Michael Roberto

I'd like to open a new kind of grocery store. We're not gonna have any branded items. It's all gonna be private label. We're gonna have no television advertising and no social media whatsoever. We're never gonna have anything on sale. We're not gonna accept coupons. We'll have no loyalty card. We won't have a circular that appears in the Sunday newspaper. We'll have no self-checkout.

Frankly, in many cases, they're in sort of old strip malls, so they've saved money on the real estate.

We won't have wide aisles or big parking lots. Would you invest in my company?"

We're all acclimated to every other supermarket looks the same. It has 35,000 items. It has 7 million varieties of toothpaste and tomato sauce. Every other player has all those things. But Trader Joe's, they only have, say, 3,000 stock keeping units in a typical Trader Joe's or 4,000 at most in one of their larger stores.

What that means is Trader Joe's has mitigated the power that suppliers might have over them. So while they're not nearly as big as Kroger's, they can get great purchasing power because they're condensing all their buying in tomato sauce to one vendor for a very limited number of items.

They're at the top by a wide, wide margin. The sales per square footage estimates are unbelievable. I mean, three and four times better than some of the leading players in the industry.

It has 7 million varieties of toothpaste and tomato sauce. And a Trader Joe's shelf.

A typical grocery store has a SKU count. SKU stands for stock keeping unit. So it's that number of different items carried in a store. Well, typically grocery store, a supermarket might have 35,000 SKUs, right? A tremendous selection of varieties. You go to Trader Joe's and they only have, say, 3,000 stock keeping units in a typical Trader Joe's.

Thank Thank

The two brothers who founded Aldi North and Aldi South in Germany, you know, have a record of that. Michael Roberto again. That was kind of the family heritage of really being pretty secretive about their business operations. And really, they weren't even you couldn't even find photos of them like on the Internet for years. You know, I mean, they were very secretive.

At Trader Joe's, what they want is employees in the aisles who have sampled the product, who know the product, who can say, have you tried this wine or that cheese?

Let's play Shark Tank today. You're the investors. Shark Tank, if you don't know, is the TV show where people pitch business ideas to famous investors. You might be Mark Cuban or Mr. Wonderful. You're trying to decide, would you invest?