Trader Joe’s is known for many things, like its great selection of pre-made and fresh food, its reasonable prices and its friendly staff. Every supermarket has at least one of those aspects, though. The one thing that truly sets it apart from every other grocery store on the planet is the fact that it has the worst, most God-awful, pain-enducing, miserable, nightmarish parking lots on planet Earth. I know it. You know it. We all know it. But why is it like this? Why is every Trader Joe’s parking lot the seventh circle of Hell? Surely, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Well, according to Trader Joe’s, there’s actually a reason why its parking lots are akin to a law hellscape of red shopping carts and people endlessly circling around in their cars, and it goes back to the company’s first store in Pasadena, California.
The whole thing got broken down during a 2023 episode of the company’s podcast called “Inside Trader Joe’s.” To this day, that store, which opened in 1967, has a parking lot that Matt Sloan, one of the podcast’s hosts and TJ’s vice president of marketing, described as “a bit challenging,” because — like every other TJ’s lot — it’s small and busy. This isn’t necessarily the company’s fault, though. Like most things, you can thank the government for the issue.
Size matters
Basically, any store’s shoppable square footage determines how big its parking lot is, according to Food & Wine. Since your average Trader Joe’s is far smaller than most other supermarkets out there, naturally, it’s going to have a smaller parking lot. When you add in the fact that Trader Joe’s is always incredibly busy and popular wherever they end up, it’s a recipe for disaster on the blacktop. I’m no expert, but I sort of feel like a business’s parking lot size should be determined based on estimated demand, not store size, but that’s just me.
“[W]hen you design a parking space or you allocate spaces for parking for a retail store, it’s based on the size of the store. So you mentioned how small our stores are relative to other grocers,” Sloan said on the podcast. “Well, that’s true and that can have an effect on the number of parking spaces allocated.”
Because of that situation, the only real remedy is to build a bigger Trader Joe’s store, but that’s never going to happen, unfortunately. Sloan said it would “change who we are” if TJs suddenly had normal-sized grocery stores, and I guess they’re sort of right. I suppose that means the only logical solution is to call your local congressperson and complain. Though I don’t know. I sort of like the Royal Rumble style of parking Trader Joe’s demands. It makes me feel alive.
