Of the 5 TJ’s I’ve been to, none has a particularly small parking lot. One has a vast one as TJ’s took the place of a shuttered supermarket at that location. One thing to remember is they are comparatively small stores without a huge number of products and you get in and out pretty quickly, so the turnover in the parking lot is pretty quick.
The Pound Plus dark chocolate bars are excellent quality, and very cheap (I believe someone else upthread mentioned this). The milk chocolate is awful, though, imo.
I hadn’t heard this, so I Googled. There were a bunch of webpages that talked about this (this one, for example). Nothing official from the company, but the speculation seemed to be that the small stores and small parking lots are, in part, to keep the costs down.
In our case, it was because they moved into a busy urban street with a small footprint (but did hollow out the basement as a parking ramp, so parking is adequate). I’m sure if they were Wegman’s they could’ve bought an acre out in the 'burbs and had plenty of parking.
I agree with the others that say Trader Joe’s isn’t a replacement for a more general purpose grocery, unlike, say, Whole Foods. My own shopping takes me far and wide to grocery stores all over the place but seldom do I go out of my way to TJs. It’s a stop of convenience, when I’m in the area. Meats, produce, cbeese are more expensive than elsewhere. The one thing I always grab is the red jalapeno hot sauce, very good and I’ve not found another like it. Usually, some frozen rice bowls find their way into my basket. It’s the only place I’ve seen tritip locally. I’ve never bought any but the houseplants have turned my head a time or two.
The parking lot of my closest store (Park Ridge, Il) is seriously dreadful. Using google to fly over, there are 60 spots for TJs and several other businesses. It’s surrounded by condos & townhouses and I’m sure some use the lot for quick stops. In the winter, plowed snow eats up about 6-8 of the spots, awful.
There’s a fairly active Trader Joe’s subreddit. It’s a place for folks to give recommendations (or not) and feedback on products and a good way to get a feel for what’s new or discontinued.
When it come to “Two buck Chuck”, a friend recommends buying a bottle and trying it out in the parking lot. Then decide whether to go back in to buy a case
I have always liked TJ’s beef tamales – they’re inexpensive and go well with their green salsa, which is mild, but is maybe a little saltier than it should be. The green salsa also good with TJ’s blue corn tortilla chips.
TJ’s has probably 8 or so different types of canned tuna. The best is the yellow fin tuna. I’m a fin…er, fan.
Not a food, but the pine kitty litter is the one that we like more than any other – years of searching.
Dried coconut and bananas (not the crunchy banana chips, but the softer kind) are good go-to snacks for us.
Humble brag: my mom shopped at the very first TJ’s in South Pasadena, CA, 40-plus years ago. I was like, “This isn’t from Ralphs…”
Wine. Not the Charles Shaw stuff, either. There are a lot of good, drinkable wines at or under $10. The ice cream is pretty good, and I’ll always get some produce so that I’m not checking out with only 12 bottles of wine.
They sell packaged fresh meat and cheese, milk, peanut butter, and a couple of other staples, but the vast, vast majority of the space is filled with stuff for people who think cooking and heating-up are the same thing, and junk food.
Beef tamales, or green chile and cheese tamales…? It’s hard to say which we like better. They’re both good. (Mrs. L.A. does not prefer the sweet corn green chile and cheese ones.)
Our definition of ‘civilization’ is “less than a 90 minute drive to Trader Joe’s and CostCo” and we’ve barely managed that in our last couple homes. We don’t need a lot from TJ’s but what we want, they’ve got. Certain select wines and beers, breads and nut butters, soups and sauces, frozen herbs and entrees. We skip the fast treats and other not-a-deal offerings.
I’ll admit we splurged more when a TJ’s was on our daily drive route, before we retired to the boonies. Lunch wraps, mutant tamales, frozen veggie medleys, more than I can recall a couple decades later. But we’ve been hooked on TJ’s since about 1982. We go for quality and value, not kewl vibes.
My recommendation: Peppermint Joe-Joes. They appear around the Holidays and disappear quietly sometime in January. Essentially an Oreo with peppermint flakes in the filling.
Two things I don’t recommend: Every one of their pasta sauces is thin and soupy. If you boiled them down to about 50% volume, you’d have a reasonable sauce.
