Have you ever whispered the Trader Joe's prayer right before you black out and wake up with eleven bags of cauliflower gnocchi and a succulent you'll kill by Thursday? This store shouldn't work. No app. No loyalty points. A parking lot designed by someone who hates cars. And yet people drive past three normal grocery stores to shop there like it's a pilgrimage.

The origin story is unhinged. Joe Coulombe realized he couldn't out-7-Eleven 7-Eleven, so he fled to the Caribbean and wrote a manifesto about a customer who didn't exist yet. He predicted exactly what they'd want, what would flatter them, and what would make them feel like they'd discovered something the masses had missed. Then he built a store that runs on psychological tricks most retailers would consider business malpractice. Why won't they put in a loudspeaker? Why do the employees wear Hawaiian shirts? Why is the cheese section a disaster on purpose? Every answer is weirder than you think.

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Dumbify celebrates ideas so weird, wrong, or wildly impractical… they just might be brilliant. Hosted by David Carson, a serial entrepreneur behind multiple hundred-million-dollar companies and the go-to secret weapon for companies looking to unlock new markets through unconventional thinking. Dumbify dives into the messy, counter-intuitive side of creativity — the “dumb” ideas that built empires, broke rules, and ended up changing everything.

... I was in Trader Joe's last week doing my favorite hobby, lying. Just lying to myself. I'm just popping in for a couple things. That's the Trader Joe's prayer. That's the prayer you whisper right before you black out and wake up at home with seventeen frozen entrees, a plant you don't deserve, and a jar of something called spread that tastes like your childhood, but with better branding. Trader Joe's is the only store where I go in for eggs and leave with a vague sense that I'm a person who hosts. I'm in the aisle holding a bag of Scandinavian swimmers because I'm an adult, and I realize something: Trader Joe's shouldn't work. On paper, Trader Joe's is the opposite of what every smart business does. They don't have an app nagging you, no loyalty program, no coupons, no members earn points scheme where you slowly unlock the privilege of buying yogurt. They're not tracking your snack habits like, "We've noticed David only buys brie when he's emotionally fragile." They don't even have the thing every grocery store has, a loudspeaker that turns the store into an airport. No one ever interrupts your private spiral with, "Attention, shoppers, clean up on aisle five." Trader Joe's is calm. It's weirdly calm. It's like a grocery store designed by someone who loves you, and it's not a massive store either. Trader Joe's stores are small. Sometimes the parking lot is bigger than the store, which is also the most Trader Joe's thing possible. The store is basically a hallway with ambitions, and yet it's one of the most successful grocers on Earth. So today, I wanna talk about why. Because Trader Joe's is a dumbify masterpiece. It's proof that sometimes the genius move is doing something that looks dumb, doing less, collecting less, saying no to best practices, and then doing it so stubbornly it becomes untouchable. So let's do this. Let's get dumb.

Dumbify, let your neurons dance. Put your brain in backwards pants. Genius hides in daft disguise. Brilliance wears those googly eyes. So honk your nose and chase that spark. Dumb is just smart in the dark. Dumbify. Yelling like a goose. It's thinking wrong on purpose with juice.

[upbeat music] Okay, so here's my basic thesis on Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's didn't win by being the best grocery store. They won by being a different category of place. Other grocery stores are like, "Welcome! Here are forty-seven kinds of ketchup. Choose your destiny." Trader Joe's is like, "We have one ketchup. It's good. Stop asking questions." Other grocery stores make you feel like a tiny, confused ant navigating capitalism. Trader Joe's makes you feel like a clever little raccoon who found treasure in someone's backyard. And the origin story is surprisingly relatable in a depressing way, in a way that should inspire all of us. Because it starts with a guy who tried to compete in the obvious way and got punched in the face by reality. Trader Joe's begins as a chain of convenience stores called Pronto Market in nineteen fifty-eight. Its founder is a guy named Joe, Joe Coulombe, and the first version of Joe's company is essentially, "Let's do Seven Eleven, but smaller and sadder." He's essentially copying the Seven Eleven model, which is what you do when you're young and optimistic, and you still believe the world is fair. And then, like every entrepreneur eventually learns, you look up one day and realize you're not competing with a company, you're competing with a machine. Seven Eleven already has scale, capital, the whole distribution fortress. They're bigger in a way that makes better kind of irrelevant, and this actually helps Joe to see things more clearly. He says, "I can't out Seven Eleven Seven Eleven," which is a brutal moment for anyone because it's not, "I need to improve my strategy." It's, "I might be fundamentally playing the wrong sport." It's like training your whole life for basketball and then realizing you're five foot three, and the NBA doesn't have a short and scrappy with heart position. So Joe is staring down bankruptcy, competition, the whole thing, kinda bleak. And instead of optimizing operations or hiring a consultant or whatever people do when they wanna feel productive while panicking, he does something that I'm obsessed with. He leaves, he retreats, and he writes a white paper. Not like a modern white paper where someone explains why your company needs a new HR platform. This was a personal white paper, a prediction, a future memo to himself. He basically goes, "What is the world becoming, and who is the next customer going to be?" And I wanna slow down here because this is the best part. This is the beat I want to expand because it's not just Trader Joe's history. It's a creative method. It's a mindset. Joe's move is so simple it almost sounds like procrastination, like he's avoiding work by thinking big thoughts near water. But it's actually the opposite. It's the kind of thinking most businesses don't do because it doesn't look like work.... There's no spreadsheet, there's no meeting, there's no Slack channel called #GrowthWarRoom. It's just a guy looking at the world and trying to notice what everyone else is missing. And did I mention that he's in the Caribbean? He's just writing this white paper predicting demographic shifts in the Caribbean. But one of his core insights is that America is about to produce a giant class of people who are... How do I put this? Too educated to be happy, and too broke to pretend they're not. Essentially, over-educated and underpaid. There's this rising tide of recent college grads. It's the GI Bill effect. More people are going to college. And then, with the Jet Age, coupled with the recently massive drop in price for international travel, people have tasted the world. They've tried better food, they've seen other cultures, they've developed opinions. But they're not rich. They're not shopping at fancy specialty markets. They're not living in a Nancy Meyers kitchen. They're living in an apartment with a hot plate, a beanbag chair, and a rotary phone with a cord long enough to reach the kitchen. But they still want quality. They still want interesting. They want value. They wanna feel like the world is bigger than their paycheck. So Joe essentially says, "Okay, that's my customer." Not everyone, not the average shopper, not families in the suburbs. A very specific person: worldly, curious, budget-conscious, slightly self-serious, maybe a little smug, but in a charming way. A person who will absolutely describe a snack as nuanced. And the genius of this is, the moment you pick a person that specific, your strategy gets easier, because you stop trying to be everything. You stop competing on the same terms. You stop needing to copy the big machine. You create a store that is optimized for that one weird, wonderful person, which, by the way, is still Trader Joe's customer today. If Trader Joe's had a mascot, it would be a person with a tote bag, who read half of Sapiens, and now makes it their entire personality. And I say that with love, because it's me. So Joe returns from this retreat, and in 1967, he opens the first Trader Joe's in Pasadena, and the vibe is your friend's dad, who owns a sailboat and insists it's a vessel. The whole theme is important, because it does something subtle: it turns a store into a world. Managers aren't store managers, they're captains. Assistants are first mates. Staff are crew members in Hawaiian shirts. And it's easy to laugh at that, because it is funny, but it's also kind of brilliant, because it transforms retail labor from, "I'm working a shift," into, "I'm part of a crew." That's a cultural choice, and culture becomes an operating system. You feel it in the store. People are helpful, they're present, they're not dead-eyed. In a normal grocery store, you ask where something is, and you can feel the employee's soul leaving their body. At Trader Joe's, you ask where something is, and the employee is like, "Oh, my God! Yes, follow me. We've been waiting for you." Joe also makes the other genius move: he creates rules, simple rules, brutal rules. Because when you're running a small store with a specific customer, you don't get to be chaotic. And he comes up with what he called the four tests for products, and they sound like something you'd hear in a spy movie: high value per cubic inch, high rate of consumption, easy to handle, outstanding in price or assortment. Translated: small store, limited shelf space, fast turnover, low complexity, and only stock things that are worth it. High value per cubic inch is my favorite phrase, because it makes groceries sound like missile components, but it's perfect. Trader Joe's stores are small. Every inch has to matter, so you don't waste space on things that don't deliver. So yes, nuts, coffee, snacks, wine, frozen foods, things people consume often, things you can move quickly. And easy to handle is one of the most quietly savage business decisions, because it means no butcher counter, no bakery, no complicated departments that require a lot of labor and equipment. Trader Joe's is basically designed to avoid the parts of grocery that make grocery miserable. They simplified the system, and when you simplify the system, you can put your energy into what actually matters: the product and the experience. This is where Trader Joe's starts to diverge from the rest of the grocery world, because normal grocery is a chaos buffet. It's built on an endless array of brands fighting for shelf space, slotting fees, promotions, coupons, loyalty programs, an entire economy of noise. Trader Joe's says... [singing] "No. No noise, no deals that are actually just math puzzles, no club pricing that makes you feel punished for existing without signing up."... They simplify, they curate, and then they do something that becomes their emotional signature. They turn shopping into a treasure hunt. Because Trader Joe's isn't designed to guarantee you'll find the exact thing you got last time, it's designed to guarantee you'll find something, and that's addictive. It's the same dopamine loop as thrift shopping. Maybe I'll find an amazing thing. Maybe it'll be gone next week. I should probably get two. That's how you leave with twelve frozen items.

So let's talk about wine, [gentle music] because wine is one of the first places Trader Joe's really flexes this weird rules strategy. They leaned into wine as a high value per cubic inch category because it's the epitome of dense value. It's super high consumption for their target customer, it's easy to handle, and it's differentiated. And also, Trader Joe's doesn't treat wine like all the other wine stores. Other stores are like, "Here are the brands. Here's the price ladder. Choose based on your income and shame." And Trader Joe's is like, "Here's a bottle of wine you've never heard of, and it's cheap, and it's weirdly good, and good luck explaining it to your friends." That's the Trader Joe's experience in a nutshell. It's like being handed a secret, and once you start getting secrets, you don't want to shop anywhere else. Then comes the move that makes Trader Joe's essentially uncopyable: their private label stuff. They start with the health food-ish stuff, anticipating what becomes the next health food wave: granola, nuts, the whole early I'm eating better now phase that America goes through every six months. But their private label isn't just a brand choice for Trader Joe's. It's an actual legit business model choice. Because when you sell national brands, customers can price compare you to death. Let's say you sell the exact same brand of almond butter as everyone else, and the customer can be like, "Yeah, but Target has it for twenty cents less, and also, I don't have to fight your closet-sized parking lot." So instead, Trader Joe's is like- [singing] ♪ What if we sell almond butter that only exists here? ♪ Now comparisons get weird, because there isn't one. Because you can't do a one-to-one price check on Trader Joe's almond butter that you now believe is the only almond butter. And once direct comparisons are hard or impossible, you stop being a commodity. You stop competing purely on price. You compete on identity, which is why Trader Joe's has fans, not customers. Fans don't ask, "Is this thirty cents cheaper somewhere else?" Fans ask, "Do they still have that thing I really like?" This private label strategy also changes the whole relationship with their suppliers. Because Trader Joe's isn't just a shelf for brands like most supermarkets. Trader Joe's is a curator, a partner, a buyer with specific taste and conviction. Here's something else they do with their suppliers that's pretty weird for a supermarket, and it's kind of legendary. Instead of slow paying their suppliers in sixty to ninety days, like a lot of big retailers, Trader Joe's has built a reputation for paying very quickly. We're talking, like, cash on delivery. Unheard of, but that's Trader Joe's. And even if you strip away the mythology and just focus on the principle, it's still super on point. They try to be, God forbid, a good buyer. [upbeat music] Imagine that. Which gets them better deals, which gets them better product, which makes customers happier, which creates more volume, which gives them more leverage. It's a virtuous cycle that starts with something unfashionable in business: treating partners like partners.

Now, let's take a quick detour into one of the most Trader Joe's facts of all time. In nineteen seventy-nine, Joe Coulombe sells Trader Joe's to Theo Albrecht of Aldi Nord, and the deal is done, get this, on one single page. One page! And it guarantees that Trader Joe's gets to essentially keep their independence, their weirdness. One page? Insane. It's two thousand and twenty-six, and I can't even cancel a gym membership without signing twelve documents and sacrificing a goat. But Trader Joe's? One page. Legendary. And after Joe sells to Aldi Nord, that independence really matters because it doesn't get absorbed into a giant corporate system where everything becomes standardized, and beige, and sad. It gets to keep being its weird, nautical, loving tote bag at a tiki party self, even as they end up going through a major expansion era. Under the new CEO, Dan Bane, who led the company for over two decades and subsequently retired in twenty twenty-three, Trader Joe's expands but somehow keeps its same core bizarre shape. Trader Joe's doesn't become a mega store. They don't become a big box warehouse membership super thing. They keep the small footprints. They continue to curate their own stuff, the private label identity, the treasure hunt, like, "I'm at a thrift store," kind of energy.... They scale the concept without bloating the operation, which is hard. Most companies scale and immediately lose their soul. Trader Joe's scaled and somehow stayed, well, Trader Joe's, which is why people can walk into a Trader Joe's in any city and pretty much instantly feel like, "Ah, I know this place. This is where I go to become the version of myself who eats olives and thinks they throw parties." Okay, here's the part of Trader Joe's that really feels the most Dumbify to me: the anti-data approach. Because we live in an era where every single company wants to know absolutely everything about you. Today, it feels like every company just wants to track you, segment you, retarget you, nurture you, put you in a funnel, assign you a score, and then send you an email that starts with something innocuous like, "Hey, David!" As if we're somehow old friends who survived a war together. But Trader Joe's, they basically said, "No, we're not doing that." No loyalty program, no coupons, no app, no tracking you like a wildlife biologist who wants to set a trap to make you buy more cheese. Instead, Trader Joe's just focuses on their in-store experience and their product, and they keep the store human. They do things like use bells instead of a PA system, which is such a tiny detail, but it really changes the whole vibe. It's subtle, but it signals, "We're not an airport. We're not a warehouse. We're a store where human beings exist." And all of these no's end up creating this kind of operational elegance. Because every loyalty program is essentially just more overhead. Every coupon system is also just more overhead. Every personalization engine is essentially just another thing to spend money on. But Trader Joe's just doesn't build any of those things at all. They save all that money and complexity, and they pour that back into what actually drives their brand: the product, the pricing, the curation, and the feeling. This is where Trader Joe's becomes super hard to copy, because if you're a traditional grocery chain, your economics are built around all the things that Trader Joe's refuses. As a traditional grocery store chain, you make money from the brands on your shelf, from promotions, from slotting fees, from trade spend, from the whole ecosystem of brands paying to play in all of your stores. If you're a Kroger, or a Walmart, or a traditional supermarket, and you try to suddenly behave like Trader Joe's, good luck. That's not just a simple change in strategy. That's essentially you detonating your entire business model. You'd have to unwind all of those relationships with the brands that actually fund your shelves. You'd have to retrain customers who are addicted to coupons and promotions. You'd have to rebuild your entire store experience and operating culture. It's not that they won't try to copy Trader Joe's, it's that they structurally can't. They can't copy Trader Joe's without becoming a completely different company, and that's the Trader Joe's moat. In the famous Seven Powers framing, that's what you call counter positioning. You build a business model that incumbents and competitors can't adopt without completely wrecking and annihilating themselves.

So what's the actual Dumbify lesson here? Why am I bothering to tell you about Trader Joe's? Because the goal certainly isn't just to admire Trader Joe's like a museum exhibit. The goal is to steal the method, and the method is not nautical tote bags and Hawaiian shirts. The method is not, "Let's just make a fun store." The method is what Joe Coulombe did in that retreat. Remember? When he just fucked off to the Caribbean and wrote his white paper, that was unique, and to most, kind of dumb. But what he really did was essentially he stopped asking the wrong question, which was, "How do I beat my big, scary competitors?" Instead, he started asking, "What is the world becoming? What will people be doing, and who will build a store that's specifically attuned to them and their needs?" That's such a different question. Competitor thinking makes you reactive, and that's mostly bad. But future thinking, that's what gives you the opportunity to be more original, more unique, more open to the needs of what's coming, rather than competitive thinking that keeps you in the same game as everyone else who might be bigger and better than you could ever hope or catch up to be. Future thinking, in essence, lets you invent an entirely new game. So here's how I want to translate Joe's white paper method into something you can actually do without needing to flee to the Caribbean or own a failing chain of convenience stores. Imagine you're in a moment right now where you feel boxed in: in your job, your business, your creative project, anything. You feel like you're competing on terms you didn't choose, like the game is rigged, like everyone else has more money, more distribution, more attention, more whatever. Here's the Dumbify move: Write a white paper to yourself. Not a research paper, not a business plan, not something you show anyone. A white paper is a one-page future memo. It's you making a bold prediction about who people will be in five to ten years, not what trends are.... not what technology is. People, what will they want more of? What will they be tired of? What will they be ashamed of? What will they secretly crave? What will they pay for because it makes them feel like they're winning? Coulombe looked at the GI Bill and the Jet Age and said, "A new person is coming: over-educated, underpaid, worldly, curious, value-driven." And then he built a store for that person. So your white paper doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be specific, because specificity creates strategy.

Dum, dum, dum, dum, Dumb Word of the Day. Dumb Word of the Day. It's a word. It's dumb. Use responsibly.

[upbeat music] Yes, it's time for my favorite part of the show. It's time for Dumb Word of the Day, and this week's word is the perfect word for this episode, and that word is [harp music] planogram, spelled P-L-A-N-O-G-R-A-M, planogram. A planogram is like the corporate blueprint for how shelves in stores should be arranged. Think of it like the military command center of grocery retail. It's, "This cereal goes here. This brand goes at eye level because they paid. This sale item goes here because we need to move inventory." But Trader Joe's planogram feels like maybe it was designed by someone who glanced at a planogram once, laughed like I did, and fed it to a seagull. Because Trader Joe's isn't built to maximize brand payments, it's built to maximize discovery and delight. That's a different kind of planogram. It might sound soft, but it's actually a really, really hard thing to pull off. But when you do, that delight drives a monster truck-sized can of loyalty that doesn't need a loyalty program. Let's use it in a sentence. [harp music] My garage sale was a total bust because my planogram relied heavily on placing my old flannel shirts and socks at a more prominent eye level than my wife's baked goods and underthings. [harp music] That was weird.

And that's our show. [upbeat music] Thank you for getting dumb with me today. If you need me, I'll be in the Trader Joe's doing my usual routine: walking in for just a couple things and leaving with a cart full of frozen food and a plant I'm most likely going to kill, but not on purpose.

If you think this episode is perfect for that friend or family member who could use less big box retail and more small footprint weirdness wrapped in reheatable cheese, send this their way. And if you'd be so kind to give this episode or this podcast a five-star review, I'd be grateful. Every little bit helps. And if you'd like more dumbness from the Dumbify dummyverse, then sign up for the Dumbify newsletter at david-carson.com. Until next week, I'm your host, David Carson. Stay weird, stay curious, and if you're stuck competing with a giant machine, do what Joe Coulombe did: stop trying to win their game and invent your own. [upbeat music]