I live in an area where high-quality produce is cheap and easy to find, so I don’t rely on either TJ’s or Whole Foods for fruits and vegetables. There’s a TJ’s close to my home, so I tend to go there when I’m in a hurry to get something edible to put on the table. Whole Foods, on the other hand, tends to annoy me. The place is overpriced, and has a bit of a cult feeling to it.
My biggest frustration with TJ’s is that they stop carrying products that I like. One example is their black bean and cheese taquitos, which they discontinued a few months ago. Not only did these taste pretty good, but they were fairly low in sodium, which I have to be careful about because I’m taking care of my 91-year-old father.
I’ll stop in a Trader Joe’s if I’m close to one, but only to buy Liberté, which is a reasonably priced pinot noir (about $10 here). I’m not a fan of their famous, cheap wine, and there’s really nothing else in the store at appeals to me at all. It seems to be all pre-made, frozen food with a limited selection of fresh vegetables on the way in. The staff, though, are amazing, and if they sold, you know, useful stuff, I’d see myself being a fan.
I don’t know that I’ve even been to a Whole Foods, as I don’t have any near me. I tend to think that Fresh Thyme is supposed to be the same style of store, though, a copycat, and I can’t stand it because it’s full of froo-froo hippie crap instead of anything useful. If this isn’t the case for Whole Foods, by all means let me know, though.
We’re a household that cooks from ingredients, and don’t really snack, so there’s really nothing appealing about these. Because of TJ’s great attitudes, though, I really wish they sold more food ingredients instead of junk food, though.
Ain’t that the truth? They used to have a whole selection of (mostly Asian-themed) frozen meals in a bowl. Loved 'em. They’ve been gone for years. Same with their frozen stir-fry-in-a-bag meals. Used to be our standby dinner, and I’d eat the leftovers for lunch at work the next day. Again, all gone, except for one or two of them that I never really liked to begin with. And that’s just for starters.
Whole Foods founder and current CEO John Mackey is an anti-union libertarian who claims not to be a climate-change denialist but who is totally a climate-change denialist. He’s a schmuck, and he’s used his power to bust unions, and his influence in the organic food markets to downplay the dangers of climate change is itself dangerous.
I have shopped at both, but neither is very close to me. Even if they were closer, I wouldn’t shop at either more than a few times a year. I do the vast majority of my food shopping at traditional supermarkets and warehouse clubs, which are far cheaper.
I used to go to WF a few times a year for their reasonably priced bulk food: things like rolled oats and spices. I never found anything else there that was reasonably priced. A few years ago a locally owned bulk-food store opened that’s closer, cheaper, and friendlier. I haven’t been inside a WF since.
I continue to go to TJ’s a few times a year. I rarely make a special trip, but I’ll stop in if I happen to be near one. They have a few items of very high quality that I really enjoy. Prices are not exactly cheap, but they’re worth it as a special treat now and then.
I shop at a regular supermarket and at Whole Foods most weeks, and go to Trader Joes every couple of months. So I voted “Whole Foods” on frequency. But really, they are different.
I like the produce and meat at Whole Foods. If I need to, I can get all my groceries there, although the supermarket has better prices and “regular brands”. (There’s breakfast cereal at Whole Foods, but not anyone’s favorite brands.) But in a pinch, I get get everything I need there.
Trader Joes doesn’t have enough variety to be my supermarket. But it has good prices on what it has, and it has lots of specialty items that are lower quality or harder to get elsewhere. So I buy wild rice at Trader Joes, because they sell pure wild rice for a reasonable price. The supermarket sells tiny expensive one-serving boxes, or wild-and-long-grain-rice-blend. My husband buys pure cranberry juice at trader joes because they carry it. They stopped selling my favorite juice (a blend of cranberry, blueberry, and hmm, maybe cherry?) but they still have an excellent selection of pure fruit juices and mixed fruit juices. If I want a pound of smoked salmon for a party, I got to Trader Joes, which carries an excellent brand for a reasonable price. We sometimes buy cookies and candies at Trader Joes, too.
They’re different stores for different purposes, but I don’t find myself going to either much.I’m more likely to go to Whole Foods, though, in search of something than Trader Joe’s. I’m maybe at TJ’s twice a year and WF’s six times a year. TJ’s is great, but every time I step in there to have a look around, there’s really nothing that interests me. There’s a couple of frozen or prepared items that I will occasionally pick up, but I typically don’t eat a lot of premade stuff, so it’s typically just the local supermarket for me. With Whole Foods, I like their cheese selection (my local groceries might have a lot of different cheeses, but they are mostly bland mass market brands. Like I can’t find a Stilton, morbier, or even a real Parmigiano-Reggiano at my two usual supermarkets. Whole Foods is the closest place I could think of with a decent cheese selection. There’s a Mariano’s closer that is good, as well, but not as extensive as Whole Foods.)
They also have a surprisingly good in-house smoked brisket. If I don’t feel like driving to my favorite barbecue brisket places in the area (which, admittedly, is only two or three places), Whole Foods more than suffices.
I go to TJ’s a few times a year and Whole Foods basically never - too expensive, and just about anything I would buy there, I can get somewhere else cheaper. I don’t buy a lot of prepared foods, but at TJ’s I might buy wine, nuts or dried fruit, jarred salsa, cheese, decaf coffee (which we don’t go through very fast - regular coffee comes in 3 lb. bags from Costco, but decaf lives in the freezer for the occasional after-dinner coffee, so we buy the 12 oz. canisters from TJ’s), and I use the Pound Plus chocolate bars for baking because they are cheap as hell and better than most of what you can buy in a regular supermarket. (I made chocolate-dipped glaceed apricots this year for office Christmas gifts, and everyone was impressed with the chocolate.) Once in a while I might buy the fresh-squeezed orange or grapefruit juice, cookies, or something like that. They were handy when I needed cookies to make a cheesecake crust; triple ginger cookies were awesome with pumpkin bourbon cheesecake!
Whole Foods I pretty much go to only when I’m at my dentist’s office and want a snack afterwards because they are down the block, or maybe if I want some esoteric type of flour or grain from the bulk bins for a recipe, or steel-cut oats, or the occasional natural cosmetic item. Although WF was very handy a couple of weeks ago when we went to a vegan friend’s wedding, it was a short walk from the hotel, and all the vegan family members could find something they were willing to eat at the food counters there. Suburban Orlando strip malls are not a hotbed of vegan dining.
Trader Joe’s by a slight margin. They have different roles though. Trader Joe’s is more like a Tappas bar; it’s a highly curated experience, and everything I’ve gotten there has been excellent. But I wouldn’t want to do all my grocery shopping there. The “Unexpected Cheddar” is divine.
Whole foods is closer to a grocery store, although still too expensive to be a total grocery destination. And there is an awful lot of crap to sift through while looking for the gems at Whole Foods. Even if I had the money, I’d chafe at paying that much for regular shopping. I wouldn’t want to live without their bakery though, and the citrus salmon at the deli is divine.
The point that puts Whole foods a little below is that I’ve bought some really disappointing stuff there, which made me wonder if the manager had ever tried it. Despite the fact that I’ve had to toss some TJ’s veggies that might have been dangerous, I consider that to be a problem with the American food system, not specific to Trader Joe’s. And TJ’s was very assertive about contacting the public and making sure we knew to toss it out and come back for a refund. I liked the approach they took toward it.
When I lived in Berkeley a few years ago, I felt like I shouldn’t be shopping at the WF on Ashby because I didn’t dress colorfully enough, or in pastel hemp clothing.
We have our pick of all kinds of good food stores in northern VA. Whole Foods went downhill years ago. We end up getting everything at a combo of Wegmans, Trader Joe’s, various Asian supermarkets, and farmers markets.
I do almost all my shopping at my local food co-ops and at farmers markets; we buy some staples at TJ’s like cheese, milk, eggs, chicken, canned tomatoes, honey because their organic staples are usually cheaper. I long ago tired of their frozen meals. I loathe Whole Foods the way and for the same reason I loathe Amazon and Walmart. I never, ever go there. I also very rarely shop at conventional supermarkets because I don’t eat that kind of food.
I remember that Trader Joe’s, or at least the one I used to shop at in Salt Lake City, goes one step better than that.
I was once talking to a stocker working in the frozen food section and asked her if she had tried a particular item that I hadn’t seen before, and she said that she hadn’t had it yet, and I guess I must have mentioned something along the lines of, “Thanks anyway, I guess it seems kind of spendy and I don’t know if that is something I would really enjoy that much, maybe I’ll just stick to my usual stuff today.” and she said, “Well, you know that if you buy something here and don’t like it, you can always bring it back and get a refund, right?”, and I told her that sure, at almost any reputable store if something was spoiled or otherwise defective you could bring in the unused portion and get a replacement, but she said at TJ’s, if you don’t like something for any reason or for no reason at all, even if you already eaten the entire item, you just need to bring in the empty packaging and you will get a full cash refund with a reciept, or if you have lost the reciept, store credit, or a replacement, your call.
I think I only took them up on this extremely liberal policy once or possibly twice, but knowing how it worked, over the years I ended up getting several things I might not have otherwise tried, knowing there was no risk of paying a lot of money for something and then finding out it wasn’t something I would really enjoy.
TJ’s also has a policy of letting customers taste items, even if it means opening a package. Obviously, there are limits to this (mind if I do a taste test of all of your wines?), but it’s a generous policy.
That’s spoiled? Huh. I’ve got an Aldi, a Bi-Rite, and something called Lucky’s (overpriced and mediocre quality, but it’s there) within easy walking distance, two Giant Eagles, a Marc’s, and a Discount Drug Mart in easy bike distance, a Sav-A-Lot that’s a little further but that I go right past on a number of my other errands anyway, and a Dave’s, a Heinen’s, a Whole Foods, another Sav-A-Lot, and the West Side Market close enough that I could reasonably bike to them if for some reason I thought it was important. By any reasonable standard of “driving distance”, I could also add a Wal-Mart, another Heinen’s, another Dave’s, another Aldi, another Marc’s, a Trader Joe’s, and probably a few others I’m forgetting or not familiar with.
Just looking at the web site, Jungle Jim’s seems more like Whole Foods than like Trader Joe’s. JJ’s has a butcher, a deli, an olive bar, and a good-sized produce section. TJ’s sells pre-packaged foods; even their fish, meat, and poultry is packaged, and TJ’s fresh produce selections are limited.
On the other hand, JJ’s has big candy, soda, and toy balloon sections, and JJ’s also sells cigars. This sets it apart from both TJ’s and Whole Foods.