Peek Inside Trader Joe’s Super-Secret Corporate World

Photo by Flickr user Christopher Long

What’s it like to work at Trader Joe’s? What are their hiring practices? Do they seek out people with tattoos and piercings (sure seems like it right?)

We’d ask, but the Trader Joe’s corporate folks are notoriously closed-lipped about their human resource practices.

But the good people at Thrillist got some interesting pieces of info from two anonymous employees. Three of them caught our eye:

The employee discount is small

“It’s enough to offset sales tax here [Editor’s Note: We’re not saying which state for anonymity purposes]. It helps, every little bit helps.” I asked if their friends beg them to use it. “No, my friends don’t beg me to use it. Admittedly, most of my friends work there, so I don’t have that problem.”

The foreign (secretive!) ownership doesn’t have a presence
[Editor’s Note: German supermarket conglomerate Aldi owns TJ’s.]

“I don’t know what [Aldi’s] about. They seem okay to me. I think we’ve more become our own unique culture that can’t be traced to anyone. It’s just Trader Joe’s.”

TJ’s employs people to travel the world and eat/research
“We actually have a team of individuals – this would be the coolest job in the world, by the way – they get to go around the world and research the best providers for all of our products. They will not accept a provider if it’s not 100% [up to snuff] with them. [Our food] is made all over the place.”

“There was this one pizzeria in Italy that one of the individuals who’d go around looking for products went to. And he was so taken aback by this pizza that he asked for their recipe. The pizzeria said no. ‘Can we buy you out?’ ‘No, I like my pizzeria,’ the guy said. So [the TJ’s employee] came back to them with a business plan. He came up with a process to freeze the pizza on site with them. It gets frozen, packaged, and sent to us, and then it goes to the warehouse and then shipped to the stores. This guy’s pizzeria is now his side job [compared to all the business he does with TJ’s].”