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The advent of the Apple Macintosh in 1985 made a tremendous improvement in publishing the Fearless Flyer. Using a piece of software called Adobe® PageMaker, we were able to dis-intermediate most of the printer’s function and produce camera-ready copy entirely in our office. Pat St. John, whom Alice recruited for us in 1986 as head of advertising, made a great contribution here, cutting lead time by almost a week. Anyone who has been in advertising can appreciate the nerve-racking problems of products that are advertised but didn’t arrive in time to cover the advertising. I would have had a coronary without the Macintosh, which had made it possible to expand the Fearless Flyer from twelve pages to twenty. This created all the more space to advertise products, but it also potentiated the coronary potential, and the almost-as-bad requirement for still more cartoons! Please remember: Trader Joe’s was a low-overhead operation with all of us wearing several hats. Sure, some of the above could have been done pre-Macintosh, but at vastly greater expense.
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Joe Coulombe (Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys)