Retail Watchers

I'm not sure if this is a store by store or region by region or nationwide return.

I was over hearing an employee tell the other employee the situation - possible microwaving but no food preparation. So that's a little bit of a bummer as most of their old demos used to take 2-4 products and combine them, sometimes in surprising ways. In this case they will be offering tastings of a single item.

I hope they go back to offering beverage sampling as well, but I'll be surprised if they do.

The one nearest to me used to have wine tastings on the weekend--I never saw that at other stores. The woman who did it was a part-timer in grad school. She had a lot of personality and seemed at least moderately knowledgeable about wine. She left after her studies ended to do foreign policy research. They replaced her for a few weeks with someone else who lacked charisma and didn't seem to know much about wine and then they stopped doing the tastings altogether. The store recently cut back its wine selection, particularly the cheaper non-store brand bottles. They haven't cut back on the beer which no one seems to buy.

Tasting station in the store I went to tonight was covered by boxes of various pumpkin items.

This one previously offered free coffee and also had a cold drink bubbler and would have juice, tea, or something there as well.

TJ's podcast mentions that demo is back nationwide. They were at the "captains meeting" in the latest episode.

No sign of demo returning to the Trader Joe's in Carson City, NV or Reno, NV yet...

Reno could bring it back pretty easily. Carson has the area covered with a large display of "pumpkin" themed dry goods.

at least as of yesterday...

Time to remove that pumpkin themed display of dry goods anyway, that is outdated at this point and should be holiday themed goods now.