![]() ![]() Ask anyone: this is a happy and helpful lot who, from my own two decades of patronage in other cities, plainly buy into the company’s culture. The relative dearth of a sustainable customer service pool has been the common complaint in the food and hospitality trade here for the last few years, and the Trader Joe’s Crew Member is a cut above. Perhaps none of us needs to delve any deeper to discern that this factor has, heretofore, held Savannah back. We want to bring in people from the community who understand our company.” “When Captains are looking at hiring,” said Friend-Daniel, “they are looking for people who have energy and a passion for food and a passion for customer service. store general manager) who wants to go there, just one of many “moving parts.” Positions on the new store’s staff are opened up to veteran Crew Members who are interested in relocating as Mates in the new store, though the majority of the jobs are ultimately filled by local applicants, a process Trader Joe’s does not take lightly. When the plans to open a new branch move forward, the company finds an experienced Captain (a.k.a. No, those daily requests are not all from me, and no, she would not commit to whether or not those TJ’s people had been on Greater Savannah’s ground to date. “Our Real Estate Department looks at every single request,” Friend-Daniel explained. “Where is that ideal spot? Are we wanted? Are we going to get enough customers? Where are our distribution centers? Do we have enough crew members who want to move there?”Īs for the the ‘ideal spot’ and distribution centers, keep reading.Īs for the ‘wanted’ and ‘enough customers’, consider two Facebook pages devoted to the cause and the freak-out wrought by ‘the hoax’.Īs for the crew members willing to move, if TJ’s can get experienced employees to relocate to Albany, New York, and Coralville, Iowa, come on. Her rhetoricals were pragmatic and appreciable, though with each question she posed, I found myself nodding on the other end of the line: Thankfully, Friend-Daniel’s responses to my questions were not all discouraging, and I would like to think that I understood how Trader Joe’s operates as an ever-expanding but thoughtful corporation. This was not what I wanted to hear and immediately had Jim Carrey and Lauren Holly’s climactic scene from Dumb and Dumber running through my head, though I kept myself from feebly saying, “So you’re telling me there’s a chance.” “Savannah is not a place we have ruled out,” she told me. Within an hour, I heard back from Kenya Friend-Daniel, Trader Joe’s National Director of Public Relations, and though I came away from our conversation and emails without the definitive answers so many Savannahians clearly want, I feel like there is a lei of hope. Last week, I played the journalist card and contacted a few executives at the corporation’s headquarters in Monrovia, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles, promising them that my search for answers was born out of the best intentions. All it took was one person’s post to create a social media brush fire, but within the next few hours, the blaze was extinguished, leaving nothing but scorched dreams of Outside-In Stuffed Gnocchi and Mandarin orange chicken.Ī month ago, I promised ‘Dine Savannah’ readers that I was on The Coconut Case and would do my level best to get to the bottom of why we do not yet have a Trader Joe’s, even though a Hawaiian-shirted crew is about to huck bottles of Three-Buck Chuck at Store #756 in Little Rock, Arkansas. As a devotee of Trader Joe’s, I was gutted.īefore I had left the house that morning for an interview with the Starland Yard team, my wife had emailed me to let me know that FB was blowing up, as the kids said five years ago, with the ‘news’ that Trader Joe’s was coming to Savannah. Get Savannah arts and culture news delivered to your inbox: Sign up for our morning, afternoon and food newslettersĪs an English teacher, I was offended. The font was wrong, too: a lame attempt to disguise Cooper as the trademarked tiki text. ![]() Before I even walked across Bull Street, I could see that the ‘COMING SOON’ was pink, not red. ![]()
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