Okay, this saddens me, but I've visited & lived in NYC for decades & have a Trader Joe's burlap bag…read moreolder than the median age of this store's workers. I'm struggling between staying positive & candor: the problem is that the average worker in NYC is less bright than most of the rest of the country. Ouch. I know. But I have encountered this very roughly a hundred times over the years.
Sadly, this TJ's follows the above pattern. It's a case-study that perhaps Harvard's business school should analyze: take a great franchise, slowly muck it up by degrading ingredients, fill it with well-meaning folk, and ignore, forgive me, intelligence in the hiring process. I'll only cite recent examples, though I've a treasure trove:
[1] no TJ steel cut oats, polite friendly inquiry when it might be re-stocked, answer "discontinued," fully stocked next day after I've bought Bob's Red Mill via walmart.com;
[2] all raisins gone in the entire store, again cheerful what's-up? answer "will get in next month," fully stocked next day, ditto w/ walmart.com for organic (!) alternative 1/3 (!!) the price;
[3] No skim milk of any variety (organic, reg, lactose-free, or from various ruminants) at 8p, gentle inquiry, "we received more at noon & hope to bring it out," then 1 employee spends all her time exclusively straightening containers at the back of the top shelf.
It's important to add that their former great gift of freeing us from reading each set of ingredients like some rejected script for "Portlandia" has now been replaced by their cutting corners that affect our health and their value. Cases in point, albeit there are many:
[1] Palm oil has replaced nearly all other oils in hundreds of their products (I'm not one of these crazies, but palm oil is indeed destroying rain-forests and 'extincting' apex species: 25-30M hectares, the size of ARIZONA (!) https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/16/5111/2024/); it's the least healthy oil in widespread use today; but it is CHEAP.
[2] Try to find a breakfast cereal without added sugar; there are none; their shredded wheat with sugar-frost coating is cheaper than w/out.
[3] The average age of their apples are 9 to 14 months old https://www.rd.com/article/supermarket-apples-10-months-old/; very little of their fruit is genuinely fresh.
I've many more examples than these 6, but you get the idea. If you go 2 hours before closing, you must negotiate a phalanx of boxes and employees darting about re-stacking such that it's hard to even move down the aisles. The place is still pretty clean and the employees friendly, but I'm sorry, it's really a dumbed-down version of a formerly great franchise, and I've been to TJs all over CA, in OH, VA, upstate NY, CT, NJ, OR, just to name a few.