A better start might be mapping known Aldi warehouses.
https://careers.aldi.us/employment/olathe-warehouse-jobs/61/...
I know that for McDonalds and Aldi, Albany, NY is “Boston” and Utica west is “Pennsylvania”. It’s all about the transport corridors and modes.
Where in the World are Trader Joe's's Warehouses?
Or should it have been...
Where in the World are Trader Joes's Warehouses?
But just looking at the clusters, esp. on the east coast and look at the marked known locations one can visually see that the 22 clusters don't make sense. You can visually cluster a lot of stores towards the existing warehouses and remove the need for the estimated ones in between.
But still this is an interesting approach as it helps in identifying the clusters that seem to be served by these known warehouses.
Maybe not taking the distance as the crow flies, but trying a street route could be an optimization. And then trying to find the minimal amount of clusters that still show the known locations at roughly the center.
Not sure if this would be a valid approach.
The organizers got a nice letter back from Trader Joes who said they really appreciated their enthusiasm but the East Lansing area was too small a municipal area for a Trader Joes but if that criteria changed they'd keep us in mind. A number of the group years later kept the campaign going and maintained an active Facebook page.
A couple of months ago Trader Joes announced an East Lansing store in that very strip mall they'd turned down decades earlier. Different store but the exact same development.
I'm such an idiot shopper. I was on a date with a girl and going to cook her dinner but I was missing a few vegetables. Went to Fred Myer (local Kroger chain). I was picking up some potatoes and the girl found a stack for half the price that looked just as good, hidden on the other side of the produce aisle. She was like, "you don't look for good deals, do you?" Ugh. Shamed. I wish I'd had an excuse like "I wanted organic" but the truth was I'd never known there was a whole separate stack. Damn you Fred Myer!
Their diet stuff flies off the shelves, so that HN story about diet soda "spoiling" (was it methlyation?) isn't a problem. I doubt it lasts even a day on the shelf.
Their kettle salt+vinegar potato chips, orange "yogurt" (comparable to yoplait orange cream "yogurt"), generic life cereal is all pretty good. You can tell, because those are often not in stock, I think their production is limited by agreements with the name brands I would speculate.
Aldi's generic soda was pretty bad. Meijers, most grocery generics, all pretty crappy.
But my experiences are from the Seattle Area south to Oregon.
I would say Kroger isn't a real supermarket, it's a junk food market and pharmacopia.
I suspect that's why they don't partner with delivery vendors. Grocery stores would rather you came in person. You'll make impulse buys, they can direct you to products where they have excess inventory, and they can maintain a direct relationship with you.
Most are forced to offer delivery precisely because they don't have a "great and unique selection of food." If they don't support delivery, you'll get the same products from a competitor who does. Trader Joe's doesn't have to because you can't find their products anywhere else.
The COO (?) specifically said that they preferred to invest in their people and store experience, not automation or such technology.
edit: ah, found the articles:
https://www.businessinsider.com/trader-joes-wont-offer-groce...
https://www.boston.com/food/coronavirus/2020/04/24/trader-jo...
It is an idiosyncratic store. To tell you the truth, I'm not as enthusiastic about them as some people are though I go in from time to time if they're convenient. They have a lot of prepared food and possible healthier and better quality prepared food is still prepared food which I don't eat a lot of.
From my experience on the customer side since, things haven't changed much at all. In light of that, I think that even now, online ordering for them would be a mess that the company just can't afford in customer goodwill.
I think a big part of Trader Joe's success is that they have a good core of staples that people are willing to come in for, and then they have a big selection of new and interesting items that people are willing to try, since they're already there. The quality of the staples allows them to fly under the radar with the rotating stuff, which is in reality pretty hit or miss. But this symbiotic relationship between the core and the experimental sides allows them to quickly iterate through the experimental stuff to find more popular items.
Another thing I've seen is that a product might appear only once in a while, but is never discontinued - it's in rotation with other products. I've seen this a lot with frozen goods. That gives them a way to offer variety without having zillions of SKUs in stock at any given time.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sanfordstein/2019/10/25/aldi-ri...
Next step would be to plot the known/suspected warehouses and give an error measurement for the best predicted locations against those more or less known warehouses.
Further steps could be to look into a pattern of how those known/suspected warehouses are placed in relation to stores, and extrapolate that into the missing warehouse locations.
Another possibility is that trader Joe's does actually manufacturer a lot of their rotating products but just simply rotates the store that receive them so they don't need to have a massive production for something so small. Cacio Pepe sauce for new england area for this month, southwest region next month.
Granted, it can be fixed by resizing my window.
*I also prefer sans-serif fonts but that's just my personal preference.
