New locations, but still none in Texas

Recent additions or about-to-open stores in the TJ's fleet:

Madison, WI Oct. 20

Roswell, GA (Hey Laigh! There's someone else who I play the saxophone for every once in a while, although he moved to Buckhead, a half hour away.)

Brentwood, CA (Up in the Sacramento Delta in northern California, not the Brentwood where the rich live in W. LA. They already have several!)

Cary, NC

Glendale, WI

Pittsburgh, PA (Oct. 27)

Sandy Springs, GA

Walnut Creek, CA

Add to that the old Albertson's by the lakeside in beautiful Oakland (How many square feet must THAT be!) and you see that this is a store chain that is growing by leaps & bounds. Unfortunately, it's bounded right over Texas!

Trader Joe's is Everywhere.

This is a post from this summer's blog about working on a cruise ship in the Baltic. Not many folks know that TJ's is owned by a reclusive German company, reclusive in large measure because one of the owners was kidnapped in 1971. While mighty Wal-Mart gave up on the German market, the Aldi chain owns 3.5% of the marketplace in ALL of Europe.

This entry starts off with a complaint that the English panic over alleged highjack bombers had made hash out of travel, while the English Minister of This and That would come on and report that the investigators had unearthed another pint of hydrogen peroxide. We had passengers on board the ship whose luggage, detained by the crunch in Heathrow, never in their 10 days on board the Star Princess caught up with them.

Seems like an odd transition to Trader Joe's, but bear with me.

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Well, the British have managed to get the all that unpleasant business in Lebanon off the front pages or, in the case of the cruise ship musician, the crawls of CNN international and BBC World. What they did was round up a bunch of Pakistanis who may or may not have figured out a plot to make bombs out of common household materials that could be smuggled on to planes undetected in common carry-on baggage. As a result of all the hysteria there is no carry-on baggage allowed at Heathrow, All well and good, but if this catches on it’ll make it difficult to fly back to the states with my horns and my Powerbook in tow, to say nothing of my effects, as they call all my stuff I packed for four months in the Baltic.

I don’t anticipate flying through Heathrow. but what scares me is that this might spread to Copenhagen, where I will likely depart Europe in 31 days (this having been written August 11) for JFK or Dallas if I get real lucky.

Good news, though, as we are in Warnemunde for one last time. The last time we were here I thought I’d stumbled upon a store owned by the parent company of Trader Joes. Our Berlin tour guide pointed out a market about a mile from the ship and said that tourists from Sweden came in on ferries to stock up for parties. So I checked it out that night, only to find the store closed. I did manage to look inside the place, though and it had a very TJs feel to it.

Of course I had my doubters.

But when I got there this morning, thee weeks later, I found a place very much like TJ’s. Things for sale were piled up everywhere, the booze boxes had been knifed open on one side, there were plenty of pre-wrapped cheeses and produce, and the usual assortment of sausages (Germany, remember) and frozen stuff and chocolates. I was delighted to find some Arnika gel, which I’d run out of, and which is spelled completely differently in Germany. It’s a great relief to my neck, which gets a workout holding saxophones. Still, I hadn’t found the smoking gun until, turning to the freezer case form the cereal, I found Trader Joes brand prunes! I know that Joe doesn’t make stuff for its competition, so I did my best to ask the check-out gal if the company she worked for had any association with TJs.

So I bought my gel, six bottles of vitamin-enhanced orange and carrot juice, Eurodont mouthwash, a chocolate bar, and those prunes. Just under ten Euros. I was lax in my booze purchasing, but I felt like the Swedish passengers on the ferries deserved no competition from me. Tomorrow we start a two-day in Copenhagen. This almost felt as good as when I found a current New Yorker in Helsinki at the legendary Stockman department store. Even though it was 6.9 Euros I had to have it.
Anyway, this place is Aldi Markt. They have stores all over Germany and a certain division of their company will be opening 700 stores in the states this year. Maybe I’ll get lucky and one of the stores will be in central Texas.
Peter, wish you were here to help with the translating!

The other thing happening this day was a big sailing festival with Tall Ships everywhere. I took some shots outside the ship when I was walking around.

That’s the bow of the Star on the upper right.

What is it about this store that I like?

One of my first memories when my family moved to Laguna Beach from the steely northland was a high-pitched, rather strident owner of the Pronto Markets chain who insisted on doing his own radio commercials. That was Joe. Joe Coulombe. When 7-11 stores started popping up like mushrooms after a rain in the forest, the story is that Joe went to a hilltop overlooking the Pacific and came back with a plan. He would reshape Pronto Markets into the "anti-7-11." Instead of trying to sell lots of things, the new markets would concentrate and staples, wine and beer, and quirky gourmet items packaged with "house brand" labels. Workers would wear tropical shirts.

And so Trader Joe's was born. You've gotta love the image of the owner of these stores responding to the invasion from Texas by deciding to do something so different that the Southland Corporation just washes over him and something unique is born in the process. This is the stuff of fairy tales. Does it matter that it might be weak on details? Did it matter when Moses brought down his tablets from the mountaintop?

Years later I went north for college and Trader Joe's followed me with a pretty large store in Capitola and, eventually, like the string of missions founded by the Franciscans, a necklace of TJ's went up El Camino Real to San Francisco and beyond.

I married and moved back to southern California. Our apartment was within walking distance of a busy (and small) west LA TJ's.

They say you never miss the water 'til the well runs dry, and ten years ago I learned what that really means when I moved to Austin, Texas. Austin is a great town, and I moved here to share it with someone I deeply love. There is a great big supermarket here called HEB that does a pretty good job of things. Whole Foods started here. Central Market was started here by HEB. The town is food obsessed. But where was Trader Joe's?

Of course, ten years ago TJ's just occupied the west and east coasts. Around that time a TJ's opened in Worcester, Mass., which is pretty clost to where I was born. But no TJ's in Texas.

I understand distribution. I used to work for a tradeshow contractor who dealt with every concievable problem of logistics. I knew warehouses had to be built, trucks needed to roll to supply these stores. Still, when a couple stores opened in New Mexico I began to think the days of my flying places with empty suitcases were about to end.

But they didn't end. Now there are TJ's stores in New Mexico, Missouri, Georgia. We're surrounded, though Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana buffer us to the east.

But clearly there is movement on breaking into Texas. You'd think with a state as business-friendly as Texas is that there would be no problem. They might get a sweet deal on tax abatement. Everyone else seems to.

I'm thinking it's a complex set of circumstances. Besides logistics, there's the TABC, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Control folks. Last year they famously stationed investigators with arrest powers in bars and had them arrest drinkers for drinking.

TJ's is first and foremost a liquor store. The first one I went into, when I was too young for it to matter, had an impressive wall of Scotch. Something tells me that it might not be a good match, that maybe we're waiting for a political turn in the direction of the government agency responsible (still) for making sure that grocers don't selll booze before noon on Sunday.

Meanwhile, before I go to a gig out of state (I play saxophone for a living) I plan my TJ's stop. I spent the summer on a cruise ship in the Baltic, where TJ's owners since 1979, Aldi Market, dominate the discount wine and booze marketplace and resemble in some ways TJ's. I'm trying to get on a ship for winter that docks every ten days about 4 blocks away from the North Beach TJ's in San Francisco.

The underlying problem, though, is that we don't have a TJ's in Austin, nor anywhere else in Texas. And that, besides the anecdotal reminicences of various former Californians, is what this blog is alll about. Thanks for checking in, and let me know if you have a story to contribute.