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Joe Coulombe
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“In a lecture at the University of Southern California Business School, I talked about this. A young woman raised her hand: “But how could you afford to pay so much more than your competition?” The answer, of course, is that good people pay by their extra productivity. You can’t afford to have cheap employees.”
― Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys
― Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys
“I concluded that I didn’t have to find an optimum solution to Pronto’s difficulties, just a reasonable one. Trying to find an optimum solution in business is a waste of time: the factors in the equation are changing all the time. But you’ve got to have something to hang your hat on. The one core value that I chose was our high compensation policies, which I had put in place from the very start in 1958. This may sound like a strange way for polarizing a business, but I did not want to destroy the faith that Pronto Markets’ then-handful of employees had in me and in our common future. After all, they had just ponied up half the equity money needed to buy out Rexall.”
― Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys
― Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys
“Time and again I am asked why no one has successfully replicated Trader Joe’s. The answer is that no one has been willing to pay the wages and benefits, and thereby attract—and keep—the quality of people who work at Trader Joe’s. My standard was simple: the average full-time employee in the stores would make the median family income for California. Back in those days it was about $7,000; as I write this, it is around $40,000. What I didn’t count on back there in the 1960s was that so many spouses would go to work in the national economy. When I started, average family income was about the same as average employee income. The great social change of the 1970s and 1980s moved millions of women into the workplace. Average family income soared ahead. But we stuck with our standard, and it paid off.”
― Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys
― Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys
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