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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the organization's a mess, but there are some gems in there, like:

> Trader Joe's [in avoiding loyalty programs, coupons, and retailer trade fairs] spares itself the cognitive overhead required to rationalize complicating the living shit out of everything

Should have maybe been broken into a series of two paragraph articles.

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This was a really bad example. Trader Joe's repackages (almost) everything under their own brand so you can't recognize and buy the product elsewhere. So technically it's (almost) all BS.

Sorry, I'm not following, why is that BS? It sounds like you're saying it's BS since other stores are not Trader Joe's.

It's BS because you can't compare prices even though you're basically buying the same product.

Maybe you can't compare the exact same product, but you can certainly compare the type of product.

You've got this backwards. TJ sells name brand products at a discount that can be fairly steep. The product manufacturers are incentivized to camouflage this (via the TJ label) so as not to cannibalize their higher margin brand name sales.

This is what Trade Joe's says, but our experience is that the bill is higher at TJ's than at, say, Walmart or Safeway, for the same shopping list.

> This was a really bad example.

Yeah, fair point, I don't cut coupons or sign up for every loyalty program, but I've still always been sort of underwhelmed at TJs.

Maybe Aldi would have been a better example.

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