My Time in Retail Mania at Trader Joe's

I heard questions at Trader Joe’s that sounded like jokes. “Where do you keep the grass-fed salmon?” is one of my favorites, if only to picture how that could go. Would you pick up a salmon by the tail and dangle it in tall grass, urging it to chow down? Or would you throw fistfuls of grass into the river and hope for the best? I heard a lot of absurd questions while working there. It’s like a spell was cast over customers, as if any sense of proportion or realistic stakes were stripped away whenever they crossed the threshold. When I told a customer that we were out of organic kale but had plenty of the conventional variety, they asked me, “How do you sleep at night? I’m supposed to feed that to my kids?” As if I had suggested they serve their children arsenic. I often processed these absurd moments by placing them in imagined scenarios that matched the drama I was seeing. Sometimes I’d write them down, like I did when a customer was devastated by the absence of watercress:

A woman picked up a bag of baby spinach and turned it over in her hands. She frowned, first at the bag, and then at me.

“Do you have any watercress?” she asked, creasing her forehead with emphasis.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I haven’t seen any here.”

Her frown deepened, and she put the spinach back. “Why?” she asked, with vehemence and a clench in her jaw.

I wondered, in that moment, what she meant. Why was there no watercress for her? Why didn’t we have what she wanted? Why was the world so cruel? I pictured her huddled under a bluff on a mountain during a blizzard, her wooden bowl full of spinach, arugula, a handful of halved grape tomatoes, a hunky slice of beet, a puck of fried goat cheese, gooey and breaded, but no watercress. Never watercress! She turns her face up to the storm and cries out in desperation, but the wind swallows her howl, heard by none but the cold, indifferent moon that hangs in the sky above her.

The thing is, it was still a retail job, and absurd questions or not, retail is hard, under-respected work. It used to drive me crazy (and still does) when I’d mention I worked at Trader Joe’s and I’d hear something to the effect of, “You must love it there. Everyone always seems so happy.” It’s weird to hear that when it’s the same grinding retail work I’ve had at other corporate stores. There’s the same long hours, the same low pay, the same disinterested look from upper management when they visit, the same union-busting, the same semi-anonymous existence that comes with retail service. The difference, in my experience, is that unlike any other store I’ve worked for, Trader Joe’s has fans who live in a fantasy where the customer is always right and every retail worker is theirs to command. That, and all crew members were urged to be smiley at all times.

There was no evil intent in this fantasy, but the effect on customers left a dehumanizing taste in my mouth. One day, a family emergency happened while I was at work. I was distraught, but I couldn’t afford to miss a shift, so I focused on stocking shelves to keep from crying. A customer tapped me on the shoulder and told me, “You should be smiling more.” Somehow she saw an upset-looking stranger going about their job and felt not only affronted by the lack of a smile, but also felt comfortable demanding one. Another absurd question: “Do you have locally-grown bananas?” I can’t imagine a banana grown in New England would be very good, and that we’d likely have to transform all of Rhode Island into a greenhouse to pull it off. Behind that question, though, was typically a racist concern about whether any of the produce had come from Mexico. Shortly after the 2016 election, I saw many of the customers concerned about their produce approach South and Central American employees to ask, “When are you being deported?”

There was a customer who started flirting with me whenever he came through my line or asked me for help. I initially shrugged it off, but it intensified. Telling him I wasn’t interested didn’t do much. I started to dread our interactions, doing whatever I could to avoid him. One day, he went more explicit than he ever had, so I told a mate (the TJ’s name for a manager). The response was pretty upsetting: “Maybe you could be more understanding. If he likes you, and the only place he sees you is the store, how else is he supposed to ask you out?” I don’t think Trader Joe’s as a company intended to permit any of this behavior, but from what I saw, management usually deferred to the customer, so it happened anyway.

Trader Joe’s is no worse a retail chain than any other, but it’s the only place I’ve worked at that has fans. It surprises me that even now, people seem to view the store as some kind of unicorn, a “good corporation.” How they do that in 2026 is beyond me, but fan culture is an incomprehensible thing. At the end of the day, retail work sucks just about everywhere, and that doesn’t change just because a store sells cute tote bags.