Whether or not Northeast Wisconsin will ever have a Trader Joe’s bestowed upon us is a running joke within the commercial real estate development community.
So much so that the frequently-asked question was bound to come up at Insight’s annual InDevelopment Conference, which convenes local developers, engineers, architects, general contractors, retailers, investors and lenders involved in commercial real estate development.
This year’s conference was hosted Sept. 13 at the Hilton Appleton Paper Valley and — spoiler alert — Trader Joe’s in the New North, or the lack thereof, came up.
The neighborhood grocery store chain is known for its interesting and affordable private-label products like gluten-free cheese pizza with a cauliflower crust and cold-pressed matcha green tea lemonade.
Given that the company has more than 500 locations in 42 states, not having a Trader Joe’s can make a community feel like the last kid picked for gym class dodgeball. But Trader Joe’s (affectionately referred to as TJ’s among its cult-like fandom) has a rather specific method for choosing where to open new stores.
GB Real Estate Investments founder Garritt Bader analyzed the data from over 80 of Trader Joe’s markets, looking at criteria like educational attainment, population density and household income — criteria that TJ’s is rumored to consider in its decision-making process.
“The somewhat uncomfortable reality is that when we compared ourselves to those markets, there weren’t many that were ‘worse’ than ours,” Bader said during the InDevelopment panel.
Ouch. But knowledge is power.
Bader isn’t the only one analyzing TJ’s selection criteria. An analysis by AggData found that Trader Joe’s stores are located in counties where the household median income is roughly $10,000 higher than the average U.S. median income.
So maybe Northeast Wisconsin hasn’t hit the magic intersection of education, income and population to catch the eye of Trader Joe’s — yet. Whether by being deemed worthy through the growth of our region or TJ’s eventual world domination, Bader seemed cautiously optimistic that, one day, TJ’s would be ours.
Until then, I’ll just have to buy my cold-pressed matcha green tea lemonade someplace else.
