Trader Joe’s started in 1967 in California, and it’s since thrived, I’d guess, more because it does a good job selling cheap food a few notches above slop than because of its nautical and cutesy name and marketing themes. Because it commits to prices being the same even in big cities where retail rent is high, Trader Joe’s is often the cheapest food available for sale in some urban markets, and some young, millennial journalists I’ve known survive on it almost entirely. But last week, it announced it had been practicing an evil, and it will be fixing its ways.
How? Paying employees more? Donating more food to the hungry? Of course not! It’s about words and names. All our moral fights are about words now. The Los Angeles Times reports that “the names Trader Ming’s, Arabian Joe’s, Trader Jose’s, Trader Giotto’s and Trader Joe San appear on items such as habañero and lime salsa, gyoza dipping sauce and artichoke antipasto.” Trader Joe’s is giving in to a petition to remove these words, which was signed by a few thousand people and circulated by a 17-year-old from the Bay Area who insisted the variants on Joe were deeply evil.
You may be wondering what is so wrong with this, since until recently, nobody would have thought this raised any particularly serious concern worth circulating a petition about — and indeed, it might even just be a good-natured acknowledgment of the enjoyable differences between naming and culinary conventions among mutually admiring, different cultures. Not so fast! “The carefully-crafted facade of your friendly neighborhood hipster grocery store belies a darker image; one that romanticizes imperialism, fetishizes native cultures, and casually misappropriates,” the petition’s author tweeted. The petition explained its charge, saying TJ’s has created “a narrative of exoticism.” “The Trader Joe’s branding is racist because it exoticizes other cultures — it presents ‘Joe’ as the default ‘normal’ and the other characters falling outside of it.” The store’s founder “took inspiration in building the Trader Joe’s brand from a racist book and a controversial theme park attraction.”
NBC News reports that “the grocery store chain said it has been in a yearslong process of repackaging those products and will soon complete the work.” Common sense dictates this is almost certainly a lie, and it wasn’t already on board with the petition for years. The petition’s claims contain moral ideas that didn’t exist years ago. “Exoticizing” is not strictly new as an objection, but it’s one of those bad ideas that has newly escaped the academy into the broader discourse. And it makes no sense when scrutinized. Five minutes ago, “exotic” was a word that actually meant something good, like how an exotic car is a Lamborghini and an exotic vacation is on a sunny beach. The prepackaged phrases for “offensive” and “racist” crimes that are being minted these days are getting more and more absurd, and they usually have within them some abuse of language. If you stop and think about them for even a moment, you can usually see that somebody is trying to pull one over on you.
