Trader Joe’s, the crunchy-granola grocery with the Hawaiian shirts, was built on booze.
Joe Coulombe opened it in 1958 as Pronto Markets, a convenience chain copied from 7-Eleven. In 1967 he renamed it and dressed it in an invented South Seas theme. The first Trader Joe’s stocked what he billed as the world’s largest assortment of alcohol, with around 100 brands of Scotch alone.
Trader Joe’s on Brandseum