ICYMI: Why Doesn't Trader Joe's Have a Loyalty Program

Inside Trader Joe's

Trader Joe's

Arts, Nutrition, Health & Fitness, Food

4.7 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2023

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We get this question all the time, and it’s a good one. The truth is, once you start to think about “loyalty programs,” you quickly realize there’s nothing in them to promote loyalty. They’re just ever-so-slightly-disguised ways to collect data about your purchases. We look at loyalty with a significantly different lens. Tune in to the latest in our series of bite-sized episodes, ITJ ICYMI, to get the scoop.

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0:00.0	Our crew members get a lot of questions and they're really good at answering them.
0:05.0	Here's one that comes up all the time.
0:07.5	It's another, in case you missed it, many episode of Inside Trader Joe's.
0:13.0	What a baaah!
0:20.0	I see why am I. In case you missed it, why doesn't Trader Joe's have a loyalty program?
0:25.0	What the heck is a loyalty program anyway?
0:29.0	I mean, I think of them as key fobs and cards to swipe and codes to remember and phone numbers to provide.
0:38.0	All in the hopes of chasing after some ever-illusive discount on something I probably didn't want in the first place.
0:45.0	So as you might guess, I'm not particularly taken with this idea of loyalty programs, but the programs themselves...
0:53.0	Well, I don't even know if they're well-intended, but what they're meant to do is to provide benefits.
0:59.0	That loyalty, that membership has its privileges, and you save a little bit of money on this, or you get access to it that...
1:07.0	It's effectively a way to feel like you're part of a special, not-so-secret club, and you get better deals than the schmo next to you in line.
1:17.0	The idea is that that store is gaining your loyalty by providing you discounts.
1:24.0	The discounts are paid for by the manufacturers of the products, so they're paying the store to offer discounts, so you'll buy more of the products.
1:36.0	It's very convoluted. To me, it sounds anything but something that would engender loyalty, because what it does is it says,
1:44.0	this week I'm going to shop over here because they have a discount on this, and next week I'm going to shop over there,
1:50.0	because the manufacturers go back and forth with the different retailers, with the discounts, and when you shop at Trader Joe's,
1:58.0	you know what the prices are going to be. We don't change our prices unless our costs change.
2:03.0	Every customer who walks into the store has access to the same values on every product.
2:10.0	We're loyal to all of our customers, and in return, what we found is our customers really appreciate the fact that they know what to expect when they come into the store.
2:20.0	They can expect great values every day.
2:23.0	I think other retailers, the other guys, presume that the loyalty in question is coming from their customers.
	...

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