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From The New Yorker: The book is a sort of “Kitchen Confidential” for the grocery business, but without the drugs or rage.

In the sixties, a thirty-two-year-old entrepreneur named Joe Coulombe presided over a midsize chain of California convenience stores called Pronto Markets. The company, which lived in the shadows of 7-Eleven, was nearly bankrupt. One afternoon, a desperate egg supplier paid Coulombe a visit. He had a major problem: he had far too many extra-large eggs. In order to off-load them promptly, he offered them to Coulombe at the same price as the plain old large eggs. This meant that Pronto Markets could sell extra-large eggs—which were twelve per cent per dozen larger than the large eggs, a meaningful difference to customers—at a discounted price, undercutting other chains.

The success of the discounted extra-large eggs helped buoy Coulombe’s stores, and eventually allowed him to embark on his path to grocery-business notoriety. A few years later, he used the financial resources and customer insights that he’d acquired through Pronto Markets to start Trader Joe’s, a grocery store known for its seemingly irreconcilable characteristics: high-quality, health-minded foods self-branded and sold at bargain prices. Coulombe would build an empire rooted in small-scale cleverness and common sense, exploiting loopholes and product discontinuations, zigging where others zagged, and turning the rest of the grocery business’s trash into treasure for Trader Joe’s.

Coulombe, who died last February, at the age of eighty-nine, was one of the very few business leaders who could make minor discounts on the price of eggs feel monumental on the page. He tells plenty of these kinds of fun-fact-laden business tales in “Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys,” an unusually colorful and sensible business guide that refuses to glamorize entrepreneurship. Coulombe insists that success in business hinges not on the mind of a visionary leader or anticipating a technological disruption but on more mundane and hard-earned factors: ruthless product knowledge, respect for employees, plenty of good luck, and a deep understanding of complex legislation. (“We had found a loophole in the law, and by God we drove a truck through it!” Coulombe writes.)

Read full post on The New Yorker