Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…I feel like Ben Thompson used to write about this—that it was the American holy trinity of General Motors, the NFL, and Procter & Gamble. Yes, it's a partnership, but it's not a great partnership because as soon as the CPG product becomes so wildly differentiated, they're going to start commanding—somehow squeezing more in the value chain. Or, let's say the grocery store got differentiated, they're going to start squeezing more in the value chain. Trader Joe's has been a 50-year exercise to ensure their independence, where no one has leverage over them. Individual little things, like a landlord, has leverage over them in a store negotiation, or a supplier does for a given SKU. But at scale overall, Trader Joe's is really, really resilient from external things that could dramatically shake their business. They've built—I think we talk about this a lot—stored potential energy in their business that just makes them more resilient. And it's crazy that the Internet happened, and it hasn't been bad for them. They've grown just as fast in the Internet era as the non-Internet era. It's hard to imagine things that could shock them more. There is the perfect existence proof of this in COVID. Pretty much the only way that all other grocers could deal with COVID was Instacart or doing their own delivery, which Instacart actually powers a lot of now as a white-label service, which is fascinating. But anyway, Trader Joe's said, "Nope, we're just not going to do that. We're going to find a way to operate our stores during COVID," and they didn't miss a beat.…

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