Running head: WORKING FILE: TRADER JOES SITE VISIT

Working File: Trader Joes Site Visit David Owens-Hill Queens University of Charlotte October 9, 2011

WORKING FILE: TRADER JOES SITE VISIT

Three Levels of Culture To understand the culture of Trader Joes as a corporate entity, we must look through three levels of their being (borrowed from Schien): artifacts, values, and assumptions. This working file will be divided into those categories. On October 5, 2011 Mark Grumbach, Store Captain at Trader Joes Metropolitan in Charlotte, North Carolina gave us a tour of his store and addressed the items that he thought best represented the culture of the organization. His tour was part merchandising and part org-chatthat is he discussed both the traditional aspects of running a grocery store and discussed the workings of the organization. Being a regular customer of his store, I understood most of what he addressed on a personal level; there are few ways to be more intimately involved with an organization than to be a member of its core group of stakeholdersas a shopper, my dollars reinforce Trader Joes raison dtre.

Artifacts Mark was wearing a floral Hawaiian shirt. His job title is Captain. He refers to his employees as crew members. He addressed the customer service bell and justified its use over a traditional public address system. Each of these artifacts encourages a shiplike metaphor within the store. As a regular Trader Joes customer, I know that this metaphor is not specific to the Metropolitan location; these are not gimmicks specific to a particular subgroup of the total Trader Joes organization. Ship metaphors tie back to a long-held assumption of the vessel as efficient, tidy, a place that encourages teamwork, an entity with forward momentum. Ships, in the modern age (e.g. the age of Trader Joe proper noun versus the age of historical ocean faring exploration) also have an element of

WORKING FILE: TRADER JOES SITE VISIT

casual fun. While they are necessarily ship-shape they are also vessels that encourage exploration, a bit of fun, and a laid back lifestyle. The Trader Joes lifestyle clings to these notions of modernity: the staff (through recommendations, samplings, etc.) encourage you to explore new foods with which you may not be familiar, the packaging and signage are whimsical and fun (to offset the uncertainty that accompanies purchasing foods with which you are not familiar by virtue of ingredients or packaging), and food should be about more than sustenancemaking and eating food is a very personal and intimate affair that should be fun. The stores signage further reinforces the notion of food as experience. The signs are hand-lettered, a tradition that has its roots in the very dawn of signage. These roots reach back to an era when signage was ostensibly about marketing a product but, because of the human act of crafting the message, also implied a human connection to the products marketed. I was especially struck by the signage that accompanied staff recommendationsdid you notice the pictures of the staff who made the recommendation? Trader Joes is telling you in no uncertain terms that the food is good, but that message isnt coming top-down, rather it is coming from people just like you and me. People who eat. The definition of everyman. Id like to propose that the prices at Trader Joes are also artifacts. Surely their low prices are a marketers dream to get foot traffic in the door, but they become more than that when you look at the culture as a whole. The low prices on private-label foods (over 85% of the items in Trader Joes are private label) become a part of the culture for stakeholders. Weve become accustomed to never seeing a sale, but we still look for that crazy price on a box of lentils or on a package of frozen edamame. The shelf-talkers that

WORKING FILE: TRADER JOES SITE VISIT

the staff place to emphasize a particularly low price do more than entice us to buy. From an operational standpoint, Grumbach points out, these low prices are because of a reduction in the cost of the item, which is passed directly to the consumer. From an organizational culture standpoint, theyre one of the primary motivational factors for continued stakeholder buy-in. If you cant entice your stakeholders to stay engaged, theyll leave and your organization will soon encounter a crisis of authenticity.

Values After our tour, where the Topics in Organizational Culture class furiously took notes on artifacts, we were lucky to be able to interview Grumbach off-site. The location of our interview is important hereone wonders if Grumbach could have been frank and earnest about organizational values if he were in situ. It is much easier to think about your normal when you arent surrounded by it. Grumbach pointed out that, since the company was founded, Trader Joes has had only three CEOs. He also spent time explaining how his staff is empowered to make merchandising decisions about the items displayed around the store. He told us of his career with the company and the number of stores (eight or so over approximately fifteen years). He explained the workload distribution for his staff: no more than two hours at a register at a time, frequently switching directions so one arm doesnt get more fatigued than another. Grumbach explained the training programs that his staff has access to as well as their benefits, both of which are generous for a grocer.

WORKING FILE: TRADER JOES SITE VISIT

All of these items point to the value Trader Joes places on its people. As much as they care about the products they introduce to the community, they are more interested in keeping their staff engaged and involved in the company. Human capital aside, this approach to Human Resources has a tangible benefit: the fewer staff you have to train, the fewer hours of productivity lost to an empty position. Trader Joes has ported the fiscal necessity of running a lean operation into a work environment that encourages its staff to stick around for the long haul; the entire voyage, if were carrying through the ship metaphor.

Assumptions If we believe that the reason we study artifacts and values is to get to the assumptions, we can believe that this is the meat of the Working File. And I do believe this. Grumbach was open and honest, and while appreciated, he was clearly an ingrained member of the organization. I believe several things to be unequivocally true about Trader Joes as an organization: Trader Joes values their people Trader Joes values their customer Trader Joes values the experience of shopping, cooking, and eating Trader Joes has a handle on the metaphors and artifacts necessary to encourage and reinforce their corporate culture at a sub-cultural level to employees and customers alike

None of the above should be considered a negative reflection on the organization, though, admittedly, the fourth bullet does make the organization sound a bit manipulative. All four assumptions about the companys culture reify the core mission of the entity: to provide interesting and lost-cost grocery options to people who otherwise

WORKING FILE: TRADER JOES SITE VISIT

wouldnt have them. By relying on the metaphors and artifacts that work on a surfacelevel and subconsciously in the minds of the stakeholders, the company is able to best authenticate its existence.

Conclusion The organizations members subscribe to the metaphors, use the artifacts encouraged by precedent, and further reify the notions of Trader Joes as an entity (rather than as just another company.) From our limited interview time, I believe the wholehearted subscription to these values may be a top-down notion. No cultural analysis would be complete without a commensurate interview with a low-level employee to ground managements notion of organizational culture. I propose that the strict adherence to Trader Joes culture was a bit too by-the-book. If we believe, as I do, that the truth is somewhere in the middle of most situations, we need the other end of the spectrum from which to triangulate an actual assumption on corporate culture. In the absence of this perspective point, we still have a valuable trove of analysis that is unique to this organization. Im encouraged by the idea of applying similar cultural analysis themes to organizations of differing missions. I hypothesize that the artifacts and values will differ from organization-to-organization, but that the fourth bullet point will be consistent across myriad successful organizations.