After hearing many endorsements, my wife and I ventured out to Trader Joe’s in Hewlett, NY this past weekend. What is Trader Joe’s, you might ask. Their own words:

At Trader Joe’s, our mission is to bring our customers the best food and beverage values and the information to make informed buying decisions. There are more than 2000 unique grocery items in our label, all at honest everyday low prices. We work hard at buying things right: Our buyers travel the world searching for new items and we work with a variety of suppliers who make interesting products for us, many of them exclusive to Trader Joe’s. All our private label products have their own “angle,” i.e., vegetarian, Kosher, organic or just plain decadent, and all have minimally processed ingredients.

They are somewhat small supermarkets filled with a lot of healthy stuff. By healthy I don’t necessarily mean low in calories, but organic, unprocessed stuff. Walking around the place, I was doing a mental comparison with my regular supermarket. It’s amazing to think about how processed and filled with chemicals just about everything in a regular supermarket is. I always buy organic milk because I drink a lot of it, but Trader Joe’s really makes me want to buy natural, organic stuff all of the time now. Then I got retrospective and thought about how sad it is that food companies have put sheer profits ahead of putting stuff out there that isn’t so horrible for us to consume. One of the downfalls of capitalism, I suppose.

The only real negative at Trader Joe’s is their checkout system. The counters are too small if you have a cart full of stuff so the cashier has limited space to work with. They take an item, scan it, place it down, repeat. This goes on until the cart is empty, even if there really isn’t a lot of space on the checkout counter for any more items. After that’s all done, the cashier then bags the stuff. I did assist with bagging to speed things up a bit. My buddy Matt Dorsey put it best saying “It’s like it’s intentionally inefficient.”

Aside from the checkout process, Trader Joe’s gets a huge thumbs up from me. I am mildly disappointed that I waited so long to check the place out, but that isn’t helped by the fact that the nearest location to me is about a half hour drive away. To make up for lost time, I plan on buying lots of yummy stuff there as often as I can make it out there.