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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3393 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Inside the secret world of Trader Joe's

TJ's is now, has been and shall always be Grocery Outlet for hipsters.

We shop there regularly but it's a miasma of bad produce, house brands and low-quality staples. That they sugar-coat it and dip it in spices does not change the fact that it's still frozen meatballs.





tla  ·  3393 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah it's like that. Produce wise, the ones local to us are hit and miss with what they stock so we usually need to go to a regular grocery store as well just for basics, some things are better quality than Safeway so that's a bonus if we're already going there. We go mostly because my husband prefers their frozen pizzas over regular grocery store frozen pizzas.

kleinbl00  ·  3392 days ago  ·  link  ·  
tla  ·  3392 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Heh, amusingly avocados is one of the things they do better than the supermarkets around here. But I'm in California.

kleinbl00  ·  3392 days ago  ·  link  ·  

You're high.

There are five ralph's around me and one TJ's. TJ's avocados are crap. They literally go from "unusably rock hard" to "beyond guac mush" in three days. The period during which they are actually acceptable to put on a sandwich lasts for about six hours.

tla  ·  3392 days ago  ·  link  ·  

By my experience, supermarkets in my suburbia prefer to get their produce once a week. On Mondays. From Wednesdays through Sunday the avocados left are ripe and have been pawed at for days already so even the good ones have bad spots.

We don't have a TJ's in our town, so we go a few towns over on Saturdays usually. I can get bright green avocados from TJ's on a Saturday and have them ripe but a little starchy on Monday, ripe but firm on Tuesday and buttery Wednesday or even Thursday no problem and with few bad spots. Unless I store them next to bananas, then all bets are off.

kleinbl00  ·  3392 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That's weird. And terrible! The supermarkets around here stock daily, while TJ's is twice a week.