Why Are Trader Joe's Parking Lots So Small? It's No Big Conspiracy

Trader Joe's addressed the issue of its cramped and busy parking lots on the grocery chain's podcast.

If you have a long list of questions about Trader Joe’s, there’s a good chance that they’ve been answered during an episode of the company’s podcast. In some of its recent episodes, co-hosts Tara Miller and Matt Sloan have addressed why the California-based chain doesn’t offer grocery delivery, why it doesn’t have a customer loyalty program, and why some of your favorite products might be discontinued.

In another episode of “Inside Trader Joe’s,” Miller and Sloan tried their best to explain what’s going on with Trader Joe’s parking lots. If you’ve driven to your local Trader Joe’s lately — or any time, really — you’ve probably noticed that their lots can be chaotic collections of discarded red shopping carts, Horchata ice cream-carrying customers running for their lives… and one available parking space that seventeen Teslas are silently inching towards.

TJ's parking lots bordering on lawlessness (perhaps an exaggeration, but barely) is nothing new — in fact, they always have. “​​Like a lot of things related to Trader Joe's, this can be traced back to the very first location, the Arroyo Parkway store in Pasadena, which has had, and still very much has a challenging parking lot,” Sloan said. “And by that, I mean it's small and it’s busy. And that size factor, it's small, and the busyness factor, lots of people parking cars, well, those are the two reasons that our parking lots can be, well, a bit challenging.”

Related: Ina Garten Admits She Loves Trader Joe's Desserts Just Like the Rest of Us

But some Trader Joe’s newer locations have even smaller parking lots, which Miller and Sloan say are because their stores are also smaller compared to other supermarkets. Not only can a store’s shoppable square footage determine the size of its parking lot, Trader Joe’s stores seem to stay reasonably busy, which means an already smaller lot can fill up quickly.

“[W]hen you design a parking space or you allocate spaces for parking for a retail store, it's based on the size of the store,” Sloan added. “So you mentioned how small our stores are relative to other grocers. Well, that's true and that can have an effect on the number of parking spaces allocated.”

Before you ask: no, Trader Joe’s doesn’t plan on opening bigger stores to accommodate a larger number of customers (and their cars.) “[T]hat kind of changes who we are,” Miller said. “We have small stores, so they come with small parking lots. If we had bigger stores, sure we'd have bigger parking lots, but we'd feel like a different store.” (And even if your local Trader Joe’s has the world’s most bonkers parking lot. just consider that there are a number of TJ’s locations in the U.S. that don’t have parking lots at all.)

Basically, Trader Joe’s knows that their parking areas can be frustrating, and one of the most off-putting aspects of visiting their stores — but that’s just the trade-off for having a Trader Joe’s in your neighborhood. “We don't open stores with the world's most ridiculous parking lot on purpose,” Sloan said.

And even if they did, those Chocolate and Peanut Butter Joe-Joe’s just might still be worth it.

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