Joe Coulombe’s memoir details how the making of Trader Joe’s

Hawaiian shirts, playful seasonal food products, and impossibly low prices are fixtures of the Trader Joe’s brand today. But what was the secret sauce behind one zany California grocery chain’s ascendance into an American retail darling and its seemingly contradictory modus operandi of selling cheap-yet-high-quality house-brand products? The company’s late founder, Joe Coulombe, spelled it all out in his recent memoir, “Becoming Trader Joe,” “a sort of ‘Kitchen Confidential’ for the grocery business, but without the drugs or rage,” writes The New Yorker’s Carrie Battan. An increasingly curious, educated, and well-traveled middle class prompted Coulombe to stock his budding chain’s shelves with more unconventional items like almond butter. But it was his openness and rigorous dedication to product research that cemented the store’s success as a popular food hub among the “hippies, hipsters, intellectuals, and health-food junkies.” And as for the smiling and insightful employees, the man who ran a profit-chasing company abided by what he calls “selfish altruism”: He figured respecting and paying your workers well with good benefits was cheaper than high employee turnover. Still, Battan writes, “it’s nice to go behind the scenes of a beloved national chain without uncovering insidious forces at work.”