Honestly this is a practice that has emerged all over retail in the last 30 years. You can blame your favorite store, Walmart for this.veteran+ wrote: ↑April 15th, 2024, 9:09 amCommon practice from what I have seen.mbz321 wrote: ↑April 14th, 2024, 7:33 pm Funny that this comes up as I happened to be driving around the back of a shopping center with a Trader Joe's last week and I noticed on their loading dock area they had a TJ's branded pop-up canopy with boxes of merchandise (or perhaps and hopefully, store supplies) being stored underneath!
As Walmart moved into the Supercenter era, they intentionally reduced or eliminated the majority of their back rooms. They made the decision that they would add more dock doors, and impose on their landlords where they lease. To replace the back room space, they would lease extra trailers on the dock and also rent shipping containers that would line the alleys behind the stores. And they would sometimes stack paper goods and other items on pallets behind the store or even on the roofs of the storage containers. So now instead of needing to add say 50,000 Sq ft to convert a Division 1 to a Supercenter, they would only need to add 30,000 because they were effectively moving overstock outside of the four walls at a lower cost. And if the landlord or neighbors didn't like 50 ugly rusty storage bins out back as a low rent stock room, "tough $#!&" was their response along with idle threats of closure that would never actually happen.
Back then Walmart was ridiculously transparent and reported almost weekly. "Eggs this week were more popular because Easter is coming up. Next week we expect to see a lift in trash bag sales." So Walmart suddenly was telling Wall Street that up to 90% of their supercenter facilities were now sales floor space and that became the expectation for all other retailers. Department store chains were always the worst offenders, I've explained elsewhere that some of these huge Macy's and others are half sales space, half offices, backrooms etc. And the expectation that back rooms disappear was coupled with the big box boom that ran into the 2010s. Retailers like Circuit City who ran a half backroom, half showroom format were crucified by the Wall Street geniuses who never foresaw e-commerce, curbside pickup etc. as they demanded that stores open up all their walls and maximize the sales floors even if they weren't actually adding any SKUs or delivering any productivity with the moves. This also forced many retailers to move to overnight and early morning stocking simply because the freight won't physically fit in the back room. It is not acceptable to these Wall Street people for the store to have a back room large enough to hold a full delivery.
My point is that although I appreciate your passion about Trader Joe's, they're actually one of the only retailers that is pushing back. They can afford this since they're privately owned. Trader Joe's is actively trying to get space at any price where it's available to add additional stores to bleed off overloaded locations, any time any tenant closes next to one of their older in-line stores they immediately lease the space and remodel to absorb it. Is it a problem that they have some overflowing back rooms where unloading has to be outside due to lack of facilities? Yes, but I challenge you to drive through that same Trader Joe's strip mall in the early morning hours. You're going to see Walmart, TJX, Petco, Michaels, CVS, Walgreens, Whole Foods Market, some Sprouts, Small Format Target, 99 Cents Only before they went under, and many more doing the exact same thing with alleys or front sidewalks covered in freight sitting there for hours. The difference is that frankly the rats are out at night when these other stores are stacking boxes outside, while they sleep during the day when TJs is unloading additional trucks. This is a problem that spans the majority of big box retailers that didn't demand dock wells and large unloading areas as they tried to grow fast over the last 30 years, and I honestly don't think Trader Joe's anticipated that the rest of the conventional grocery industry would abandon some of the most densely populated urban areas leaving TJs as the predominant grocer while lacking the facilities to accommodate the additional business they were inheriting. I am sorry but I think if you looked a little further you'd find that this is a much more widespread problem.
Freight sitting in the alley and doors open all day and night is a common practice throughout big box retail and has been for several decades now.
