Trader Joe's Highly Competitive Retailer

Trader Joe’s is a highly competitive retailer that has some interesting differentiating components thus making them a highly effective and efficient retailer. Although Trader Joe’s does many things extremely well, there are some key component that set their company above the competition. Some of these key components include, highly selective products, low prices, distinct target market, store environment, and privacy and secrecy both in management style and in vendor/supplier interaction. Each of these key components bounce off each other creating a strategy that has proven to be both effective and efficient in an industry that contains giants such as Walmart and Costco. Having highly selective products at low prices with a one of a kind environment, …show more content…
Some of their biggest weaknesses included lack of technology, limited product line, weakness in marketing, small and poorly laid out parking lots, and finally a much larger amount of frozen food as opposed to fresh food. A stand out weakness to our group was the lack of technology Trader Joe’s portrayed. In today’s retail world it seems that most companies heavily rely on technology to help run a smooth operation. However, Trader Joe's doesn’t incorporate many of these technology strategies into their plan limiting their marketing presence through social media engines and online ads. They primarily use word of mouth which can potentially limit their exposure and reduce the ability to spread their brand name. Although one of Trader Joe’s biggest strengths is uniqueness of products, they also have trouble in offering a wide range of products due to the limited space in their stores. Though this seems to be a strength in many contexts, it can also prove to be a weakness to many consumers. Trader Joe’s will have to continue to sell specialized products in hopes other larger retailers won’t be able to meet the same complexity of products they have to offer. A weakness that seems to not be a problem in most retailing situations would be the availability of parking spaces. However, in Trader Joe’s case they seem to severely struggle with providing their …show more content…
As a group we believed Trader Joe’s biggest threats to be intense competition, substitute products, and Private information leaked to the public. Although there could be smaller threats present we believed these were the most prominent and posed the largest threat. Because of the recent popularity in Trader Joe’s, many other food retailers have taken notice. Because of this rise in interest these other retailers are looking to mimic Trader Joe’s strategy by implementing smaller retailer stores that can compete with specialty food stores like Trader Joe’s. For instance Wal-Mart has introduced their many stores in hopes of stealing some competition from smaller retailers that would otherwise get the smaller groups of customers. For this reason we concluded that this could be a major threat to Trader Joe’s especially if they transition to a healthier food option as presented in Trader Joe’s strategy. We also found the subject of substitute products to be a significant threat to Trader Joe’s. Although they do make all of their own products a lot of other retailers are adopting the same ideas only providing it through various other brands and sometimes at a cheaper price. Since Trader Joe’s cannot patent their products they’re at major risk for simple substitute products. We also found it interesting that Trader Joe’s has had some