Skip to main content

Theory Papers

Like many consumers I love Trader Joe's and make it a point of reading their Flyer end to end though lately I have not been there too much and they have wisely stopped mailing me their publication. They need people who will shop at their store with some reliability not folks like me who read the Flyer to be amused and entertained. To learn that the founder was a man way ahead of his time did not come as a great surprise

Joe may have stood on some tall shoulders, but he saw further than any man in groceries before him; by 1967 he had successfully envisioned the consumer of 2017; by 1978 he had perfected a strategy for private labeling that has come to dominate the industry, even as competitors are still playing catch-up trying to understand and mimic it. He did this meticulously, through hundreds of pages of internal documents—he called them Theory Papers—whereby he forecast cultural shifts, currency fluctuations, and educational trends and drew on philosophical tracts, military planning strategy - Lorr, Benjamin. The Secret Life of Groceries (pp. 21-22). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

There are specific things I look to buy at that store when I am there but what is unique about the shopping experience there compared to any other grocery store I know is the sense that you might discover something you love and value if you spend the time to browse. In every trip I have been well rewarded for my browsing time. Maybe not enough for the store to consider me the kind of shopper they want to nurture but still a positive experience for me. Makes me wonder how Joe would have accounted for the likes of us in his Theory Papers.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more