Trader Joe's

Trader Joe's is an American grocery store chain headquartered in Monrovia, California, with 608 locations across the US.

The first Trader Joe's store was opened in 1967 by founder Joe Coulombe in Pasadena, California. Theo Albrecht, the co-founder of Aldi, bought the chain in 1979. Today, ownership of Trader Joe's is structured so Aldi Nord is a sister company, with both directly belonging to three foundations (Markus-Stiftung, Jacobus-Stiftung and Lukas-Stiftung) of the Albrecht family.^{[citation needed]} The company has offices in Monrovia, California and Boston, Massachusetts.

Trader Joe's is named after its founder, Joe Coulombe. The company began in 1958 as a Greater Los Angeles area chain known as Pronto Market convenience stores. Coulombe believed that the original Pronto Markets were too similar to 7-Eleven, which he described as the "800-pound gorilla of convenience stores", and was concerned that the competition would be too heavy.

Coulombe developed the idea of the Trader Joe's South Seas motif while on vacation in the Caribbean. During the 1960s, the Tiki culture craze was still widespread in the United States, so in a direct nod to the fad, the Trader Joe's name itself was a spoof on Trader Vic's, the famous tiki-themed restaurant that had opened its first southern California location in the Beverly Hilton in 1955. Dining at Trader Vic's in Beverly Hills was notoriously expensive, but the Trader Joe's in Pasadena provided an irreverent and more affordable offering of food and drink. Coulombe noted two trends in the US that informed the merchandising of his new store concept: one, the number of college-educated people was rising steadily, partly due to the G.I. Bill, and two, with new jumbo jets due to premiere in 1970, international travel would be accelerating as well. A better-educated, more well-traveled public was acquiring tastes they had trouble satisfying in American supermarkets at the time.

The first store branded as "Trader Joe's" opened in 1967 in Pasadena, California; it remains in operation. In their first few decades, some of the stores offered fresh meats provided by butchers who leased space in the stores, along with sandwiches and freshly cut cheese, all in-store.

In 1979, owner and CEO of Aldi Nord Theo Albrecht bought the company. Joe Coulombe wanted the contract to be made on one page, but the German lawyers refused to write it, so Joe's attorney wrote it instead. The contract ended up being longer than one page, however.

Coulombe was succeeded as CEO by his Stanford roommate, John V. Shields, in 1987. Under his leadership, the company expanded into Arizona in 1993 and into the Pacific Northwest two years later. In 1996, the company opened its first stores on the East Coast in Brookline and Cambridge, both outside Boston. In 2001, Shields retired and Dan Bane succeeded him as CEO.

Since its inception, Trader Joe's has continued to expand across the United States. In 2004, BusinessWeek reported that Trader Joe's quintupled its number of stores between 1990 and 2001 and increased its profits tenfold. In February 2008, BusinessWeek reported that the company had the highest sales per square foot of any grocer in the United States. Two-and-a-half years later and in 2016, Fortune magazine estimated sales to be $1,750 in merchandise per square foot, more than double the sales generated by Whole Foods.