Trader Joe’s: Treasures from Afar, By Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture

October 21, 2010 Whitney Farmer 0 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music venue on a beach outside L.A. She has an M.B.A., and is currently angry with Microsoft.

My 82-year-old dad looked out the front window the other day at a couple of neighbors who were walking home, laden down with canvas bags full of groceries after walking to the market. He shook his head and said with pity, “Those poor old people!” I was confused as I looked out the window to try and figure out what he was talking about, seeing only two people that he trumped by at least a decade. It’s true that they didn’t have my Dad’s Chippewa mixed with Laplander smooth brown skin and full silvery head of hair, but they didn’t look that bad. And they were taking some important, heavy laden steps to improve the rest of their lives. They had gone shopping…

Trader Joe’s has opened up in my neighborhood.

I remember my first time…I was working in banking in the Seattle area in 1995 when my escrow officer came into the office with a “Fearless Flyer” newsletter and a can of Irish Steel Cut Rolled Oats as a gift for me. Trader Joe’s has just come to town, and its strange mythology beckoned to me as I looked through the catalog, and then re-read it time and time again as if it was an adventure story. I remembered as a kid reading “My Side of the Mountain” and wanting to live by myself in the woods in a hollowed out tree with a pet falcon who could hunt for me. I would eat acorn pancakes smothered in maple syrup that I had tapped myself along with trout that I had caught with a fishhook made of thorns glued together with rendered cartilage and twine. The child who I had been who had devoured all sciences like a feast had been pressed into service in finance because I had a home that was only 75% through a remodeling project plus a spec house that was only half built when the business partner/soon-to-be-ex-husband’s-soon-to-be-ex-best-friend had snorted the construction fund up his nose. But when I ate that oatmeal, I was having the same meal that another woman just like me was having half a world away. So I wouldn’t eat it in the morning. Instead, I would eat it when I wanted to escape into a Quiet Man dream. Until the can was empty.

A few years but a lifetime later, I was going to visit someone in Pasadena and stopped to get my bearings. I went in to Trader Joe’s for something I’ve forgotten but that sustained me. I would learn later that this was the original Trader Joe’s, opened a generation earlier and under a different name, but probably almost unchanged. Very few things to buy, but each essential and perfect.

My TJ’s is in the same center as my shipping store, my bank, my doctor who helped me with my bloody eye, my gym, my vet — or my little white dogs’ vet — and my nail salon. I should think about trying to land a job there as a professional shopper. There is a dentist I have wanted to try, plus a realtor, a Chinese restaurant, an mean pharmacist, and a plastic surgeon. Boy, they could print the Mother of All coupon books…

As I walked up to the store for my maiden treasure hunt, the beginning broadcast of 80s music could be heard piped in over the p.a. I knew that it was a pandering move, and I approved of the wisdom. To those who were too old to have ached while they watched the Breakfast Club, it gave them a second chance. To those who had experienced St. Elmo’s Fire, it was like coming home. To the young who dressed as “80s Prom” for Halloween, it was retro and cool. Outside the door was an unmolested transient who was pandering for an organization that I knew was a farce, but who I had decided would eat healthy on my dime that day anyway. Inside the doors, it was sometimes difficult to tell the Hawaiian shirts of the employees apart from the Hawaiian shirts of the locals from the beach community that I had moved to after leaving my home on the backside of Dodger Mountain, within walking distance of Chinatown, with a resident Golden eagle. In the fruit, I found 2 pounds of figs for $5.00. There were Washington apples like from Snow White that looked good enough to die for. I found mushrooms and spinach and sweet cabbage and fresh clipped basil with blossoms on the tips. Down the aisle, I found Celtic cheddar cheese and bought it eventhough I had no idea what it was. Soon after, I made my only mistaken purchase: In looking for nonfat yogurt, I accidentally bought goat’s milk yogurt. Not wanting to be wasteful, later that night I gave it an honest try. It tasted like hairy sweaty goat nipples. If you like that, I’m sure it was quite tasty. But I actually had a mild nightmare a couple days later that included the taste in my dream.

I continued to follow the current through the aisles, passing by the children who were looking expectantly at the cereals for anything that might have sugar in it and settling for “Flax Flakes”, past the sharks who used TJ expeditions for prime date hunts. You can tell tons about someone by what they have in their grocery bag, much more than from their Facebook postings. At the TJ’s in the mid-Wilshire district, there is valet parking to help coordinate all of the cruising traffic. With my possible object of affection in San Antonio, I reminded myself, ‘…Remember the Alamo…Remember the Alamo…’ And I grabbed a bottle of liquid courage named Two Buck Chuck (merlot) as I made my way to the check-out.

I read recently that Trader Joe’s is now in New York City. I know that our beloved, sophisticated, deep, powerful older sister city is almost always exasperated with her clumsy and glittery younger sister city of L.A. But maybe after you have had a bowl of steel cut Irish Oats purchased at an outpost of our culture in your vertical backyard, you might like us a bit more.

Quote of the Blog from the lead singer of the Young Dubliners after playing a great show with a horrible cold: “The mistake I made is I dinna’ drink whiskey. So I dinna’ burn it outa me”

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