David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. All right, David, the big expansion. So what happens after the sale? Well, the immediate answer, of course, as we said, is nothing. Joe sticks around as CEO for the next 10 years, running the private label strategy, and it works great in Southern California. As you were saying, Ben. So here's the thing about Joe. He really is like Sol Price. He was this incredible entrepreneur, absolute genius. Came up with all of these truly innovative, orthogonal, genius strategies that nobody else in the industry was pursuing. Sol Price did the same thing at Costco. But Sol Price isn't the one who really built Costco. Jim Sinegal built Costco. The Costco we know today, it's the same thing for Joe. He built Trader Joe's, but he really didn't have any interest in scaling it and taking it outside of Southern California. I kind of think, reading between the lines of some of the things some of his successors said about him and some of the stuff in his obituaries and press, I think he just really didn't want to travel. I think he wanted to be close to his family. I think he wanted all the stores within a day's drive to and from his house. So when he retires in 1988, again, 10 years after he sold the company, they're only just shy of 32 total stores. They had just expanded to Northern California. The first Northern California store was in San Rafael, my wife's hometown in Marin. Great little town. I think for Joe, that's sort of what his ambition was: to build one of the greatest retailers of all time, a regional chain. But he was indifferent whether it was regional or national. It's so interesting how some of the entrepreneurs we study have this empire-builder strain to them where they're never satisfied. They have to build the biggest thing in the world and build something of consequence to the world. And if there's an opportunity to do that, they must go seize it. It's impossible to not spend their time, effort, life doing that. And Joe just wasn't one of those...…

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