Joe Coulombe Quotes
13 quotes from Joe Coulombe — Founder of Trader Joe's, the beloved grocery chain known for unique products, low prices, and Hawaiian-shirt-wearing em….
“I concluded that I didn't have to find an optimum solution to Pronto's difficulties, just a reasonable one. Trying to find an optimum solution in business is a waste of time: the factors in the equation are changing all the time.”
“Time and again I am asked why no one has successfully replicated Trader Joe's. 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.”
“In a lecture at the University of Southern California Business School, I talked about this. A young woman raised her hand: 'But how could you afford to pay so much more than your competition?' The answer, of course, is that good people pay by their extra productivity.”
“Let's define health foods as foods grown with as few chemicals as possible, processed with as few chemicals as possible, and packaged as 'ecologically' as possible.”
“Trader Joe's first private label food product was granola. We installed Alta Dena certified raw milk, to the disgruntlement of Southland, and within six months were the largest retailers of Alta Dena milk, both pasteurized and raw, in California.”
“You might think of Trader Joe's as one of the more esoteric cable channels; the supermarkets as NBC-CBS-ABC.”
“We had found a loophole in the law, and by God we drove a truck through it!”
“Growth for the sake of growth still troubles me. It seems unnatural, even perverted.”
“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.”
“This is the most important single business decision I ever made: to pay people well.”
“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.”
“Do I regret having sold? Yes. I admit it. To mine own self I was not true when I sold.”
“Trader Joe's is for overeducated and underpaid people, for all the classical musicians, museum curators, journalists — that's why we've always had good press, frankly!”
