I suspect that's why they don't partner with delivery vendors. Grocery stores would rather you came in person. You'll make impulse buys, they can direct you to products where they have excess inventory, and they can maintain a direct relationship with you.
Most are forced to offer delivery precisely because they don't have a "great and unique selection of food." If they don't support delivery, you'll get the same products from a competitor who does. Trader Joe's doesn't have to because you can't find their products anywhere else.
Trader Joe's definitely benefits from people walking the aisles. They put all kinds of interesting new products right next to staples so you are more inclined to buy it. If I could just browse the product offering online, I'd be able to just pick exactly what I needed and wouldn't be checking out with some new dip, cheese, beverage, or pasta sauce that had piqued my interest.
I remember in the beginning of the pandemic they were asked to comment on this, especially about how online ordering and pickup could help people in the situation.
The COO (?) specifically said that they preferred to invest in their people and store experience, not automation or such technology.
And delivery runs counter to that if you deliver from one of their stores because you now have pickers for delivery clogging up the aisles.
It is an idiosyncratic store. To tell you the truth, I'm not as enthusiastic about them as some people are though I go in from time to time if they're convenient. They have a lot of prepared food and possible healthier and better quality prepared food is still prepared food which I don't eat a lot of.
They've been a lifesaver for my son in college. He's living in a dorm but the housing service has struggled the entire year with staffing, food stocks, and just generally being able to feed kids who don't have 60-90 minutes to spend standing in line.
TJ's is right off-campus and he's able to pick up meals he can prep in his dorm room a few nights a week when a lab or extra-curricular keeps him from being able to get food at the dining hall.
It's especially baffling because TJs deliberately keeps a fairly small number of SKUs, so it is actually much better placed for online orders than more traditional grocery stores that have 12 kinds of Cheerios.
I think online ordering would just be too far outside their wheelhouse. I don't know what improvements they have made over the years, but when I used to work there years and years ago they were very much a human-driven company. By that I mean that ordering was done entirely manually by people that specialized in their sections, inventory tracking was rather loosely done, and the customer question of 'do you have any of X in the back' would need to be answered by actually checking in the back.
From my experience on the customer side since, things haven't changed much at all. In light of that, I think that even now, online ordering for them would be a mess that the company just can't afford in customer goodwill.
I suspect that's why they don't partner with delivery vendors. Grocery stores would rather you came in person. You'll make impulse buys, they can direct you to products where they have excess inventory, and they can maintain a direct relationship with you.
Most are forced to offer delivery precisely because they don't have a "great and unique selection of food." If they don't support delivery, you'll get the same products from a competitor who does. Trader Joe's doesn't have to because you can't find their products anywhere else.