I don’t have a car, but I enjoy walking through any parking lot on my way to the bus/trolley stop just to see how many stalkers I can drag along with me.
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The one on the UWS is similar. It’s like TJ’s management said “hmmm, no cars involved in this town. How else can we add that extra bit of annoying effort to put the customers through?”
The Pico store is more typical of TJ’s: tiny and badly laid-out rooftop parking lot. But it’s understandable, since I believe that location was built specifically for the chain.
The puzzler for me has been the Beverly Hills store at La Cienega. That condo building couldn’t have been constructed to TJ’s specs, and yet that underground lot is the usual cramped nightmare. Perhaps the developer designed the rotten parking lot specifically to lure TJ’s in as a tenant.
As in many aspects of my off-peak life, my solution to these First World problems is to go in the middle of the day.
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Exactly right. But see my comment on the NYC locations above. One way or another, TJ’s is generally going to make you jump through some sort of annoying, increased revenue-per-SQF hoop to get at those products.
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Sounds like something the people behind me honking would say…
Edit: Also, when people aren’t social distancing like they should, you want to get in and out as soon as possible, so there is reason to be concerned.
Ah, this makes total sense. I was mentioning to my husband how there was a time the parking was ample in one TJ location in Long Beach. We went there occasionally but when the supermarket strike happened, we shopped at Bristol Farms and Stater Bros along with TJs in order to not cross the picket lines with Ralph’s and Vons. We weren’t the only ones. Long Beach, San Pedro and the greater Harbor areas are BIG union strongholds.
I think this ultimately hurt Big Grocery in LA County as people found that TJs and Stater Bros places were less expensive than Ralph’s and Vons.
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I’ll play the straight man here (so to speak) and quote a Bloomberg article that summarizes a Strong Towns article with: “less parking keeps overhead costs to a minimum, which translates to lower food prices.”
If the rest of the store and the check out lines are at or over capacity, increasing the parking is just going to exacerbate the capacity problem within the store.
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I tell you, I kind of like the lower capacity, even with the wait outside, even if my total time is more. I know my TJs perfectly* and in the lighter traffic I can barrel through there and fill a cart of groceries in 15 minutes max.
- I also have a penchant for Aloha wear, so if someone asks me for help I don’t waste time explaining I don’t work there, just send my fellow Trader Joe’sians on their way!
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If you don’t walk them there, then they can tell you’re not an employee.
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I never have a problem finding a spot at TJs when I go there at 5am.
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you forgot that most look at that and don’t realize its a bad city.
more likely they are saying “whew! plenty of parking”
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Ah, this thread got me pining for the TJ in Menlo Park my wife and I used to frequent. Small and easy to bike to.
What it also got me thinkIng about is that where I live now, I often avoid the local Fred Meyer because of the parking and its excessive size in favor of a smaller but more expensive locally owned store close to home. I am willing to pay more for a more relaxed shopping experience.
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I used to live near that Pico one, and it truly is nuts- like I thought it was a joke or a mistake the first time I went. There are fewer spaces than my hair salon has. All TJs are tight, but that Pico one is really ridiculous.
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Yeah. We’re not talking about one with a roof lot. This is Pico @ 10 freeway. There’s a roof lot at Olympic near Barrington that isn’t half bad but the grade to get up there is kinda crazy.
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My error. I was thinking of the Olympic one.
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I remember, back in the oldern days, when talk in the BB comment section was about the destructive nature inherent to the ‘big stores’ in atomizing then aggregating the late stage capitalist classes… destroying the communities that shop at small stores, destroying small businesses.
I guess there’s a stage in life when getting a good park is worthy of discussion
do I really need to /s ?
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Makes me enjoy the very walkable Trader Joe’s in my area all the more!
Spot on.
I didn’t get that. Why is a queue through the shop annoying? Where else is the queue supposed to be?
Germany is defined by cars, and most people would find this kind of city planning and public architecture really horrifying.
Which totally does not make sense, since we create one suburb single-storey super market and department store after the other, and force people to go there by car from all the villages around. And kill off the smallish department stores and supermarkets. We already lost the small community service shops. When I grew up, “Tante Emma-Läden” were the norm. Now, they are all but gone. And families own several cars.
But still, the picture above would be rated as an example of the terrible American way of life…
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Munich resident here who no longer owns a car. I grew up in the States, and still can compare to the US in many ways. What I have noticed when I use a car to go shopping (thanks, ShareNow!) is that parking in Germany tends to go into multilevel garages rather than sprawls. It seems the philosophy is that customers should not be expected to walk more than X meters from the door, using elevators to keep walking down.
But yeah, supermarkets have been forcing the the smaller grocery stores out of business. It doesn’t help that most of the Tante Emma Läden were assimilated by Edeka. A lot of neighbourhood stores are now TEDi (comparable to dollar stores) and seedy little vape supply shops, chain clothing stores (Ernsting’s Family or KiK), or Asian groceries.
Honestly, I’d like to take a look in a Trader Joe’s, as it seems to be sort of an Aldi but not quite.
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The entire shop is the queue at the Manhattan TJs. At most times of day you enter the store and immediately get into the checkout line that wends its way through every aisle, shopping as you go until you reach the cashier. I suppose that might be seen as having some sort of odd efficiency, but it’s not the usual grocery shopping experience for Americans (including at TJs outside NYC). Normally, the checkout queues are at the tills where you pay for your items.
Are these NYC TJ’s kinds of queues common in Germany?
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This is derailing a bit, but Edeka is a complicated case: it’s a Genossenschaft with about 4.5 k independent businesses contracting together, plus a strong central organisation. The Wikipedia page on it is rather unhelpful, but basically, the idea behind Edeka was that together, better pricing can be achieved, and competition against larger (read: dominant) other players would be possible. The Tante Emma-Läden joining Edeka - BTW, not many Germanophones could spell out it’s Einkaufsgenossenschaft der Kolonialwarenhändler - actually made sense to me.
The market concentration (swallowing Kaiser’s Tengelmann, Plus and so on) are another thing, entirely.
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