For years I’ve kept a page about foods that I love at Trader Joe’s. Unfortunately, I’m turned off now. There are still some Trader Joe’s items that I like, but I had issues at my local store, and I wrote to them a few times, and got no response. Yet, when I wrote to them with a positive comment, I DID get a response. What kind of customer service reps ignore complaints and only answer positive comments? It’s great if you want to fill your cashier positions with Pollyannas, but for customer service, get some people who are equipped to handle complaints.
Don’t Buy Produce at Trader Joe’s
It took me a long time to learn my lesson. I’d say 90% of the bags of produce I bought at Trader Joe’s either contained moldy items or went bad within a day or two. Their snap peas, for example, always looked delicious. Like a dummy, I bought them at least five times and every time there were moldy pods in the bag. Because their produce is cello-wrapped, you don’t notice until you get home. And it’s not worthwhile to drive back to the store to return some rotten grapefruit or moldy Persian cucumbers.
It’s a shame that they care so little about the fact that they are selling rotten food. Their non-produce items are awesome! It seems as if they sell produce because they feel they should, but they’d be better off NOT selling produce than selling bags rife with mold and rot and mealy garbage.
My other issue is that my local Trader Joe’s outgrew their parking lot ten years ago. TJ’a has become very popular with the Canadians whose border is twenty minutes away. I’m Canadian, and I’m not afraid to say that my people are rude – the ones who come to shop in the States, anyway. They block the aisles with their “buggies”, and get aggressive in the parking lot. I had a lady fling herself onto the hood of my car because she was trying to block me from a parking spot. Her husband was in the car, around the corner. This was after I’d been driving around the little strip mall lot for fifteen minutes. I was excited to finally be behind a car that was leaving, and I put my blinker on. As soon as the car pulled out of the stall, though, SPLAT, this lunatic splays herself in front of my car so that I couldn’t take the spot I’d been waiting for.
I wrote to TJ’s about that incident, too. I didn’t expect them to compensate me in any way, but a response would have been appreciated.
So, sadly, I took down my page of Things I Love at Trader Joe’s because I won’t support a store that cares so little about its customers that it sells them rotten produce, knowingly, and doesn’t bother replying when a customer takes time to write to them about significant issues.