Joe Coulombe, a struggling convenience store owner in Los Angeles, decided in 1967 to open a grocery chain to appeal to the small but growing number of well-educated, well-traveled consumers that mainstream supermarkets were ignoring.
“I have an ideal audience in mind,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1981. “This is a person who got a Fulbright scholarship, went to Europe for a couple of years and developed a taste for something other than Velveeta” ordinary beer and Folgers coffee, he said.
Coulombe recognized that international travel was about to explode thanks to the new Boeing 747 hitting the market. For the name of his new store, Coulombe landed on Trader Joe’s to evoke exotic images of the South Seas. The name was inspired by Trader Vic’s, a popular Tiki Bar restaurant started in California.
One marketing expert thought it was a terrible name — “Trader” was “something associated with selling defective horse flesh,” Coulombe said in his memoir, “Becoming Trader Joe,”…
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