Fan "Commercial" Celebrates Trader Joe's

The YouTube and BoingBoing web sites are offering a video homage to Trader Joe’s that’s as clever as any Super Bowl commercial and, if you are a regular shopper of the store, even a little poignant.

The visual quality might not be great but the framing and editing betray that the video wasn’t put together by amateurs. The director is Carl Willat, who, as proprietor of Carl’s Fine Films, has worked on commercials for the likes of Hershey, Nabisco, Ford and the United States Census Bureau, his website states. One day, after being chased out of a favorite Trader Joe’s by a manager because he was photographing one of the company’s hand drawn promotional signs, Willat decided he would return and create his own Trader Joe’s commercial using his Treo cell phone

Trader Joe’s Fan Commercial

Now, Trader Joe’s doesn’t do television advertising, so this wasn’t an unsolicited client pitch. Rather, it was a customer inspired to take some time and apply his own professional skills by a store experience. That’s where the poignancy comes in. In addition to celebrating the miniature cups of free coffee Trader Joe’s offers customers at its sampling stations, Willat bemoans favorite products that the retailer – which regularly introduces new items and cuts slower moving ones – no longer carries. So, ultimately, the commercial is a chronicle of the relationship between the director and the store.

This isn’t atypical of how Trader Joe’s customers respond. The tradersjoesfan.com web site, a labor of store fan and freelance web designer Jovanna Brooks, was established as a sight where a group of friends and Trader Joe’s fans could share product information. Today, it is filled with meal preparation tips, product reviews and discussions about store experiences.

Trader Joe’s goes out of its way to create customer relationships by emphasizing service and training employees to drop everything at the first sign of a question to help with information or with a storage-room trip to retrieve a product missing from the store shelves. The small supermarkets require lots of restocking during peak selling periods, which means lots of employees are where customers can find them when they are most likely to be in the store. It may be chaotic, and it certainly isn’t for everyone, but shoppers don’t wander aisle after aisle to get a question answered, as they might at a supercenter, a warehouse club or even a big supermarket. The sample stand, a staffed service desk on the sales floor, a checkout system that encourages customer/clerk interaction, the Fearless Flyer, an entertaining magazine of a circular, all contribute to a rare level of rapport between the store and those shoppers who have embraced it. The low prices don’t hurt either.

The pay off is customer fondness, free advertising and some viral attention.