but their Christmas version of the Oreo rocks!
Does anyone personally know someone who works at a Trader Joe's? If you do, can you give me their thoughts on their experience?
Maybe making a career change and I've started to look around. Very early on in the process... Anyway, if you happen to know someone who works at a Trader Joe's, can you share their thoughts? Likes? dislikes?
Thanks!
but their Christmas version of the Oreo rocks!
Man Overboard!!
I know several people pretty well at Trader Joes including clerks and store level managers. TJ takes very good care of their employees relatively speaking with regard to pay and insurance. (You also get a 10% employee discount FWIW.) The younger people love their jobs, but many of the older people are looking to do something different. Retail can get old after a while. At our local TJ, apparently there is a lot of partying and hooking up between employees (probably not surprising given the laidback atmosphere in the store). I have no idea what it is like in corporate management.
We also love Trader Joes. All the employees know me and my kid by our first names because we go there so often. It's a great place to shop; their prices are cheap and their products are top quality. The fact that one is ten minutes down the road was a deciding factor for the home we purchased.
Everyone I know at TJs loves it! Of course, I don't know anyone in corporate management. I simply know the employees and store manager of my local Trader Joe's. It is the place where everybody knows your name.
I love their sweet and sour shrimp with rice, the stir fry shrimp primavera, their spanikopita, the frozen shrimp, and of course, their famous Two-Buck Chuck, which I buy by the case.
Where are you located dbb03? I could introduce you to the manager of my local TJs if you're in northern California.
It's a grocery store. Here's a link to their website.
Since you aren't familiar with TJs, you probably don't know about the Two Buck Chuck. It's a fairly decent wine produced by Charles Shaw that retails for $1.98 a bottle, hence the nickname, "Two Buck Chuck."
I forgot to add that they have a retirement plan if I'm not mistaken. Also, you do not necessarily have to be full-time to get the benefits. That really helps out employees who are students taking a lot of hours at school and working at the same time. If I had to work retail again, Trader Joe's would be the place. Working at a grocery can be interesting. I use to be a paid staff member at the Durham Food Co-op and learned quite a few things about food and the food industry.
Trader Joe's recently opened a new store in Chapel Hill (Eastgate Shopping Center, old Southern Season location). There is another store in the Raleigh area... Cary I think. You'll find a variety of organic foods often not available in most grocery stores. Their soups are particularly good. The dried fruits look like real fruit. It's a great place to browse and sample!
I know this will catch the eye of some on the board -- TJ's beer selection is pretty varied!
Their coffees are really good; love the Bay Blend. Breads - rosemary foccaccia - ymmy; chocolates are outstanding and cheap; good, easy frozen foods for those nights you don't feel like really cooking.
oh, and my favorite product - frozen brown rice. 3 min. in the microwave, instead of an hour for the real thing.
Not in California. Still only $2. From $3 to $4 in other states.
Charles Shaw is a phony name. These are blended wines made by Bronco Winery in Modesto (well, Ceres). Bronco is owned by the Franzias, who sold the Franzia label to Coca-Cola. They know what they're doing. Both the chardonnay and the shiraz have recently won legitimate first place prizes in blind taste testing contests.
The 'better' wineries hate this, as you can imagine. Not only is Charles Shaw underselling them, but the taste is very good. Now, I'm not contending that they are the best, but they are better than the price suggests, much better.
I remember reading articles SEVERAL years ago about the Charles Shaw wines being a real embarrassment to the wine community. In blind tests among expert tasters, judges and connoisseurs, it had scored as high as or higher than wines costing $$$$. My dad, who our family friends call the "cheap wine connoisseur" (he has a good palate, but searches long and hard to find cheap wine...he refuses to spend more than $20 a bottle, and doesn't like to go over $10), has tried it, and he likes it quite a bit.
My understanding from wine industry insiders is that the exact contents of various Charles Shaw wines varies. Trader Joes and Bronco buy up the excess wine of other talented and sometimes well-known wineries in bulk when they have overproduced. (Apparently there is a glut of wine in the US.)
It is bottled and labeled and the two or three dollar "Chuck" you are drinking may be wine that you'd pay $15 or $20 for at the liquor store or wine shop if it bore the label originally intended for it.
Ultimately, of course, it is a matter of personal choice...of taste...and of perception influencing taste and choice.
More likely it is wine that would have ended up in a box or in one of those 3 liter jugs. I personally don't think much of it -- more of a two-buck upchuck.
I had it in a blind wine-tasting once (so perception wasn't there to influence taste and choice) against wines ranging up to ~$50. A few people did like it.
I'm on the side of people who don't like the $2 chuck. When it first hit that there was a cheap wine a few years ago I bought a bottle of each varietal to try them out and decided that it was better to spend the extra money and get the much better $10-20 bottles that you can find if you take the time. There was a huge wine glut out here in CA and as a result many great bargains were available (not to mention wines from other countries, such as Chile).
Trader Joe's is huge in CA (the CEO talked at an event I attended 3 years ago and shared some great anecdotes) and I have 3 within 2 miles of me with another opening up about 1 mile away. I consider this a good thing, as it's almost impossible to park anywhere near one despite the fact that they even stay open an hour later now due to demand. Good quality, good prices on a wide range of items.
And, apropos of all this is a Yahoo News article today correlating blind tasting to price, wrongly.
BTW I think it is incorrect to suggest that Bronco only buys up excess wine from other companies. They do buy their own grapes as well, but what they do best is blend or re-blend according to the varietal and the sweetness desired. They have, for example, come out with 'Napa' on the label, meaning they bought Napa County grapes.A $90 wine was provided marked with its real price and again marked $10, while another was presented at its real price of $5 and also marked $45.
The testers' brains showed more pleasure at the higher price than the lower one, even for the same wine...
What the Franzias are doing is little different from what the Gallos or the Mondavis do. The blending and reblending of varietals has become an industry science. This all arose from the Gallo table wine blending practices as more fully developed by the enology department at UC Davis (about an hour north of Modesto). This procedure results in a relatively uniform varietal or table wine which will taste pretty much the same over the years. Gallo's hearty burgundy was probably the pioneer here. It was later applied to varietals where the same grape variety came from different places. It kind of put the end to yearly vintages at those wineries.