I’ve had this idea for a while now.
Trader Joe’s quietly papers over a storefront in Valencia—not Barcelona or Paris because those cities are too obvious. It only tells people who need to know what they’re working on—and those who need to know sign ironclad NDAs. I really think—if done right—they could keep the cat in the bag.
One morning, the paper comes down and—without any warning whatsoever—Trader Joe’s opens on a busy corner in the heart of urban Spain. Within hours the place would be packed—a viral sensation with a line spanning a block or more.
It almost makes too much sense if you occupy that orbit and like or love Trader Joe’s.
There are no Trader Joe’s stores in Spain—or anywhere else in Europe. But the bags are everywhere.
So my idea comes back to me every time I see a person carrying a Trader Joe’s tote in Europe. I see them weekly in Valencia. And I saw them regularly on recent visits to Barcelona and Paris.
While there’s no doubt I’d visit Trader Joe’s once the spectacle died down, you’d be about as likely to find me shopping there as you would be to see me with a Trader Joe’s tote slung over my shoulder.
In a forthcoming article about baseline standards of quality in Spain, I write:
Sometimes we’ve even seen people turn their noses up when produce comes from the supermarket rather than the municipal market or a local frutería (which, typically, sells fruits and vegetables).
I could go on. But suffice to say many people here have standards that can come off like complaining. Or even, in some cases, pretentiousness.
As an American, it has taken me a minute to make sense of this. I guess I had to live the experience enough to not only understand it, but to recognize some of the same instinct in myself.
Now that I do, it’s clear that the food didn’t suddenly get worse — my baseline got better. What once felt exceptional — relative to where I’m from — became normal.
Trader Joe’s is a prime example.
It’s a classic illustration of, as I also write in the article—“When you’re forced to constantly settle, you’ll take shitty avocados and poor excuses for bike lanes all day long.”
When I lived in the United States, Trader Joe’s looked good if I was willing to look past—and, obviously, I was—the excessive packaging, products produced and presented white label courtesy of large American conglomerates, and shitty avocados. Plus, the fact that—even in the heart of Central Los Angeles—it was the saner and more logical choice to drive rather than walk to your “neighborhood TJ’s,” as the company calls it.
Unless you live within a few blocks of Trader Joe’s in most of LA, it’s a nervous-system-rattling pain in the ass to arrive on foot. This is the case throughout much, if not most of America.
People who live outside of LA’s core or in some other far-flung suburban or otherwise low-density environment have it bad, as I chronicled in 2024 before we moved to Spain.
As we drove back from the beach and decided — on the fly in our car — to “stop” at Trader Joe’s, we found ourselves in an inane mess of classic car dependency, waiting to do a u-turn around a median to get to the store just across the street.
So I issued a challenge to my wife:
I bet it will take less time for you to jump out of the car, cross the street, get what we need at Trader Joe’s and come out than it will for us to take our turn at the left turn arrow, make a u-turn, park and go in.
So, she got out of the car so we could test my assumption.
This is the type of stuff I write about: not where to find familiar American products abroad, but what something as ordinary as a grocery store can reveal about cities, car dependency, public space, and the standards we’ve been trained to accept as normal. If you’re moving, considering it, or wondering why where you live makes daily life harder than it should be, subscribe.
The point of the article wasn’t really Trader Joe’s.
I used that ridiculous experiment to illustrate how car dependency can make something physically close so absurdly far away. The store sat within spitting distance. Yet, while I waited for the arrow, made the u-turn, and parked, my wife crossed the street, bought two bags of stuff, and was walking out by the time I arrived.
It’s comical—an abject failure of urban planning made possible by the raging success of American indoctrination, packaged and exported for international consumption.
That’s what I mean when I say Trader Joe’s might work better inside the kind of city America stopped building. Unless you’re in a handful of still-functioning urban environments in the U.S., the idea that anything is your “neighborhood” store is little more than marketing nostalgia. Trader Joe’s could stock virtually the same store in Valencia, but the surrounding environment would transform the experience before Trader Joe’s changed a single product.
That said, Trader Joe’s might need to change a lot to thrive in a place like Spain. While I can see the store catching on—with some locals, but particularly with Americans who just can’t let go of “home” and self-soothe with symbolic gestures like ranch dressing and Philly cream cheese—a European venture also risks an outcome dangerously close to Domino’s failure in Italy.
Just as you have to have something seriously wrong with you to eat Domino’s pizza in Italy, you’d have to be equally nonsensical to buy even one tomato or avocado at Trader Joe’s given the multitude of local and far superior options. We have enough American chains littering the landscape here—my number one complaint about Europe—and Trader Joe’s probably wouldn’t be any different.
It would become just another tourist attraction. With well-placed signage or branding—another selfie destination.
And Trader Joe’s sure isn’t going to tell me what the lady at my favorite fruit and vegetable vendor in the market told me the other morning: We don’t have lettuce today because it didn’t look good this morning.
That’s reason enough to kill my own idea.
No matter what it did, Trader Joe’s would still be trying to scale and standardize a version of neighborhood shopping in a place where the real thing remains alive and well.
So Trader Joe’s shouldn’t secretly open in Spain after all.
The frenzy would be real. But once the spectacle passed, Spain would be left with another American chain occupying space in a place that already does much of what Trader Joe’s approximates—for real and better.
European cities are far from perfect. But across much of the continent, the larger movement is toward fewer cars, more public space, stronger neighborhood life, and higher standards for ordinary daily life. Despite setbacks and outliers, much of Europe is doubling down on what works from an urban planning perspective. So much of this is simply public policy meets urban planning.
The current trajectory—when European cities are at their best or getting better—is away from American influence, not toward it.
The United States should be importing concepts and lessons from European cities, not the other all-too-typical way around.
Trader Joe’s has built a business selling Americans a Disneyland version of neighborhood life. In Valencia, I can walk downstairs and live it.
Seeing the tote bags here and there is enough.
Spain is the lens, not the product. This newsletter is about what happens when you change your environment enough to see how thoroughly the old one organized your movement, relationships, health, and idea of a good life. If you want me to keep researching, reporting, and writing stories like this, become a paid subscriber.