While it seems like the grocery industry has hopped on the in-store retail media bandwagon, there’s one grocer that stands firmly against the technology: Trader Joe’s.
“So it turns out we are all about marketing, the lowercase-M marketing being an actual market,” co-host Matt Sloan, vice president of culture and innovation, said in the grocer’s most recent episode of the “Inside Trader Joe’s” podcast.
Fellow co-host and Vice President of Marketing Tara Miller added that while other grocers have screens throughout their stores, robots roaming the aisles and smart carts, Trader Joe’s plans to steer clear of that flashy tech.
Instead, Trader Joe’s focuses on fostering the social experience of grocery shopping, the hosts said.
“[I]nstead of cold, impersonal, flat monitors, we have live crew members who are smart and fun to talk with,” Miller said “They’ll not only help you find what you’re looking for and discover new products, they’re happy to share their thoughts on these products.”
Trader Joe’s has never positioned itself as “a tech company,” which is a deliberate choice, the hosts said, adding that the grocer also doesn’t see the need to track its customers’ individual shopping behavior.
“We don’t track our customers’ shopping habits, their shopping patterns, their shopping choices, their shopping data. Basically, we just don’t track our customers… We look at our shelves and we look at what we sell,” Miller said.
The Trader Joe’s executives even went so far as to claim that retail media is the “natural result of an undifferentiated shopping experience” as well as an “admission of defeat that shopping in those regular grocery stores was awful.”
This isn’t the first time the grocer has taken a hard stance against tech-focused in-store innovations.
Trader Joe’s CEO Bryan Palbaum and President Jon Basalone sat down for a Q&A with “Inside Trader Joe’s” in August 2023 to say the grocery chain has no plans to introduce self-checkout kiosks to its stores.
Also that year, a Trader Joe’s podcast episode reminded listeners that the grocer doesn’t see a benefit to e-commerce, noting the online channel poses additional investment costs.
“For us, one of our values is providing a ‘wow’ customer experience, and that requires being connected as human beings to each other, as crew members, as customers,” Miller said during the most recent episode. “That doesn't happen if you have screens constantly between you.”
