computers and many can go on through there phone. I think there are much more benfits to an online catalog than a regular one. People that havent experienced the online catalog will be guranteed to like it better than a non online catalog. The online catalog provodes a lot more. JCPenny can provide a lot more clothing pictures and information with having there catalog online. They also have way more catagories for cutsomers to do their shopping. I do think that customers wil spend more time searching for products online than looking through a regular catalog. Customers can easily always go online and wont have to worry about misplacing there catalog or taking it with them. Now cutomers can simply just search through the catalog from there phone.The Following are some reviews of the online catalog: :

Why I Like JCPenney.com

I like JCPenney.com because of their wide variety of products, the flexibility of choosing products by offline catalog numbers or through their online site, their frequent sales and promotions, the high quality of their merchandise, and their prompt delivery.

In the department store category, I’ve also used walmart.com, and have found that JCPenney offers a much wider variety of items and many more coupon specials (although, overall, Wal-Mart’s prices are lower.)

Checking Out

When buyers go to the checkout page, they see a list of items ordered. A box for promotional coupons or codes is listed, and savings are deducted on the following page.

Payment can be made by JC Penney credit card, MasterCard, Visa, American Express, or Discover.

Two types of checkout are available--standard or express. Standard checkout offers the options of gift-wrap or payment by gift certificate. I have tried to use the express checkout and run into snags, so I generally stick with standard checkout.

Items can be delivered to home addresses or to the nearest store (a store locator is listed on the website.) Shipping costs accrue in either case, but they are about 25% less when items are delivered to the nearest store.

Unlike so many online stores, which charge for shipping per item or by purchase price, JCPenney.com charges shipping costs based on total weight of items. Item weight appears in the online and offline catalogs.

JCPenney is a secure site, using industry standard encryption procedures.

What’s Healthy and What’s not

We all know that fried food, candy, processed food or anything that is filled with saturated fat is bad for you and can lead to bad health. However as we all know many Americans cannot stop eating these foods and continue these bad habits because the foods are all around us. Most of us know the obvious but what can be difficult is what is really true and what is not, what’s the healthiest for you? Today is it very hard to believe what you read because everything is just about money, for instance if you are researching what to eat and when to eat the right foods it can become difficult. You may read one article and think okay steak is great for you it has plenty of protein but then you read something else it explains how steak can be fatty and only certain steaks are good for you but it can also be filled with bacteria.  Everyone thinks fruit is good for you and great to eat but eating it at certain times can be bad for you because the amount of sugar fruit contains. The same thing with carbohydrates, a lot of people think eating a bowl of past or a piece of toast is great to have before the gym or after but it can’t always be. I’m always trying new things to see what works the best for my body. Something I recently have been trying and researching on is something called the Paleo Diet. When I first heard about this I thought to myself is this is just something else that somebody said to make money are the facts really true?  Once I actually tried Paleo my body felt healthier than ever before and I realized I had become more energetic. The Paleo diet is also known as the Paleolithic diet or caveman diet. The diet is all about natural foods such as fruits, eggs vegetables, nuts. The human race had always been on this diet of low carbs, protein, natural fats, vegetables  until unsaturated foods were introduced to our bodies. This article below explains more about the diet 

You’ve come to the right place to learn all about the Paleo diet and lifestyle. Put simply, the Paleo diet is not just a diet that you follow to achieve a specific goal, but more a way of living in harmony with nature and our food to achieve great health in every aspects.

Our society has become detached to the food we’ve been eating in nature for millions of years that has allowed us to become a highly evolved species.

We call this diet the paleo diet because it includes the food that was available to us for most of our evolution during the paleolithic era, starting about 2.5 millions of years ago. The idea is that our genes and physiology evolved through the process of natural selection and are most adapted to be nourished with the food that we evolved around. That includes the whole spectrum of animal food (beef, fish, shellfish, poultry, pork, lamb, bison, …) including their fat and organs as well as eggs, vegetables and limited amounts of fruits and nuts.

On the opposite side, some of the foods that we started eating in large quantity since the beginning of the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago are completely alien to our genes and metabolism and wreak havoc in our body, often causing what we call the metabolic syndrome or diseases of civilization. That includes obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, auto-immune diseases, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s and a host of other conditions that were unknown to our ancestors while plaguing us today.

Some of the worst offenders in today’s diet are what’s actually recommended by governments and nutritionists because bad science and economic agendas have demonized things like saturated fat, cholesterol and red meat over the last decades. What we should really be eliminating in our diet aregrain products, excess sugar, vegetable oils, legumes and dairy, some which are at the very basis of the US food pyramid.

The Paleo diet and lifestyle is not just based on imitating what our ancestors did, but also on real non-biased science and evidence. The habits of our healthy ancestors give us a good framework to study deeper and to try and find what our food really does to our bodies and how to live the longest and most vibrant lives.

Now this could just be another article to you ,but you never know until you try things for yourself. Everyone is different though and has different goals to reach so this healthy life style may not be for everyone.  Do you think more people should try this diet or do you  think there are too many ads and articles today that are filled with false facts?