Yet Another Reason to Love Trader Joe’s

I count it as one of the great blessings in my life that I live right down the street from a Trader Joe’s. I love the quirky store’s combination of healthy and organic foods at reasonable prices, its unique global fare, and the plethora of convenience foods that help with the daily grind of figuring out what to feed my family for dinner. Over the past seven years that I’ve lived in my neighborhood, I have also become familiar with a good number of the “crewmembers” who work there, and I have never encountered anyone who seems less than thrilled to be working there.

And now I understand why, after reading The Atlantic’s recent piece titled, “The Trader Joe’s Lesson: How to Pay a Living Wage and Still Make Money in Retail.” Trader Joe’s doesn’t just know retail; it also knows how to take care of its own.

You would think more companies would be able to grasp the wisdom of this strategy, that paying your employees well and treating them as a valuble source of competitive advantage can actually help rather than hinder the bottom line. But for many companies, especially those that see themselves as low-cost providers, the flawed thinking goes that to save money in order to offer those discount prices, you have to offer low wages and benefits and expect high turnover. (Case in point: Wal-Mart.)

But this is not just an issue for companies such as Wal-Mart. Christian companies often fall into a similar mindset as they try to balance ministry goals, economic challenges, and an aversion to wastefulness or excess in their spending. What they may not realize is that by treating their human resources as an expenditure and not an asset in which to invest, they are missing a huge opportunity.

According to Fortune, Trader Joe’s takes the following approach with its employees:

Store managers… can make in the low six figures, and full-time crew members can start in the $40,000 to $60,000 range. But on top of the pay, Trader Joe’s annually contributes 15.4% of employees’ gross income to tax-deferred retirement accounts.

In contrast, I have seen many friends over the years leave their positions in Christian companies or organizations because they just cannot make ends meet with their salaries. These companies are likely thinking that they can save money by paying employees less, but the cost to replace and retrain a new employee can be much more than the cost of giving the existing employee a fair, even generous wage.

Instead of thinking about employee wages from the perspective of “what can we afford?”, Carrie Cavanaugh of the Best Christian Workplaces Institute encourages organizations to view these issues through the lens of justice. What does the employee deserve? What are his or her comparable secular counterparts making? Cavanaugh writes:

[T]he way you pay is a reflection on your valuing of the person you employ. As Christians, we know that everyone is made in the image of God. Shouldn’t Christian organizations, more than any others, pay fairly?! Shouldn’t they set the example as places where employees are treated well?!

As much as I love my local Trader Joe’s, and as much as I appreciate that they clearly value their crew members, a part of me wishes I could see Christian organizations making the news for their extraordinary people practices and for being the trendsetters in this area. As Cavanaugh asks, shouldn’t Christian companies set the example as places where employees are treated well? I believe so, absolutely.

Trader Joe’s has demonstrated a basic understanding of business that seems counter-intuitive but that echoes what researchers Jim Collins and Jerry Porras discovered about visionary companies in their business bestseller Built to Last: “Profitability is a necessary condition for existence and a means to more important ends, but it is not the end in itself for many of the visionary companies.” In other words, money is important, but people are even more so. If this is not a value deeply embedded into the DNA of a Christian company, then perhaps it needs to further examine why they are in business to begin with.

Image via Anthony92931.