Over the years, I’ve made a lot of trips up and down the highway connecting the small Massachusetts town in which I grew up to a strip mall about ten miles away. In this strip mall is a branch of Trader Joe’s, the mid-range American supermarket chain known for its serviceable range of food, decent prices and workaday packaging.
I do not drive, and nor do I live in America any more. But when I am staying with my parents, I like to accompany them on their shopping trips as I find American supermarkets fascinating, if freezing. Trader Joe’s is an OK option for my parents; not great, but fine. For good meat, my mother would go elsewhere, and the same goes for fish. But value packs of red pepper hummus, large logs of goat’s cheese, big boxes of crackers, apple pies for the freezer, the same breakfast cereal my dad always has? That’ll be a trip to TJ’s.
All of which is why I have been bemused to watch the Trader Joe’s hipster frenzy grow not just in the US, where it could plausibly be an in-joke (akin to Jeremy Corbyn’s normcore look that went viral a few years ago), but also here in the UK. Where there are no branches of Trader Joe’s whatsoever. Where most people have probably never even heard of the 608-outlet chain, founded in Monrovia, California in 1968 by one Joe Coulombe, who initially envisioned a 7-Eleven style convenience store and chose the ‘South Seas’ look of the brand after an enjoyable holiday to the Caribbean.
And yet the UK is also where, bizarrely, the Trader Joe’s canvas tote bag has become a cult item, with shoppers paying five times the price to secure one on eBay or begging their friends who visit the US to score them one. Some have said they’ve seen pink versions of the totes listed for sale for $1,000. To be clear, they cost about £2 in their proper context. Which is on an average shopping trip for average staples in an average suburb.
The totes are also a sell-out in the US, where they first became a status symbol of sorts – but at least there they get the joke not-joke. Here, it comes across – like all imports of US trends – a most desperate grasp at cool. ‘I think I’ve seen more of the Trader Joe’s tote bags in London than I have where I live in San Francisco,’ Hannah Tyldsley, a 27-year-old visiting London, told the New York Times.
How things both change and, in this case, stay the same. Progressives and hipsters hate America with one side of their face for electing Donald Trump and having guns and so on, but on the other? It’s just like it always was. The new country offers the uplit plains of all that we really so badly want at the end of the day, whether that is an Apple iPhone, a good hamburger, stardom, or a Trader Joe’s tote bag.
‘Obviously, at some point, you’ve been to the States. You’ve picked up the bag. You know what’s up’
My cousin, a New Yorker who lives in London, told me a few months ago how dorky and strange she thought it was that every time she went out with her TJ’s tote, acquired by being a humdrum TJ’s shopper back home, people admiringly asked how she got one. ‘This is the same population that cannot for the life of them bake a real cookie, and think they are called “biscuits”,’ she said. Be that as it may, a Trader Joe’s tote now confers instant admission to the cool group here. Alice Stott, a writer, got one by chance on a trip to New York in 2023. ‘It’s nice. You see people and you do that “Oh you’ve got one too” nod. It’s a funny connection to make in the street,’ she told the Times.
‘It’s a subtle flex that you’ve been to America,’ noted one sage commenter on TikTok. Or that ‘you’re a little bit well travelled’, as a young British man told the New York Times. ‘Obviously, at some point, you’ve been to the States. You’ve picked up the bag. You know what’s up.’
Really? Having been to the States still signifies that you know what’s up? Those of us who had gathered that the US was now somewhere cool people stayed well away from, lest they end up endorsing anti-woke policies, racist police violence, crackdowns on Palestine protests and the MAGA-sphere or risk expulsion, are amused.
But there you have it: Margaret Thatcher was right. In the end, any politics falls down in the face of good old-fashioned consumerism. Bridges are built, grandiose notions collapse, and the international fate of a supermarket’s branded shapeless bag-sack becomes glorious.
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