Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood is home to two Trader Joe’s locations just five blocks away from each other on the same street — but far from cannibalizing one another’s sales, the stores stand out to shoppers because both offer unique shopping experiences, according to the grocery chain.
Despite their close proximity, the stores are the “same but different,” Matt Sloan, Trader Joe’s vice president of culture and innovation, said in the latest edition of the “Inside Trader Joe’s” podcast.
Released last week, the episode takes the audience on a trip to Trader Joe’s pair of Back Bay stores to underscore there “isn’t a single blueprint” for establishing Trader Joe’s locations. In the episode, Sloan and co-host Tara Miller, the grocer’s vice president of marketing, speak to the Trader Joe’s construction teams about the process of building differentiated stores.
One reason the Back Bay stores’ being so near each other isn’t a detriment to sales is because the older store is much smaller than the newer one.
Dubbed by the grocer as the “smallest Trader Joe’s in the known universe,” the tinier location still sees more than 2,000 shoppers daily, even with a newer and larger store just a 15-minute walk away. On top of that, the newer location down the street has actually helped with the shopper experience, the co-hosts said.
“If there are too many people [in the store at once], customers aren’t having a good time, crew members probably aren’t having a good time, and that makes the Trader Joe’s experience a little bit less fun,” Miller said.
The smaller store has been a Back Bay staple for more than 20 years, so the location leans heavily into its nostalgic charm.
“A lot of newer stores, they’re still Trader Joe’s-y, but it feels like maybe a little more modern touch to it,” Vanessa, a store manager at the location, said on the podcast, noting that the wall-to-wall cedar gives the store “that old school Trader Joe’s vibe.”
Meanwhile, the newer store is in a space where one wouldn’t expect to find a grocery store, Sloan said.
Shoppers will rarely see a Trader Joe’s move into rectangular spaces, Shane Morrison, Trader Joe’s senior director of construction and facilities, said on the podcast.
The newer Boston store, for example, leans into unique aspects of the 20-year-old building’s architecture. For instance: “We have this standpipe over here, which is part of the fire suppression system that everybody has to look at, but we’ve made it quite interesting,” Shane noted. The store’s design team created small cartoons around the pipes to make them fun and eye-catching to shoppers.
Trader Joe’s nontraditional approach to creating new stores in unsuspecting locations adds to the charm the stores already have.
