Sabtu, 29 Februari 2020

Companies are canceling US domestic travel over coronavirus fears - msnNOW

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Major companies are beginning to cancel conferences and travel plans within the United States due to the coronavirus, which analysts warn will have cascading impacts on the country’s hotels, airlines and convention centers.

International travel — particularly to Asia — has so far been the hardest-hit part of the industry, though analysts say that could soon change as fears of the coronavirus spread to Europe and North America. Hotels around the country have begun reporting a rise in group cancellations. Some air carriers, including Alaska Airlines and JetBlue Airways, are doing away with cancellation fees as jittery travelers rethink their plans.

“The cancellations are starting to move toward North America,” said Scott Solombrino, executive director of the Global Business Travel Association, which estimates that the slowdown in global travel has already cost American businesses $7 billion this year. “Obviously the concern is that this will have a long-term impact on the U.S. economy.”

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Analysts said wide-scale cancellations — which so far have been concentrated in large cities such as New York, Washington and Los Angeles — are starting to hit smaller U.S. cities, as companies change their internal travel policies.

Workday called off a sales conference in Orlando scheduled for next week, while Google and Facebook canceled multiple events in California and Nevada between March and May. Amazon this week told employees to put off “nonessential travel” in the United States, though it did not offer details on what types of trips would qualify. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Mounting cancellations, analysts said, are likely to have ripple effects throughout the economy, particularly for upscale hotels that rely on group bookings for about one-third of their sales, according to Jan Freitag, senior vice president of lodging insights for STR, a hospitality research firm.

“The most noticeable impact so far has been in group travel, with large conferences around the world being canceled,” he said. “These large group conferences take years and years to plan. If they don’t happen now, there is a good chance they won’t happen at all.”

Executives at Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel chain, said this week that group bookings in the United States have started to take a hit. The Bethesda-based hospitality giant said much of the impact so far has been concentrated in Asia, where it has 800 hotels.

“To date, we have not yet seen a significant impact in the U.S., and our first quarter is off to a solid start, but the situation is fluid,” Leeny Oberg, Marriott’s chief financial officer, told CNBC on Wednesday. “We have seen a handful of citywide cancellations.”

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Booking Holdings, which owns Priceline, Booking.com and Kayak, said this week that it expects hotel room bookings to fall as much as 10 percent this quarter because of the coronavirus.

Shares of hotel companies and airlines plunged this week, as coronavirus-related fears led global markets to post their worst weekly losses since the Great Recession. Shares of Marriott and InterContinental Hotels Group fell about 9 percent apiece, while American Airlines and Jet Blue posted declines of more than 20 percent. Expedia Group, meanwhile, posted a 13 percent drop in share price.

“Every day we think we could be near a bottom, and every day we are not,” Helane Becker, an airline industry analyst for Cowen, wrote in a note to clients this week. “The virus has spread, and the question is how much do people change their travel plans.”

Hostelling International USA, which oversees nearly 50 properties around the country, said group cancellations are on the rise. Individual travelers, though, are “so far going strong,” spokeswoman Netanya Trimboli said.

The company is taking extra precautions by training employees on how to properly clean surfaces and encouraging them to stay home if they feel sick. New signs at its hostels remind guests to wash their hands and cough into their elbows.

Other hotels also report stalling demand, as Americans put off travel plans. But analysts say the largest impact on the hospitality market could come from a slowdown of Chinese visitors, who last year contributed $34 billion to the U.S. economy, according to Philadelphia-based Tourism Economics. Chinese visitors typically spend about $6,000 and spend an average of 15 nights in a hotel while in the United States, the firm said. It expects the number of Chinese travelers to the United States to drop by 25 percent this year.

“Right now there’s a lot of uncertainty,” said Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics. “It’s shaping up to be very similar to SARS, when we saw very severe impacts.”

This time, he said, could be worse: Visits from China to the United States have grown nearly 13-fold since 2002, making a possible coronavirus outbreak much more devastating to the U.S. economy than the SARS epidemic was in 2003.

“Reservations are at a standstill,” said Kim Lee, who handles sales at Arc The.Hotel, a boutique property in Washington’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, where multiple groups have canceled reservations in recent weeks. “We’ve seen a real decline.

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2020-02-29 17:14:00Z
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The Dow is up 38% since Trump's election, down from 61% in a matter of days amid sell-off - CNBC

Donald Trump

Carlo Allegri | Reuters

The week's blistering stock sell-off has slashed the Dow Jones Industrial Average's gains since President Donald Trump's election.

What was once a 61% Dow gain just 16 days ago on Feb. 12 has eroded to a far thinner 38.6% rally as the index fell from an all-time high of 29,568 to around 25,409. The gain in the Dow is just 28.8% if you measure from Trump's inauguration day more than three years ago.

These calculations measure the percent price change of the Dow over a given period and exclude fixed returns like dividends.

The dramatic fall in Dow (and S&P 500) gains since the president's election came after the single worst week on Wall Street since the financial crisis. 

For the week, the Dow fell more than 3,500 points, or 12%, in its biggest weekly percentage loss since 2008. The blue-chip index ended the week firmly in correction territory, down more than 14% from its record close notched earlier this month.

The S&P 500 lost 11.5% over the week and, as such, also clinched its worst weekly performance since the crisis and closed in a correction. The typical correction sees the S&P 500 fall 13.7% and usually takes four months to recover.

Despite the hefty near-40% gain Trump still has, he is irate at the sell-off, according to CNBC sources. The stock market is falling amid growing concerns over the coronavirus and its potential impact on the global economy.

The president blamed both the threat of 2020 Democratic candidates as well as the coronavirus for the week's steep declines. The president said on Wednesday that he believes "quite a bit" of the sell-off was thanks to investor fears over Democratic candidates' radical economic and policy ideas expressed during this week's debate.

"I think [investors] look at the people that you watched debating last night and they say 'if there's even a possibility'" a Democrat is elected the economy will decline, Trump said on Wednesday. "I think the financial markets are very upset when they look at the Democrat candidates standing on that stage making fools out of themselves."

The president even went so far on Friday as to categorize the criticism of his administration's response to the disease a new "hoax" cooked up by Democrats hoping to oust him from office in the 2020 presidential election.

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2020-02-29 16:13:00Z
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People Are Mourning The Death Of Joe Coulombe, The Founder Of Trader Joe's - BuzzFeed News

Joe Coulombe, the founder of the wildly popular Trader Joe's supermarket chain, has died at 89, the company confirmed in a statement.

Coulombe died in his Pasadena, California home on Friday after a long illness, the New York Times reported.

Born on June 3, 1930, Coulombe was raised on an avocado ranch near San Diego. He served in the Air Force before getting a bachelor's degree in economics, and later, a master's in business administration from Stanford University.

In 1967, Coulombe opened the first Trader Joe's in Pasadena. Known for its selection of international food and wines (including the $1.99 Charles Shaw wines, aka the Two Buck Chuck), and the general affordability of its items, Trader Joe's has grown into a national retail giant in the decades since it opened.

Coulombe told the Los Angeles Times in a 2014 interview that the store was meant for "overeducated and underpaid people, for all the classical musicians, museum curators, journalists — that's why we've always had good press, frankly."

Today, Trader Joe's is a widely beloved brand, complete with Instagram fan accounts and a subreddit dedicated to discussing the store's items.

The supermarket is also consistently ranked as one of the best places to work, with solid hourly wages and benefits, and overall high morale among staffers.

News of his death led to an outpour of condolences on Twitter on Saturday. Many thanked Coulombe for making healthy foods accessible, and posted photos of their favorite Trader Joe's items.

Coulombe sold Trader Joe's to German retail chain Aldi in 1979, and remained its CEO for the next nine years.

“Joe was the perfect person at the right time for Trader Joe’s," Dan Bane, the company's CEO, said in a statement provided to BuzzFeed News. "He was a brilliant thinker with a mesmerizing personality that simply galvanized all with whom he worked."

Up until his retirement, Coulombe and his staff sampled all food and wine products before buying them.

''I used to feel I shouldn't be doing this, that I should be delegating it to someone else,'' he told the New York Times at the time. ''Then I learned that the head buyer of Bloomingdale's tastes everything. I must sample about 4,000 wines a year."

Coulombe is survived by his wife, Alice, daughters Charlotte Schoenmann and Madeleine Coulombe, son Joseph, and six grandchildren.

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2020-02-29 16:11:00Z
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Market Correction: What You Should Know - Seeking Alpha

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  1. Market Correction: What You Should Know  Seeking Alpha
  2. Markets plunge in worst 1-day drop in history on coronavirus fears l ABC News  ABC News
  3. These are the only 7 stocks in the S&P 500 that rose while the market plunged  MarketWatch
  4. The S&P 500 is plunging at unprecedented speed  CNN
  5. The Best Buying Opportunities After the Historical Selloff  ETF Trends
  6. View Full Coverage on Google News

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2020-02-29 14:35:00Z
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Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe’s, dies - Boston.com

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Joe Coulombe envisioned a new generation of young grocery shoppers emerging in the 1960s, one that wanted healthy, tasty, high-quality food they couldn’t find in most supermarkets and couldn’t afford to buy in the few high-end gourmet outlets.

So he found a new way to bring everything from a then-exotic snack food called granola to the California-produced wines that for flavor compared with anything from France. And he made shopping for them almost as much fun as sailing the high seas when he created Trader Joe’s, a quirky little grocery store filled with nautical themes and staffed not by managers and clerks but by “captains and mates.”

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From the time he opened his first store in Pasadena, California, in 1967 until his death Friday at age 89, Coulombe watched his namesake business rise from a cult favorite of educated but underpaid young people — and a few hippies — to a retail giant with more than 500 outlets in over 40 states.

A giant yes, but one that across more than half a century has never lost its reputation for friendly service from employees decked out in goofy Hawaiian shirts, a newsletter that looks like it was published in the 1890s, and rows and rows of high-quality, moderately priced healthy food and great wine, even if you sometimes can’t ever again find exactly the same thing.

“He wanted to make sure whatever was sold in our store was of good value,” said Coulombe’s son, also named Joe, who added that his father died following a long illness. “He always did lots of taste tests. My sisters and I remember him bringing home all kinds of things for us to try. At his offices he had practically daily tastings of new products. Always the aim was to provide good food and good value to people.”

He achieved that by buying directly from wholesalers and cutting out the middleman, in many cases slapping the name Trader Joe’s on a bag of nuts, trail mix, organic dried mango, honey-oat cereal or Angus beef chili. He named several products after his daughters Charlotte and Madeleine and gave quirky names to others. Among them were Trader Darwin vitamins and a non-alcoholic sparkling juice called Eve’s Apple Sparkled by Adam.

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He prided himself on checking out every vintage of wine from California’s Napa Valley, including Trader Joe’s standby, Charles Shaw, affectionately known as Two-Buck Chuck because it sold for $1.99. (It still does in the California stores, although shipping costs have increased the price in other states.)

“He sold a lot of better wines too,” his son noted with a laugh, recalling trips the family made to France to seek them out.

After selling Trader Joe’s to German grocery retailer Aldi in 1979, Coulombe remained as its CEO until 1988, when he left to launch a second career as what he called a “temp,” coming in as interim CEO or consultant for several large companies in transition. He retired in 2013.

Joseph Hardin Coulombe, an only child, was born on June 3, 1930, in San Diego and lived on an avocado ranch in nearby Del Mar. After serving in the Air Force, he attended Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics, a master’s in business administration and met and married his wife, Alice.

A few years after graduation, he was hired by the Rexall drugstore chain, which tasked him with establishing a chain of convenience stores called Pronto. When Rexall lost interest in the stores, he bought them and had grown the chain to about a dozen outlets when the huge 7-Eleven company made a major push into Southern California.

“So I had to do something different,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2014. “Scientific American had a story that of all people qualified to go to college, 60% were going. I felt this newly educated — not smarter but better-educated — class of people would want something different, and that was the genesis of Trader Joe’s.”

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His wife’s parents had introduced him to a world of foods previously unfamiliar to him, including fine olive oil, fresh seafood and inexpensive quality wine, and he figured things like that would be perfect for the younger audience he was seeking.

As he bargained for those products, he’d sometimes come across a particularly exceptional olive oil or vintage wine, never to find it again, and he wouldn’t stock an inferior product in its place.

He eschewed promotional gimmicks like loyalty clubs or loss-leader sales, getting the word out with brief radio spots and the Trader Joe’s “Fearless Flyer” newsletter, whose old-style appearance was inspired by another money-saving effort. He wanted to dress up the newsletter’s stories with illustrations he cut out of magazines, but he made sure he only took ones on which the copyrights had expired.

He passed such savings on not only to his customers but employees, which Trader Joe’s boasts are among retail’s best compensated, with medical, dental, vision and retirement plans and annual salary increases the company says range from 7% to 10%. Many workers have remained with Trader Joe’s for decades.

“He just had a visit yesterday from employee No. 1,” his daughter Charlotte said shortly before her father’s death.

He and his wife also became well known in Southern California philanthropic circles, contributing time and money to such causes as Planned Parenthood, the Los Angeles Opera and the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens.

Stories differ on how the name Trader Joe’s came about, with some saying it was inspired by a ride on Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise boat or a book he read called “White Shadows in the South Seas” or his favorite college hangout being a Trader Vic’s bar near Stanford.

Coulombe, who loved to travel, did acknowledge over the years that he had a fascination with the South Seas and put Trader into the name and a nautical theme inside the stores to lend that exotic appeal to customers.

In addition to his three children and wife of 67 years, Coulombe is survived by six grandchildren.

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2020-02-29 12:47:12Z
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News Obituary: Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe's markets - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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2020-02-29 09:25:01Z
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Trader Joe's founder Joe Coulombe, who started one of America's favorite grocery stores, dies at 89 - USA TODAY

Joe Coulombe, who founded Trader Joe’s, the popular grocery known for its kitschy vibe and beloved private label wine dubbed "Two Buck Chuck,'' died late Friday at his  Pasadena, California home. He was 89.

Coulombe’s son, also named Joe, said in a statement his father died following a long illness.

Born on June 3, 1930, Coulombe was raised on an avocado ranch in Del Mar, California, near San Diego. He served a year in the Air Force and got a bachelor’s degree in economics, followed by an MBA from Stanford University in 1954.

Coulombe met his wife, Alice Steere, at a party while in college. They married in 1952, when they were both in graduate school, and went on to have three children.

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Most popular grocery stores: Trader Joe's and Publix are some of the nation's most popular grocery chains

First convenience, then groceries

In 1958, Coulombe went to work for Rexall Drugs, where he was tasked with creating a group of convenience stores similar to 7-Eleven. He worked without pay in a grocery store to better understand the business.

The new chain was called Pronto Markets, and when Rexall eventually decided to shut it down, Coulombe bought the locations and ran the stores himself.

But in 1967, 7-Eleven  was opening more locations in California. Rather than taking them on, Coulombe decided to launch a new, vastly different chain. He started Trader Joe’s with a store in Pasadena, California.

Trader Joe's carved out a unique persona

The grocery chain was quirky from the beginning. Coulombe based the store’s nautical décor on a book he’d read called “White Shadows in the South Seas,’’ as well as his experience visiting the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland, according to the company's website. Employees were dubbed captains and first mates who wore Hawaiian-themed shirts.  

The stores were unique in other ways. His mother-in-law and father-in-law had been academics who enjoyed dining on fresh seafood and quality, yet affordable wines. Trader Joe's would cater to those with similar, sophisticated tastes who were also on a budget. 

Trader Joe's became known for a selective array of premium foods available at low prices. Coulombe sampled and chose everything his stores sold and invited employees and customers to tastings.

In 1972, Trader Joe's also introduced its own private label products, starting with granola and later incorporating items ranging from coffee to apple juice to heat-and-serve entrees. Coulombe would use images from 19th-century advertisements for the labels and named the items himself. 

Coulombe sold Trader Joe’s to the German grocery retailer Aldi Nord in 1979.  He retired from the company nine years later.

Trader Joe's stayed true to its roots as it grew  

Since then, the chain has grown from 19 stores, all based in California, to more than 500 locations in 42 states as well as Washington, D.C.

Even as it expanded, Trader Joe’s has stayed rooted in the same environmentally friendly, offbeat hallmarks that have made it one of the most popular groceries in the U.S.

In 2002, it introduced the Charles Shaw label to its wine selection. The award-winning wine became a beloved pop culture fixture known as “Two-Buck Chuck’’ because it was so affordable.

Trader Joe’s was also ahead of the curve in ensuring its private-label offerings didn’t contain artificial flavors, colors or preservatives, a standard Coulombe established starting in the 1970s. In 2007, the company said it would cut out artificial trans fats as well.

In April 2019, Consumer Reports named Trader Joe's the best grocery store based on customer satisfaction.

A busy retirement  

Coulombe anchored a "Food and Wine Minute'' that aired on local radio in Los Angeles where he spoke about his visits to the world's wine regions and gave tidbits of food trivia. He ended his segments by saying “This is Joe Coulombe of Trader Joe’s.” 

In retirement, Coulombe and his wife also supported a variety of cultural institutions, including the Los Angeles Opera.

Coulombe is survived by his wife, their three children, their spouses and six grandchildren.

Contributing: Kelly Tyko

Follow Charisse Jones on Twitter @charissejones

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2020-02-29 08:37:30Z
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Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe's, dies at 89 - Los Angeles Times

He was a marketing whiz, a retail visionary whose chain of budget-minded specialty food stores, launched in the late 1960s with a distinctive South Seas trading post motif, developed a cult-like following on its way to becoming a Southern California institution.

Joe Coulombe, the founder of Trader Joe’s, died Friday after a long illness, said his son Joe Jr. He was 89.

Trader Joe’s, which came to be known for everything from its inexpensive Charles Shaw (“Two Buck Chuck”) wine to its use of maritime bells for in-store communication, was a quirky local retail success before spreading beyond California in the 1990s after Coulombe left the company.

Coulombe was the owner of a small chain of 18 Pronto Market convenience stores in the mid-1960s when he became concerned about a growing competitive threat: the expansion of Dallas-based Southland Corp.’s 7-Eleven convenience stores into Southern California.

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To survive, Coulombe knew he had to do something different.

The answer came in part from reading a story in Scientific American that said 60% of all people qualified to go to college were doing so, compared to only 2% in the Depression year of 1932.

Coulombe also read a newspaper article that said that wide-bodied Boeing 747 jumbo jets would be put into service in a few years, which would significantly reduce the cost of overseas air travel.

His conclusion: Target well-educated, well-traveled — but less-than-affluent — consumers who have more sophisticated and diverse tastes in food and drink.

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With the South Seas becoming more accessible, Coulombe adopted the relaxed trading post theme for his stores, which he stocked with a global cross-section of offerings.

“He put a great deal of thought into it,” his son said. “He got an early take on the emerging trends — from the ecological movement to the raising education level.”

The first Trader Joe’s opened in 1967 on South Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena, with the store decorated with fish nets, oars, pennants and other nautical trappings. The inaugural store remains in business.

Trader Joe’s Open New Store In Miami Area

Shoppers wait for the grand opening of a Trader Joe’s in Pinecrest, Fla., in 2013.

(Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

The Hawaiian-shirt wearing employees added to the trading post concept, with the manager dubbed “the captain,” the assistant manager “the first mate” and the staff “crew members.” Promotions were always from within the ranks.

Trader Joe’s became known as the place to buy reasonably priced, exotic food items such as nectarines from Chile, noodles from Thailand and whole bean coffee from El Salvador.

With research showing that the more educated people were, the more high-quality alcohol they drank, Coulombe stocked his stores with 100 brands of scotch, 50 brands of whiskey, 20 brands of brandy and 17 types of California wines. Even the ever-so-cheap Charles Shaw wine came with not only a date on when it was bottled, but an exact hour so fussy shoppers could restock with exactly the same pressing.

“I have an ideal audience in mind,” he told The Times in 1981. “This is a person who got a Fulbright scholarship, went to Europe for a couple of years and developed a taste for something other than Velveeta by way of cheese, something more than ordinary beer by way of alcoholic beverages and something other than Folgers by way of coffee.”

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Coulombe often described his target customers as “the overeducated and the underpaid.”

“What that originally meant was, everyone from underpaid musicians to out-of-work PhDs could come to Trader Joe’s and find elements of the lifestyle they aspired to for not too much money,” he told Supermarket News in 2010, the year he earned a place in that publication’s Hall of Fame.

Customers, Coulombe said, “wouldn’t find branded items, but the merchandise was always of the highest quality and priced within the reality of a schoolteacher’s salary that offered glimpses into a much more affluent lifestyle.”

Part of the appeal in shopping at Trader Joe’s is never knowing what new items have been added and what items will no longer be available.

“I learned that lesson with vintage wines,” Coulombe explained in a 2011 Times interview. “There’s only so much 1966 Lafite Rothschild. So we deliberately pursued a policy of discontinuity, as opposed to, say, Coca-Cola, which is in infinite supply.

“For example, we had the only vintage-dated, field-specific canned corn in existence, and it was the best damned canned corn there was. But there was only so much produced every year, and when you’re out, you’re out.”

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Joe Coulombe with a self-painted portrait of himself and granddaughter Julia.

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Coulombe was known for having a sense of what customers want — and for spotting trends.

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“In 1971, health food became a very big thing,” Coulombe said in a 1988 Times interview. “A few years ago, frozen seafood became big. We try to stay right out in front.”

Trader Joe’s relaxed and friendly atmosphere has a lot to do with its employees.

Unlike other retailers who save money by paying lower wages, Coulombe attracted and retained the kind of workers he was looking for by paying the average full-time employee the median California family income and offering full benefits.

“He loved and believed in his employees and he wanted to keep them,” said his son. “And the only way to do that was to pay them well.”

With no money to launch a major advertising campaign when he started Trader Joe’s, Coulombe created “The Insider Report,” a customer newsletter that provided product information and which Coulombe described as “a marriage of Consumer Reports and Mad magazine.” In the 1980s, it became known as the “Fearless Flyer,” a chatty rundown on new, seasonal and offbeat offerings at the stores.

Beginning in 1976, Coulombe used radio to help raise the chain’s profile. He wound up doing more than 3,000 one-minute broadcasts on KFAC, a Los Angeles classical music station, in which he’d discuss food and wine. He closed each broadcast with “This is Joe Coulombe of Trader’s Joe’s.”

In 1979, Coulombe and his employees, who had a 45% ownership stake in the company, sold Trader Joe’s to a family trust established by Theo Albrecht, co-founder of the Germany-based discount supermarket chain Aldi.

Coulombe, however, continued to serve as chief executive until 1989.

Joe’s Joe: Joe Coulombe »

Trader Joe’s unconventional approach to grocery shopping was part of the chain’s appeal, retail industry analysts told The Times in 1988 after Coulombe announced his plans to leave.

“It has a very distinct personality,” Ron Rotter, a retail industry analyst at Morgan, Olmstead, Kennedy & Gardner, said at the time. “It has a cult of customers who love going there to see what new wines have arrived.”

In 2000, Los Angeles magazine included Coulombe in its list of 10 influential Angelenos who have “quietly shaped whole tracts of high and low culture” over the last 40 years.

By mid-2011, the privately held Trader Joe’s had grown to more than 474 stores in 43 states and Washington, D.C. It was also facing more direct competition from chains like Whole Foods and Sprouts.

“My successors at Trader Joe’s have taken a 30-store chain nationwide with remarkable adherence to the basic concepts we started out with,” Coulombe said in the 2010 Supermarket News interview. “Though it’s certainly a different store than I left in 1989, I changed it so many times, I can’t argue with what they’ve done.”

Born in San Diego on June 3, 1930, Coulombe graduated from San Diego High School in 1947 and went off to Stanford University. With a year off for active duty in the Air Force, he graduated in 1952 and entered Stanford’s business school.

After earning his MBA in 1954, he landed a job as a researcher for the Owl-Rexall drugstore chain. In 1958, he was asked to launch Pronto Markets as a test in Los Angeles.

He was operating six of the markets by 1962 when Rexall told him to liquidate them. Instead, he found financing and bought the stores. He soon expanded the chain to 18 stores.

After leaving Trader Joe’s in 1989, Coulombe stayed involved in the retail industry.

In 1992, after working first as an independent business consultant, he became executive vice president for retailing and co-chairman of Pacific Enterprises’ Thrifty Corp. retailing unit. He oversaw the Thrifty Drug Stores chain in addition to Thrifty’s Big Five sporting goods chain and four other chains.

In the 1990s, he had a number of other corporate stints, including serving as president of Petrini’s, a supermarket chain; chief executive officer of Provigo Corp., a wholesale and retail grocer; and president and chief executive officer of Sport Chalet Inc., a sporting goods retailer.

Coulombe more recently served on the boards of Cost Plus World Market and True Religion Apparel.

McLellan is a former Times staff writer.

Staff writer Steve Marble and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

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2020-02-29 08:13:00Z
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Trader Joe's founder Joe Coulombe dies at 89 - NBC News

LOS ANGELES — Joe Coulombe envisioned a new generation of young grocery shoppers emerging in the 1960s, one that wanted healthy, tasty, high-quality food they couldn’t find in most supermarkets and couldn’t afford to buy in the few high-end gourmet outlets.

So he found a new way to bring everything from a then-exotic snack food called granola to the California-produced wines that for flavor compared with anything from France. And he made shopping for them almost as much fun as sailing the high seas when he created Trader Joe's, a quirky little grocery store filled with nautical themes and staffed not by managers and clerks but by "captains and mates."

From the time he opened his first store in Pasadena, California, in 1967 until his death Friday at age 89, Coulombe watched his namesake business rise from a cult favorite of educated but underpaid young people — and a few hippies — to a retail giant with more than 500 outlets in more than 40 states.

This circa 1985 photo provided by Esme Gibson shows Joe Coulombe, the founder of the Trader Joe's market chain, at his home in Pasadena, Calif. Coulombe, the man who created Trader Joe's markets with a vision that college-educated but poorly paid young people would buy healthy foods if they could only afford them, has died.Esme Gibson / via AP

A giant yes, but one that across more than half a century has never lost its reputation for friendly service from employees decked out in goofy Hawaiian shirts, a newsletter that looks like it was published in the 1890s, and rows and rows of high-quality, moderately priced healthy food and great wine, even if you sometimes can’t ever again find exactly the same thing.

"He wanted to make sure whatever was sold in our store was of good value," said Coulombe’s son, also named Joe, who added that his father died following a long illness. "He always did lots of taste tests. My sisters and I remember him bringing home all kinds of things for us to try. At his offices he had practically daily tastings of new products. Always the aim was to provide good food and good value to people."

He achieved that by buying directly from wholesalers and cutting out the middleman, in many cases slapping the name Trader Joe's on a bag of nuts, trail mix, organic dried mango, honey-oat cereal or Angus beef chili. He named several products after his daughters Charlotte and Madeleine and gave quirky names to others. Among them were Trader Darwin vitamins and a non-alcoholic sparkling juice called Eve’s Apple Sparkled by Adam.

He prided himself on checking out every vintage of wine from California’s Napa Valley, including Trader Joe’s standby, Charles Shaw, affectionately known as Two-Buck Chuck because it sold for $1.99. (It still does in the California stores, although shipping costs have increased the price in other states.)

"He sold a lot of better wines too," his son noted with a laugh, recalling trips the family made to France to seek them out.

After selling Trader Joe’s to German grocery retailer Aldi in 1979, Coulombe remained as its CEO until 1988, when he left to launch a second career as what he called a “temp,” coming in as interim CEO or consultant for several large companies in transition. He retired in 2013.

This Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2020 photo shows the original Trader Joe's grocery store in Pasadena, Calif. Joe Coulombe, the man who created Trader Joe's markets with a vision that college-educated but poorly paid young people would buy healthy foods if they could only afford them, has died.Chris Pizzello / AP

Joseph Hardin Coulombe, an only child, was born on June 3, 1930, in San Diego and lived on an avocado ranch in nearby Del Mar. After serving in the Air Force, he attended Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics, a master’s in business administration and met and married his wife, Alice.

A few years after graduation, he was hired by the Rexall drugstore chain, which tasked him with establishing a chain of convenience stores called Pronto. When Rexall lost interest in the stores, he bought them and had grown the chain to about a dozen outlets when the huge 7-Eleven company made a major push into Southern California.

"So I had to do something different," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2014. "Scientific American had a story that of all people qualified to go to college, 60% were going. I felt this newly educated — not smarter but better-educated — class of people would want something different, and that was the genesis of Trader Joe's."

His wife's parents had introduced him to a world of foods previously unfamiliar to him, including fine olive oil, fresh seafood and inexpensive quality wine, and he figured things like that would be perfect for the younger audience he was seeking.

As he bargained for those products, he’d sometimes come across a particularly exceptional olive oil or vintage wine, never to find it again, and he wouldn’t stock an inferior product in its place.

He eschewed promotional gimmicks like loyalty clubs or loss-leader sales, getting the word out with brief radio spots and the Trader Joe’s “Fearless Flyer” newsletter, whose old-style appearance was inspired by another money-saving effort. He wanted to dress up the newsletter’s stories with illustrations he cut out of magazines, but he made sure he only took ones on which the copyrights had expired.

He passed such savings on not only to his customers but employees, which Trader Joe’s boasts are among retail’s best compensated, with medical, dental, vision and retirement plans and annual salary increases the company says range from 7% to 10%. Many workers have remained with Trader Joe’s for decades.

"He just had a visit yesterday from employee No. 1," his daughter Charlotte said shortly before her father's death.

He and his wife also became well known in Southern California philanthropic circles, contributing time and money to such causes as Planned Parenthood, the Los Angeles Opera and the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens.

Stories differ on how the name Trader Joe’s came about, with some saying it was inspired by a ride on Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise boat or a book he read called “White Shadows in the South Seas” or his favorite college hangout being a Trader Vic’s bar near Stanford.

Coulombe, who loved to travel, did acknowledge over the years that he had a fascination with the South Seas and put Trader into the name and a nautical theme inside the stores to lend that exotic appeal to customers.

In addition to his three children and wife of 67 years, Coulombe is survived by six grandchildren.

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2020-02-29 08:11:00Z
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