[preamble: Slate on the insider's guide to shopping at Trader Joe's]

When the world is a monster, bad to swallow you whole, sometimes a well-timed section of an old-school print newspaper can be a savior. Say, for instance, you’re working on SMITH’s email newsletter from a booth at Perch, your new favorite cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn. When—what’s this?—no less than a dozen baby strollers roll in. Could it be some kind of hipster parenting group meeting? No such luck. Mother or father or nanny & child have arrived en masse for an Altie Rocker Sing-a-Long … and quicker than you can say, “This Land is Your Land,” SMITH is soaking in a rollicking rendition of the “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” No matter. I order a peach and banana smoothie, drop a buck in the café’s Karma Boomerang tip jar, put down my laptop and reach for the paper. I’m then pleased to see a big, fluffy piece on the gourmet and indeed soulful supermarket, Trader Joe’s.
Excerpt:

There is nothing quite like the chain anywhere else on the American food landscape. “Trader Joe’s is radically different in many ways from other food retailers,” said Stephen Dowdell, editor in chief of Progressive Grocer magazine. “The stores are small, they don’t rely on national brands, you can’t do price comparisons and they definitely don’t offer one-stop shopping. But every product has a story.

[The job of] the 14 other “category leaders,” is to perpetually travel the world visiting all kinds of food businesses—restaurants, farmers’ markets, artisanal pasta makers, street stalls and supermarkets—and then translate their finds to the stores. When a category leader was served an ideal tiramisu at a small restaurant on the Amalfi coast of Italy, he spent months working with the chef on a version that could be mass-produced, frozen, exported to the United States.

The Trader Joe’s enthusiasts I know—and my friends there are many—could certainly tell you stories of camping trips and bachelor parties and lost weekends fueled by the store’s quirky mix of good-living goodies. I’ve got dozen of tales about the delightful and dark places that Joe’s bags of frozen edamame and cases of the miracle powder Emergen-C have taken me. Got one? Sure it’s a little silly, and maybe crass, but the brands we believe in are part of who we are and shape the narrative of our lives. So why not? Submit your Trader Joe’s story in the comments area below. If this topic finds some traction, we’ll give it its own page on the site.

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