When Convenience Kills
On Trader Joe's, TV Dinners, & Using Your Hands
A few months ago, a group of acquaintances and I were toggling around Apple Maps quietly, trying to find a dinner restaurant - an experience of collective decision paralysis I’ve had more times than I can count. Each of us threw restaurant options into the hat (“What about _______?”), which were each met with respectful “Hmm, maybe”s as we kept searching, nothing satisfying our respective cravings. Among the group was a British acquaintance visiting New York for the week. He also helped search to be useful, though he was the most unfamiliar with food options in the neighborhood.
“What about Trader Joe’s?” he suggested sincerely. The group laughed.
We explained that Trader Joe’s is a grocery store, not a restaurant - and then joked about how it’s actually not completely a grocery store either. It’s a store chain that sells foodstuff to purchase and prepare to eat at home - but it’s separate from the Safeways, Wegmans, and Ralphs of the world. It’s a grocery store that over-indexes in frozen and ready-made meals - they carry produce, dairy, and meat, but have a far more expansive selection of kitschy packaged pre-made pizzas, flavored pancake mixes, and potato chips, all TJ-branded. It’s the type of store you might go to for pumpkin spice waffles or everything but the bagel hummus, but you likely won’t find rainbow chard or garam masala. And everything there is also insanely cheap - a regular TJs grocery haul is well under half the price of an average Whole Foods trip. It’s nice to have a Trader Joe’s in your neighborhood for convenience. Still, if you’re an avid cook, you will need another grocery store nearby, and perhaps another store for “ethnic” cuisine, as what’s available at your local Trader Joe’s is subject to season, location, and frankly, trend. It’s like a trend grocery store.
“Ah,” the British acquaintance replied. “So we can’t eat dinner there.”
I was reminded of this conversation several weeks ago while grocery shopping. The sky was filled with dark grey clouds, dumping rain sideways on San Francisco. It was the perfect weather to make one of my favorite pork noodle soups, so I grabbed my canvas Trader Joe’s tote and raincoat and made my way to the closest TJs. At my last two apartments, I’ve been lucky enough to have a Trader Joe’s within a two-minute walk of me - at my current place, I have one on the same block as my apartment. I began stocking my plastic basket, scanning the isles and produce shelves for all that I needed. After making several laps around the store, I was dismayed - but, unsurprised - to find that TJs was missing two key ingredients of this soup: rice noodles and fish sauce. To procure these essentials, I had to walk an extra twenty minutes in the rain to the second nearest grocery store: Luke’s Local, an upscale SF-based grocery store. I paid nearly $20 for the two items.
It’s ironic that Trader Joe’s lacks many key pantry ingredients, as the grocery store was first founded to provide access to foods that are tricky to locate in the U.S. (apparently). The first Trader Joe’s opened in 1967 in Pasadena, California by Joe Coulombe - the original “Trader Joe” - who was inspired to give the chain a global flair, based on his international travels. Today, there are more than 500 Trader Joe’s stores in the United States.
The typical TJs shopper has a quite specific and predictable identity. According to Numerator, the average Trader Joe’s shopper is more likely to be a high-income, urban-dwelling Gen Z or millennial when compared to competitors. A 2024 Morning Consult study found that 25% of Trader Joe’s shoppers belong to a household that makes more than $100,000 annually, 8% points more than the general population. And, importantly, Trader Joe’s shoppers are also prolific social media users.
For CNN, Lilit Marcus writes that while most American chain grocery stores rely on sameness to satisfy customers, Trader Joe’s has succeeded by leaning in the opposite direction. While the chain has become one of the most dominant and reliable grocery stores for young adults, it retains a neighborhood feeling, specific to each city. A Seattle-based Trader Joe’s may have a mural of the Space Needle on the wall, while a St. Louis one might have a model of the Gateway Arch. The 14th Street Trader Joe’s in Manhattan has paintings of East Village landmarks on the walls, while the North Beach one in SF has a painting of a cable car, which whizzes by just a few streets over on Powell and Mason. These city-specific details are finished with maritime, tropical touches: Hawaiian shirts, fishing nets, and ship’s wheels on the walls, and cashiers alerting customers by ringing bells. All these attributes give TJs a quite local, wholesome feeling - like visiting a small health food grocer in your respective city.
It’s not just the decor that varies at Trader Joe’s - the products differ and change quite a bit as well, to much fanfare. Trader Joe’s introduces over eighty new products each year, many of which are sold under private labels at significant discounts to name-brand equivalents. TJs requires brand suppliers not to publicize their business relationship, though they are confirmed to work with some food giants, like PepsiCo and Snyder’s-Lance.
Every January for the last fifteen years, Trader Joe’s announces the winners of its Customer’s Choice Awards, showcasing the stores’ most popular and beloved items. In the 2024 awards, the top product was Chili & Lime Flavored Rolled Corn Tortilla Chips, closely followed by frozen soup dumplings, kimbap, and butternut squash mac and cheese. Frozen meals, snacks, and ready-made foods remain the bread and butter of Trader Joe’s business - and this is not completely shocking. Frozen meals are an important part of the American food landscape, and have been for decades.
While the history of frozen meals is contested, the Library of Congress identifies Maxson Food Systems, Inc. as the inventor of the first complete ones in 1949, which were reheated for military and civilian airplane passengers. However, the convenient fares really began taking off when Swanson’s began mass-producing them in 1954, becoming a widely recognized brand via massive ad pushes and coining the term “TV dinner” in the process. The TV dinner became a fixture of American culture - symbolizing the ultimate form of innovation in the home space: automation. To have dinner on the table in seconds - and in front of the television no less - was to have a world of convenience and modernity in the palm of your hands.
The proliferation of frozen dinners in mid-century America helped lay the groundwork for a culture prioritizing seamlessness. Lean Cuisine launched in 1981 on the precipice of a health and fitness boom in America. And perhaps in a kind of response, Lunchables were invented by Oscar Mayer in 1988, apparently under the pretext of trying to increase interest in bologna, which was becoming less popular among more health-conscious Americans. Lunchables quickly became a lunchbox staple for 90s kids. As a grade schooler in the the early aughts myself, common and quick meals between dance rehearsals and soccer practice included STOUFFER’S lasagna and Marie Callendar’s chicken pot pie. With two working parents, feeding myself became as easy as puncturing the film on a TV dinner and running the microwave for two minutes.
Frozen meals have shifted in perception in the American public eye, from being emblems of progress to manifestations of American laziness. Today, ready-made foods have a quite mixed reception depending on who you speak to - landing somewhere along the spectrum of convenient and affordable to sluggish and uncouth. However, Trader Joe’s has given the TV dinner somewhat of a facelift - blending the long-held value props of convenience and affordability with a new kind of novelty and internet cache, intermixing the viral ingredient of the moment - chili crisp, hot honey, vodka sauce, what have you - for maximum shareability online.
Americans have long been suckers for convenience. The speed at which one can get food on the table is a top priority for families and individuals working egregious hours, for whom food is more often a source of fuel than a source of pleasure. Outlets like Trader Joe’s are safe havens for these people. And they’re also a great accompaniment to a generation of young, urban-dwelling millennials and Gen Z workers who tend to self-infantilize. Those who cannot “adult today.” Who don’t have the free time to chop onions, but have time to spend on their phones. Who, in many cases, feel increasingly lonely and alienated from their work, their communities, and - as a result - their bodily senses.
Working from home on a computer all day and then ordering dinner from a food delivery service - which arrives damp and lukewarm in a cardboard box - is hardly connecting people to that which makes them feel alive. To feel food in your hands as you slice it, to watch it change color and texture as it cooks, to smell and taste it hot from your own kitchen - these are among the small luxuries that remind people, frankly, why life is worth living. Massive American grocery chains like Trader Joe’s will produce frozen chicken tikka masala until the cows come home, but deprive customers of the spices needed to make it themselves. Heating, reheating, and spoon feeding - it barely reminds you that you have hands.
Expecting all Americans to cook themselves and their families three square meals a day when many work excessive hours for little pay - and when many live far from grocery stores with eclectic, affordable goods - is futile. Yet, those who have the time and ability to slice ingredients and watch and smell them transform upon being heated a few times a week will benefit greatly from doing so. If we become so reliant on convenience, we’ll lose the rewards found in doing hard things - from trying, failing, trying again, and perhaps again. The few hours a week you get back from frozen meals is hardly worth the inherent joy in preparing food for yourself and those you love. That joy is worth the extra twenty minutes of walking in the rain now and then. And it’s far less fleeting than the twenty minutes it takes to puncture film and watch a microwave spin.
TJs is also waging HUGE union-busting campaigns against their employees, and is part of the lawsuit trying to prove that NLRB (National Labor Relations Board, created to protect workers) is unconstitutional.
So as well-off workers purchase ready-made foods for their convenience, they’re also ensuring their lower-paid brethren (who make that convenience possible) can’t afford to live near them, or anywhere really.
Interesting paradox, high earners shop at Trader Joe's most often because of convenience and good value, one wonders if Trader Joe's effectively subsidizes high living costs in expensive large cities with greedy landlords left and right, so that such lifestyle in cities could be afforded in the first place because of lower grocery costs. Just a thought. Thank you 🤓📚🔖💯