The Egg Man Cometh
On an autumn afternoon in 1962, into a tiny office in Los Angeles walked a man with a problem and a surplus. He was an egg supplier — nobody remembers his name — and he had far too many extra-large eggs. Not enough to interest a proper supermarket chain, not few enough to discard without pain. What he needed was a buyer too desperate to say no and too small to negotiate. What he found was Joe Coulombe.
Coulombe was thirty-two years old, running a handful of Pronto Market convenience stores that were, by his own cheerful admission, circling the drain. The stores lived in the shadow of 7-Eleven, sold the usual misery inventory of cigarettes and Coca-Cola and cheap milk, and generated the kind of revenue that made bankers wince. The egg man's proposition was absurdly simple: he would sell Coulombe extra-large AA eggs at the same price as regular large AA eggs, even though they were twelve percent bigger per dozen. Coulombe took the deal, ran ads, and watched something happen that had not happened in a while at Pronto Markets. People came.
The eggs sold. Then they sold out. The ads generated foot traffic that drifted toward other aisles. Pronto Markets, for one flickering moment, looked alive. But it was not the eggs themselves that mattered — it was the architecture of the deal, the shape of the opportunity. A surplus nobody wanted, priced below its obvious value, delivered to a customer who felt she was getting something for nothing. Coulombe would spend the next quarter century building an empire on exactly this principle: finding the things that the normal machinery of American retail could not efficiently process and turning them into the reason people drove across town.
"The ads that we began running revolutionized Pronto Markets," Coulombe would write decades later, in the memoir he never quite got around to publishing in his lifetime. "And they helped to generate the profits I needed, first to stay afloat, and later to build Trader Joe's."
The sentence carries a casual understatement that was characteristic of the man. To stay afloat. As though survival were merely a waystation. As though the store that would become America's most beloved grocery chain — 530 locations, $16.5 billion in estimated revenue, a cult following so intense that discontinued snack items generate petitions and secondary markets on eBay — was a modest inference from the problem of too many eggs.
By the Numbers
The Trader Joe's Empire
19%Compound annual sales growth over 26 years under Coulombe
26%Compound annual net worth growth over the same period
$16.5BEstimated annual revenue (2020)
530+Store locations across 42 states
~4,000SKUs per store (vs. 50,000 at a typical supermarket)
80%+Products sold under private label
$0Fixed interest-bearing debt from 1975 onward
Avocado Ranch to Arroyo Parkway
Joseph Hardin Coulombe was born on June 3, 1930, in San Diego, an only child raised on an avocado ranch in nearby Del Mar where three generations of his family shared a single home. His father, also Joseph, was an engineer at Convair, the aircraft manufacturer. His paternal grandmother served New England boiled dinners. His mother, Carmelita Hardin, came from Tennessee and practiced what Coulombe would later describe, with the deadpan precision that marked all his self-disclosures, as "Southern suicide cuisine — a lot of bacon fat poured on greens."
The culinary range of his childhood was, in other words, narrow. This matters. The man who would build a grocery empire predicated on the idea that Americans were ready for Brie and Bordeaux and almond butter grew up eating boiled meat and fatback. The transformation was not innate. It was learned, and the learning began at Stanford.
Coulombe enrolled after a year in the Air Force, earned a bachelor's in economics in 1952 and an MBA in 1954. He paid his way in part by selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door-to-door in Stanford neighborhoods, an experience that taught him what he called "negative selling" — the art of making the customer feel she was making a choice rather than being sold. "You go in and say, 'Well, I really don't think you can afford this,'" he recalled in a 2011 interview. He found the technique repulsive. He would spend his career building a company that never badgered anyone.
At Stanford he also met Alice Steere, whose father, Bill, was a professor of botany. The Steere household served Dungeness crab, sourdough bread, steamed artichokes, jug wine, olive oil. "Think of it," Coulombe told Los Angeles magazine years later. "I'd never even seen olive oil." They married in 1952, when both were graduate students. Bill Steere gave his new son-in-law a subscription to Scientific American. "In terms of creating my fortune," Coulombe would write, "it's the most important magazine I've ever read."
The chain of influence is almost too neat: a botanist father-in-law, a magazine subscription, a boy from an avocado ranch who had never seen olive oil, and the stores that would one day sell more olive oil, at better prices, than anyone in America. But Coulombe was not the kind of man who manufactured origin stories. He was the kind of man who noticed that a subscription to a science magazine and a father-in-law who knew how to eat constituted a form of competitive advantage — and then spent thirty years exploiting it.
The 800-Pound Gorilla
After Stanford, Coulombe was hired by Rexall Drug Company to develop a chain of convenience stores modeled on 7-Eleven, which did not yet exist in California. He prepared for the assignment by working for free in a local grocery store, learning the mechanics of retail from the loading dock up. He and Alice drove their young son around Los Angeles studying neighborhood demographics; the boy learned his numbers by counting parking spaces at potential store locations.
With Rexall's backing, Coulombe opened six Pronto Markets by 1958. They were variety stores — car oil, toilet paper, candy bars, ammunition. (Yes, ammunition. This was California in the late Eisenhower era.) When Rexall lost interest, Coulombe bought the stores at a meeting whose brevity and informality would be unthinkable in today's corporate environment. He walked into the office of Rexall's treasurer one day in May 1962. The man was on the phone with the Wall Street Journal, trying to explain why Rexall's stock had just fallen from sixty to twenty-one. Coulombe put a note on his desk: "I will buy Pronto Markets for book value." The treasurer cupped his hand over the phone and muttered, "Ten thousand dollars over book and you've got it." Coulombe shook his hand. He had ninety days to raise the money.
He raised it. By 1965, Pronto had grown to eighteen locations and boasted the highest sales per store of any convenience operator in America — by a factor of three. A liquor license here, a health-and-beauty-aids section there, the first convenience stores to sell paperback books and promote photo finishing. Pronto was a proving ground, a sandbox where Coulombe tested the limits of what a small store could carry and what a certain kind of customer would tolerate.
Then, in October 1965, the world shifted. Merritt Adamson Jr., president of Adohr Milk Farms — which had become Pronto's financial partner — called Coulombe to a meeting. Adamson, a rancher from an old Malibu family who had inherited both a dairy and a set of archaic milk-control laws written by his own father, announced that he was selling Adohr. The buyer was Southland Corporation, out of Dallas. Southland owned 7-Eleven.
The implications were immediate and existential. The 800-pound gorilla of convenience stores was not merely coming to California — it now owned Coulombe's source of capital. "I had no choice," Coulombe told Supermarket News in 2002. "I had to do something different."
Two Articles and a Bar
What happened next has become retail legend, though Coulombe would have hated that word. "I'm going to disillusion those dear souls — there seem to be a lot of them out there — who think that Trader Joe's sprang, fully developed, from my brain, like Athena from the head of Zeus," he declared in his memoir. The truth was messier, more gradual, and — in the way of most consequential ideas — assembled from fragments.
Two fragments in particular.
The first was a small news item in Scientific American, sometime in 1965. It noted that of all Americans qualified to attend college in 1932, at the pit of the Depression, only two percent actually did. By 1964, that figure had risen to sixty percent. The cause was the G.I. Bill of Rights of 1944, which had created, over two decades, a vast new demographic: educated, curious, culturally literate, but not necessarily wealthy. Coulombe called them "the overeducated and underpaid."
The second was a newspaper article about Boeing's 747 jumbo jet, then in development for a 1970 launch. The wide-body aircraft would slash the cost of transatlantic travel, and Coulombe foresaw that within a decade, millions of middle-class Americans would visit Europe, taste its food, drink its wine, and come home wanting more. "People who traveled — even to San Francisco — were far more adventurous in what they were willing to put in their stomachs," he wrote. "Travel is, after all, a form of education."
From these two data points — one about education, one about aviation — Coulombe constructed the entire strategic logic of Trader Joe's. There was a growing population of Americans who had been to college and would soon be going to Europe, who read books and drank wine and wanted Brie instead of Velveeta, but who earned schoolteacher salaries and could not afford the gourmet shops that served the genuinely rich. Nobody in American retail was serving them. The supermarkets sold to the mass market. The convenience stores sold to the impulse buyer. The gourmet shops sold to the affluent. The gap was enormous, and it was about to get bigger.
"Dimly, I saw an opportunity to differentiate ourselves radically from mainstream retailing to mainstream people," Coulombe wrote. The adverb is doing a lot of work. Dimly. As though the most successful grocery concept of the late twentieth century was glimpsed through fog, in a bar on an autumn afternoon in 1965 — which, by Coulombe's own account, is precisely where it happened.
"Trader Joe's was not so much born as extruded," he wrote.
You might think of Trader Joe's as one of the more esoteric cable channels; the supermarkets as NBC-CBS-ABC.
A Silent Conspiracy
The first Trader Joe's opened in 1967 on South Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena. The location was deliberate. Pasadena was the home of Caltech, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Huntington Library. "All Trader Joe's were located near centers of learning," Coulombe explained. "Pasadena, where I opened the first one, was because Pasadena is the epitome of a well-educated town."
The store was decorated with fish nets, oars, pennants, and other nautical trappings. The name — Trader Joe's — evoked Trader Vic's, the popular tiki-bar restaurant chain, and the broader South Seas motif that was fashionable in mid-sixties California. Coulombe had been reading White Shadows in the South Seas; he had been to the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland; the whole thing "just coalesced," as the company's website would later put it, with the studied casualness that became the brand's hallmark. Employees wore Hawaiian shirts. The manager was "the captain." The assistant manager was "the first mate." The staff were "crew members." Maritime bells replaced intercom announcements.
It was whimsy, but it was also strategy. The South Seas theme did two things simultaneously: it signaled that this was not a normal grocery store, and it lowered the customer's psychological defenses. You do not feel like you are being marketed to when a man in a Hawaiian shirt is ringing a bell. You feel like you are on vacation. The themed environment gave Coulombe permission to stock products that would have seemed bizarre in a conventional store — Chilean nectarines, Thai noodles, Salvadoran coffee, French Brie — because the context made adventure feel natural.
"I wanted to create a silent conspiracy among the overeducated, underpaid people in town," Coulombe wrote, "so that as they moved down the aisles they would read secret messages on the product." This is an extraordinary sentence from a grocery executive. It reveals a man who understood his customers not as consumers to be targeted but as co-conspirators to be recruited. The products were the code. If you understood why the almond butter was there, if you knew what pilchard was, if you reached for the Bordeaux instead of the Budweiser, you were in on the joke.
The inaugural Pasadena store remains open today.
Loopholes, Pilchard, and the Fearless Flyer
Coulombe's genius — and this is the right word, however much it would have embarrassed him — was not in identifying an underserved customer. Lots of people can do that. His genius was in the mechanics of serving her cheaply. He was an operator, not a visionary. He read legal codes and trade regulations the way other entrepreneurs read pitch decks. And he discovered that the American food distribution system was riddled with inefficiencies, loopholes, and discontinuities that a sufficiently obsessive retailer could exploit to deliver astonishing value.
The eggs were the prototype. The Bordeaux wine was the masterwork.
In 1970, three years after the first store opened, Coulombe found a friendly importer who could source wines from Bordeaux at prices far below what California's Fair Trade Law allowed domestic wholesalers to charge. The Fair Trade Law set minimum retail prices on branded goods — but it applied to wholesalers, not to direct importers. Coulombe imported the wine himself and set his own prices. "We had found a loophole in the law, and by God we drove a truck through it!" he wrote.
This was not a one-time gambit. It was a methodology. Coulombe called it "Intensive Buying," and it was the antithesis of how American grocery chains operated. Conventional supermarkets practiced what he called "eighteenth-century buying" — they took rigid, fixed positions on nationally branded goods, competed on identical products, surveyed each other's prices on hundreds of SKUs, and "declared victory on points." Trader Joe's did none of this. It had no national brands. It competed on products nobody else carried. It scoured the world for surpluses, closeouts, production overruns, and items that fell through the cracks of the standard distribution system.
Coulombe's concept of "Intensive Buying" rested on three pillars: honoring vendors (treating suppliers as partners, not adversaries), intense intervention in product development (working directly with manufacturers to create products to Trader Joe's specifications), and intense legal and financial analysis (understanding tariff schedules, import quotas, and regulatory structures well enough to find opportunities invisible to less studious competitors).
Consider pilchard. In June 1982, Coulombe and Alice visited a tuna canning plant in Lima, Peru. They witnessed something remarkable: the United States had a quota for imported tuna, and once Peru's allocation was filled, a biological miracle occurred right there on the canning line. What had been tuna was suddenly, officially, pilchard — a member of the herring family, on which there was no quota. "The like hasn't been seen since the Sea of Galilee!" Coulombe wrote. To this day, Trader Joe's is virtually the only American retailer of pilchard.
The Fearless Flyer was the delivery mechanism for all of this arcane knowledge. Rather than conventional advertising — which Coulombe despised — Trader Joe's published an offbeat periodical that read like a cross between a Victorian broadsheet and a graduate seminar in food science. It explained where products came from, how they were made, why they were priced as they were. It cited obscure quotations from economists and Goethe. It was, in effect, a newsletter written for people who wanted to be educated rather than sold to, and it became one of the most effective marketing instruments in American retail history.
We had found a loophole in the law, and by God we drove a truck through it!
The Wages of Success
If Coulombe's buying strategy was the engine of Trader Joe's, its compensation philosophy was the chassis. And here, perhaps more than anywhere else, the gap between Coulombe and the rest of American retail became a chasm.
"This is the most important single business decision I ever made: to pay people well," he wrote.
The standard was simple and uncompromising: the average full-time employee in the stores would earn the median family income for California. In the 1960s, that was approximately $7,000 a year. By 1988, when Coulombe left, new employees started at $18,000; the average full-time worker earned $34,000; store managers — called "captains" — earned $44,000 plus bonuses worth up to seventy percent of salary. Part-timers earned as much as $13 an hour when the federal minimum wage was $4.35. The benefits were extraordinary: full medical and dental insurance, a 15.4 percent retirement accrual, and a non-expiring "Leave Bank" that combined vacation and sick days.
"Time and again I am asked why no one has successfully replicated Trader Joe's," Coulombe wrote. "The answer is that no one has been willing to pay the wages and benefits, and thereby attract — and keep — the quality of people who work at Trader Joe's."
The logic was not sentimental. Coulombe arrived at his wage policy through a cold-eyed analysis of costs, informed by an unlikely source: Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, a 1962 history of the first ninety days of World War I. Tuchman's book — which Coulombe called "the best book on management, and especially mismanagement, I've ever read" — described how the German and French militaries abandoned their initial strategies in the opening weeks of the war, leading to years of catastrophic stalemate. Coulombe drew from it a principle that governed his entire career: if you adopt a reasonable strategy, as opposed to waiting for an optimal one, and stick with it, you will probably succeed.
High wages were his reasonable strategy. Tenacity was the rest.
The economics were straightforward: employee turnover was the single most expensive cost in retail. A poorly paid cashier who quit after six months cost the company in recruiting, training, lost productivity, and — crucially — lost customer relationships. A well-paid crew member who stayed for thirty-five years (which was the typical tenure at Trader Joe's) paid for herself many times over in expertise, customer loyalty, and reduced theft. "If employees are stressed by medical bills, they may steal," Coulombe noted, with the pragmatist's directness. "That's one good reason for Trader Joe's generous health and dental plans."
He wanted store captains to earn more than office executives. "In a traditional chain store, managers aspire to become bureaucrats with cushy, high-paying jobs in the office," he wrote. "I wanted to kill such aspirations at the start." The frontline was the business. Everything else was overhead.
Every full-time employee performed every job — ordering, stocking, checkout, bookkeeping. When Coulombe made a deliberate effort in the 1970s to employ women full-time, he realized that equal duty-sharing meant women would participate in the physically demanding work of unloading shipments. So he changed his inventory practices: "We made an effort to get rid of any single case that weighed more than forty pounds." That is why, for years, Trader Joe's did not stock sugar.
The company never advertised for full-time employees. It never had to.
Double Entry Retailing
One of Coulombe's most distinctive intellectual contributions was a concept he called "Double Entry Retailing" — a framework borrowed, with characteristic eclecticism, from the language of accounting. The idea was deceptively simple: every change to the demand side of the business (what customers see and want) has a corresponding effect on the supply side (how you source, handle, and deliver it), and the supply-side effects are frequently invisible to managers who think only about customers.
The cautionary tale was freshly squeezed orange juice. Trader Joe's introduced it in the stores and customers loved it — a pure demand-side success. But the supply-side consequences were nightmarish: the sweetness of oranges varied wildly throughout the year, the machines were difficult to calibrate, and disposing of the leftover rinds created a logistical headache that consumed management attention far out of proportion to the revenue the juice generated. The product was eventually phased out.
Coulombe applied this framework to every major decision. When he considered stocking a new product, he evaluated it against what he called "four tests": high value per cubic inch, high rate of consumption, ease of handling, and a distinct reason to exist compared to competitors. These were not marketing tests. They were operational tests — designed to ensure that the supply side could sustain what the demand side created.
This operational discipline produced Trader Joe's most counterintuitive characteristic: its smallness. While conventional supermarkets carried 50,000 SKUs in sprawling 50,000-square-foot stores, Trader Joe's stocked roughly 4,000 items in spaces one-third the size. The constraint was deliberate. Fewer products meant deeper relationships with each vendor, more rigorous quality control, faster inventory turns, and lower waste. It also meant that every item on the shelf had survived a gauntlet of scrutiny that would have killed it at a normal retailer — which is why customers trusted that anything they picked up would be good.
The private-label revolution was the logical culmination. In 1972, Coulombe introduced the first Trader Joe's branded product: granola. By the early 1980s, he had adopted what he called "the Brooks Brothers strategy" — nothing in the store would carry a brand other than Trader Joe's. "When you go to a Brooks Brothers, there is nothing in that store that does not have a Brooks Brothers label on it," he explained. Trader Joe's dropped out of its wholesale grocery co-op in 1982, ending its access to conventional brands. The transition into a purely private-label retailer was complete.
The implications were profound. Without national brands, Trader Joe's eliminated slotting fees, marketing fees, and middleman margins. It controlled its own supply chain, designed its own packaging (using illustrations from nineteenth-century advertisements), and set its own prices without reference to competitors. Products were named with the sly wit that Coulombe brought to everything — Trader Darwin vitamins, Trader Giotto's Italian items, Eve's Apple Sparkled by Adam — and named after his daughters Charlotte and Madeleine where the mood struck.
Growth for the sake of growth still troubles me. It seems unnatural, even perverted.
The Sale, the Regret, and the German
In 1979, Coulombe sold Trader Joe's to Theo Albrecht.
The sentence requires context. Theo Albrecht was one of the two brothers who built Aldi, the German discount grocery empire, from a single store in Essen into a global behemoth. Theo and his brother Karl had split their joint operation in 1960 — legend has it, over a disagreement about selling cigarettes — into Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd. By the late 1970s, Theo's Aldi Nord operated thousands of stores across Europe and was looking to expand into the United States. He found, in Trader Joe's, a kindred spirit: a low-cost, high-quality, private-label retailer with fanatical operational discipline.
Coulombe's reasons for selling were, characteristically, more pragmatic than emotional. He faced a convergence of threats: the loss of surtax exemptions, complications around employee ownership, the specter of estate taxes, and — under the Carter administration — the threat of eliminating capital-gains preferences. The sale was structured through a family trust controlled by Albrecht, and Coulombe stayed on as CEO for another nine years.
But he regretted it.
"Do I regret having sold?" he wrote. "Yes. I admit it. To mine own self I was not true when I sold. I regret not having had the guts to ride out the loss of the surtax exemptions, the employee ownership problems, the threat of death taxes, Carter's threat to eliminate capital gains preference, and all the other fears, real or phantom, of late 1978."
This is a remarkable confession from a man who was otherwise constitutionally incapable of self-pity. It reveals the paradox at the center of Coulombe's career: the most analytically disciplined grocery operator of his generation, the man who read tariff schedules and import quotas like poetry, made the single most consequential decision of his professional life out of fear. Not the fear of competition, which he had faced and mastered. The fear of government, of taxes, of forces beyond his control. He sold the thing he loved because the regulatory environment frightened him more than 7-Eleven ever had.
He resigned at the end of 1988. During his twenty-six years at the helm, Trader Joe's sales had grown at a compound rate of nineteen percent per year. Net worth had compounded at twenty-six percent. The company had never lost money in a single year, and each year had been more profitable than the last. From leverage to zero debt by 1975. From six Pronto Markets to a cult institution.
"Still," he wrote, in the preface to his memoir, "judgment can be rendered that I failed, that I fell short of what I should have achieved."
The Second Career and the Manuscript
After leaving Trader Joe's, Coulombe reinvented himself as what he called a "temp" — an interim CEO and corporate consultant parachuted into troubled companies. He held executive roles at Thrifty's, Provigo, and Sport Chalet. He served on the boards of
Cost Plus World Market and True Religion apparel. He did not, in these roles, build anything comparable to what he had built before. But every engagement reinforced a conviction that he carried from his first career into his second, and which became the final, irreducible lesson of his memoir:
"A deeply troubled company is always the fault of the CEO, the board of directors, and the controlling stockholders who appoint these worthies. It is never the fault of the frontline troops."
He retired in 2013 and settled into the Pasadena life that had always been the backdrop to his work — wine tours in France with Alice, opera attendance, painting vibrantly colored portraits of family members, volunteering at Huntington Memorial Hospital. He was a patron of the arts in the way that certain old Pasadena families are: quietly, institutionally, without ostentation. Alice co-founded the Los Angeles Opera. The Coulombes hosted house concerts for local arts organizations. They donated wine and food for post-concert receptions. Joe would stop by the original Arroyo Parkway Trader Joe's after his hospital shifts, browsing the aisles like any other customer, and the crew members — many of whom had no idea who he was — would chat with him about what was new on the shelves.
Courtney Dunlap, a crew member at the Pasadena store in the early 2010s, had been talking to Coulombe for months before her captain informed her who he was. The next time she saw him, she joked, "Why didn't you introduce yourself?" He told her he liked talking to employees as a regular customer.
The memoir had been written years earlier — in the 2000s, by Coulombe's own account — but he was in no hurry to publish it. The manuscript sat for years, eventually gifted to Leroy Watson, his best friend and first employee. After Coulombe died on February 28, 2020, at age eighty-nine, Watson showed the raw manuscript to a writer named Patty Civalleri, who fell in love with it, shaped it into chapters, and shepherded it through HarperCollins to publication in June 2021.
The Store That Ate the Future
The company Coulombe built continued to grow after his departure in ways that would have astonished and, one suspects, occasionally dismayed him. Under John V. Shields Jr., who succeeded Coulombe's immediate successor, the chain went national — opening its first store outside California in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1993. Under Dan Bane, who became CEO in 2001 and served until 2023, Trader Joe's expanded from 150 stores to 547, maintaining — with what Bane called "remarkable adherence" — the basic concepts Coulombe had established.
Bane — a former accountant who grew up in the grocery business and once described Coulombe as possessing "a mesmerizing personality that simply galvanized all with whom he worked" — introduced seven core values that formalized what had been, under Coulombe, instinct and improvisation: integrity, a product-driven mindset, customer "wow" experiences, challenging bureaucracy, continuous improvement, treating the store as the brand, and being simultaneously a national and a neighborhood company. He worked shifts in his own stores, imagined the organizational chart as an inverted pyramid with the CEO at the bottom, and sent buyers to supplier locations to verify that sourcing practices aligned with Trader Joe's standards.
The essential architecture held. Hawaiian shirts. Maritime bells. The Fearless Flyer. Private-label everything. Small stores, curated selections, no loyalty cards, no coupons, no self-checkout. The company generated an estimated $2,100 in sales per square foot — more than double Whole Foods, more than Costco, more than Walmart. Revenue for the fiscal year ended January 2024 was reported at $56.4 billion by parent Aldi Nord, a thirty-five percent increase from five years earlier. The fleet now exceeds 600 locations, a third of them in California.
And the cult endured. Easter-themed tote bags introduced at $2.99 sold out so fast that eBay sellers were asking $100. Reddit threads erupted in grief when rumors circulated about the discontinuation of Chili & Lime Flavored Rolled Corn Tortilla Chips. A Canadian entrepreneur named Michael Hallatt — lithe, grey-eyed, intense — opened a store called Pirate Joe's in Vancouver, making regular cross-border runs to Bellingham, Washington, to buy Trader Joe's products and smuggle them north. "The place was full of Canadians," Hallatt said of the Bellingham store. "And I'm a bit of a stranger talker."
None of this was quite what Coulombe had intended. He had built a chain of thirty stores, all in Southern California, each one a hand-tuned instrument. The national expansion happened after he left. The $56 billion in revenue happened after he left. The Reddit petitions and the eBay tote bags and the Canadian smuggler — all after he left. "My successors at Trader Joe's have taken a 30-store chain nationwide with remarkable adherence to the basic concepts we started out with," he told Supermarket News in 2010. "Though it's certainly a different store than I left in 1989, I changed it so many times, I can't argue with what they've done."
This was gracious, and also a little wistful. The store Coulombe built was not designed to be a $56 billion enterprise. It was designed to serve the overeducated and underpaid. That it did both — and still does — is perhaps the most improbable thing about it.
Selfish Altruism
Coulombe coined a phrase for the governing philosophy of his career: "selfish altruism." He did the right thing for the wrong reasons. He paid high wages not because he was a humanitarian but because turnover was expensive. He stocked health foods not because he was an environmentalist but because his customers wanted them. He refused to badger customers not because he was a saint but because the Kirby vacuum cleaner experience had taught him that aggressive selling was bad business.
This was his great defense against the charge of idealism, which he regarded as both naive and dangerous. "Thinking about the hallmarks of the Trader Joe's brand, it's easy to imagine Coulombe as a progressive idealist, obsessed with the idea that his business was helping to make the world a better place," the New Yorker observed. "This was not the case." He didn't even particularly like hippies. He just noticed that hippies bought a lot of granola.
And yet the phrase gives away more than it conceals. Selfish altruism is still altruism. The man who insisted he was motivated purely by profit also insisted that profit was merely "an inevitable by-product of doing other things well." He quoted this line — from The Winning Performance, his favorite management book — in the preface to his memoir, before he told you anything else about himself. It was the first claim he made. The foundation.
Coulombe harbored what the New Yorker's reviewer called "an outsized disdain for the standard business practices of corporate America." He condemned venture capitalism ("vultures"), investment banking, corporate consultants, Byzantine management hierarchies, and borrowing money. In the current climate of rampant venture capital, ruthless pursuit of unicorns, and private-equity takeovers, his rudimentary, instinct-driven business philosophy reads, as the New Yorker put it, "like a revelation."
He was, in a sense, the anti-founder. He did not mythologize his own origin story. He did not seek scale for its own sake. He did not confuse growth with progress. He did not build a personal brand. He spent decades after retirement serving on boards and cleaning up other people's messes, and when he finally wrote a memoir, he couldn't be bothered to publish it. He gave it to a friend.
His son described him as a Renaissance man — a prolific reader, a painter, a man with a child-like curiosity about the world. His employee Courtney Dunlap described him as a humble customer who liked to browse the aisles unrecognized. His longtime colleague Leroy Watson described him as a man with "a photographic memory, who wanted to expand everybody's intelligence and knowledge as best he could." His competitor, the entire American grocery industry, described him the way a conventional army describes a guerrilla: with grudging respect and total incomprehension.
Joe Coulombe died on February 28, 2020, at his home in Pasadena, after a long illness. He was eighty-nine. He is survived by his wife Alice, his son Joseph, his daughters Charlotte and Madeleine, and six grandchildren. And by the store on South Arroyo Parkway, where a crew member in a Hawaiian shirt is ringing a maritime bell, and where the extra-large eggs, if they have them, are priced exactly right.
