Why is Trader Joe’s out of only one kind of peanut butter?
It’s their house brand organic PB and comes in 4 flavors: creamy no salt, creamy salted, crunchy no salt, crunchy salted. My local TJ’s is out of only creamy no salt, but they have lots of the other three. How could this happen? I mean, if they can make crunchy no salt, they can make creamy no salt by just not adding all the peanut bits. The jars are the same. Maybe they’re out of the labels. Or a delivery mixup. I can’t think of anything else that it could be. Perhaps I’m lacking imagination here.
One WAG is that creamy no-salt is what’s often called for in recipes for peanut butter cookies. So TJ’s may not have restocked yet after the holiday baking season.
Could be anything from ordering wrong to one customer coming in an wiping out the entire stock (which happens more often than you’d think).
I doubt it’s a manufacturing error, though that could be easily figured out by calling the next closest store and asking if they have any. Manufacturing problems tend to affect more than a single location.
Maybe a herd of elephants with high blood pressure were in town?
Or they may have the infamous “More in the back” that they didn’t have time to restock on the shelves.
Before the “Well, if it’s so popular, they should stock more on the shelf!” post, as I’ve posted in other threads, the logistics of product placement and stocking of shelves is a mystery that sometimes the even the store manager isn’t clued in to.
I’ve been buying this product for years and it hasn’t happened before. So that’s unlikely.
OK, those are definite possibilities.
Well, maybe. But last week they were almost out and I took the last one. It was way in the back. They didn’t put any out in the intervening week. So it’s actually for two weeks the shelf was not stocked. It’s very unlike them not to stock in that length of time. TJ’s, in general, runs too tight a ship to leave things unstocked like that.
In fact, leaving the empty gap for an out of stock item (which they did for this) is unlike them. They usually close them up and remove the sign on the shelf. At least for larger items like cereal boxes. Perhaps they didn’t want to do all the shuffling of the jars that would entail.
It could also be that they’re undergoing or planning inventory which is usually done in January because of year end accounting. I worked for an inventory service for a couple of years and some stores would purposely allow their shelves go low on stock, keeping the unopened boxes in the back where they’re easier and cheaper to count as full cases. I’ve heard stock workers get yelled at for restocking shelves prior to or during inventory.
I don’t know how big a store Trader Joe’s has, but even the largest stores should take more than a few days to complete inventory.
Sometimes stores would even hold off on orders prior to inventory to minimize what needs to be counted. Or the distribution warehouse may be holding off on deliveries. More errors = more recounts = more money spent on store staffing and time the store is closed. Even if it’s done during closed hours, the staff has clean up and reset or restock the shelves before reopening.
Have you considered the awful possibility that they’ve discontinued this item?
Well, have you?
How many times in your life have you attempted to buy an item that you had long favored, only to find that, however irrationally, it’s been discontinued? If never, you’ve lived a charmed life.
Not just food: Kitchen utensils, clothing items, ant poison that actually worked, all kinds of things.
WHEN YOU FIND A PRODUCT YOU LIKE, BUY A LIFETIME SUPPLY WHILE YOU CAN, BECAUSE THEY WILL DISCONTINUE IT!!!
I traveled to a southern California town in 2012 for a funeral. Before returning home the next day, I hit the Trader Joe’s in the mall across from my motel. I was inside near the front of the store and noticed a tour bus pull up out front. Maybe 40 youngish to middle-age-ish Asian men in casual clothes RAN inside wielding pocket cameras. They dashed about the store photographing everything. I don’t recall if they paid special attention to the nut-butter section. Then they ran out, re-boarded, and the bus spun off.
Was the OP’s missing peanut butter photo-bombed at some point?
I don’t know if this is related to the dire circumstances discussed in the OP, but I do know that my local supermarket has not had Jif Extra Chunky peanut butter for about a month! Normally I buy the BIG jar, but if that isn’t available, I’ll buy several small jars. But since mid December they haven’t had ANYTHING but their execrable Creamy version. What am I, a two-year-old? C’mon, Jewel Stores; where is my Extra Chunky Jif?
They definitely would not have left the gap on the shelves if that were the case.
As far as I can tell, creamy tastes exactly the same as crunchy, but it spreads much easier and smoother. I wish TJ’s also had big jars of it, since I buy so much. All they have is one pounders.
Did you ask the store manager or somebody else that works there? If an item I regularly bought was unstocked for two weeks, I sure as heck would ask, especially during the part when they (not everyone, but it’s a common quesiton – Don’t know if TJ does it, but I think they do) ask you “did you find everything you need?”
I may ask the next time I go there, if it’s still not stocked. It’s a matter of convenience as to whether I ask; I rarely go way out of my way to ask about missing items. The last time I asked about a missing item (my favorite kind of cereal), they said it’d be back in mid-October. It actually returned in early December.
But hey, it’s not like I’m being deprived of PB. I bought the crunchy kind and, as I said, it tastes the same as smooth. I was just wondering about the mystery of how they can have crunchy but not smooth.
If you’ve been out of your favorite PB for two weeks, with no end to the drought in sight, then buying exorbitantly priced PB on Amazon is allowed.
That’s what my husband justifies as a " 'Mergency."
If Trader Joe’s continually puts you in 'Mergency status, then it’s time to buy peanuts in 50-pound bags and using a food processor to make your own.
~VOW
It’s not improbable that the two varieties are made at different plants or even by different manufacturers. Generic and store brands (and even name brands, sometimes) are just farmed out to the lowest bidder. If there’s a bottleneck, a plant or packager will favor it’s bigger clients. A more widely distributed client lake Jiff or Peter Pan will get priority over a regional one like TJs.
Who’s gonna steal the peanut butter
I’ll get the can of sardines
Runnin’ up and down the aisle of the Trader Joe’s
Stickin’ food in our jeans
We never took more than we could eat
There was plenty left on the racks (oops!)
We all swore if we ever got rich
We would pay the Trader Joe’s back
Yes sir…Yes sir
We would pay the Trader Joe’s back
The logistics of that peanut butter getting to your store is pretty complex. Odds are, somewhere a truck didn’t arrive where/when it should have, and it is likely to affect things for weeks. Most stores don’t make “emergency” orders to fix things like that. They rely on regular shipments to eventually even it all out. But especially if it is not a high demand item, and shipments are small, those who like you missed it, and see it on the shelf after the first delivery, might buy a lot more than usual, so when you show up 2 days later, it looks like TJ is “still” out. Repeat for a couple more weekly trucks.
It worked like that when we had a newfound demand for (has to be TJ) cashew butter, anyway.
