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The expansion of the Fearless Flyer to twenty pages was an important factor in the jump of Trader Joe’s sales after 1985. Down deep, the Fearless Flyer was an educational medium and hundreds of customers kept three-ring notebook collections of the issues so they could refer back to the articles. For years, we printed three rings on the cover. Equally important, however, it was an educational medium for our employees: A lot of our employees were under twenty-one; legally they could not have tasted the wines we were selling. So the Fearless Flyer was a sales tool for those employees. As we got deeper and deeper into vitamins, and FDA got goosier and goosier about claims by the health food industry, I didn’t want our employees to do any selling of vitamins and food supplements. When asked about a product, they were to refer to the Fearless, and a back copy file was kept at the store level for this purpose. (In 1993, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah rammed a Magna Carta for health foods through Congress. The FDA hates the law, but all kinds of claims can be made now, which were impossible in my era.)
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Joe Coulombe (Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys)