I don't want to trust a food supply chain that is crowd sourced.
I know I have the unpopular view that services that do ride sharing are scary, as are many of the AirBNB's that are in random people's house.
And I know we don't do background checks on everyone who touches the produce... But we do require vaccines for people who touch our food in most places.
There isn't a nice way to say it, so I'll just say it. The Crowd that shops at Trader Joe's, or work at a service that is crowd sourced is more likely to be the crowd that doesn't get vaccinated.
Hepatitis being the most likely vector for something to go wrong which is why so many places require employees to have the HAV Vaccine.
The problem with this analysis is that you're failing to actually make a comparison with shopping at Trader Joe's (or any other grocery store).
First of all, grocery stores are pretty filthy places. Carts get used by thousands of people, and the most cleaning they generally get is when a customer grabs a sanitizing wipe at the entrance and wipes down the handlebar.
Supposing that Trader Joe's shoppers are significantly less likely to be vaccinated, which is worse: having someone unvaccinated pick up your groceries and deliver them, or going to an enclosed space full of unvaccinated people and pushing around an unsanitary cart for half an hour?
In Phoenix the carts "self Clean" pretty well 110 Degree parking lot, lots of UV from the sun...
But point taken a shop in Half Moon Bay where there is no sun and lots of water is going to be pretty gross.
I don't know how many of the Apples are handled by other people in the store. And I know "3 second rule is a myth" but it there is the longer contact with one person, and that the one person is likely to interact with 100s of buyers makes the individual risk likely the same, but the resulting outcome 100x worse.
At the store one person might infect 2, but is unlikely to infect 200. A single delivery person could infect 200.
I don't see what your connection is between people shopping at Trader Joes and people who don't get vaccinated.
I can understand being concerned about such "crowd services" (although I personally use Airbnb and other such services regularly) but I don't see a basis or reason for that particular association between people who shop at a Trader Joes and people who don't get vaccinated.
Interesting. However that link says only three in one thousand children were completely unvaccinated. The percentage that were under vaccinated is larger but still not that terrible. So even if the demographics of Trader Joe shoppers and unvaccinated people had a 100% match that doesn't mean that someone shopping at Trader Joes is likely to be unvaccinated. The percentage of people who eschew all vaccinations is low enough that the percentage of the unvaccinated shopping at Trader Joes is also likely to be very low.
Sure, and my point wasn't to necessarily defend the original parent but to see if there's data that would suggest whether there's some cognitive bias here or if the two groups are composed of generally well-overlapped demographics. I'm also not concerned as he is about this problem, just interested in the conversation.
Hep A isn't a mandatory Vaccine in most places. So most people don't have it. The types that shop at Trader Joe's tend to be the types that reject Adult Vaccines because they think that like Hybrid Crops they are just something cooked up by big companies to make money.
Are there, in fact, "types that shop at Trader Joe's" beyond people who live near them, people who like saving money on the stuff that TJ's sells cheaply, and people who like quality food?
I think you are making the very fallacy you are purporting to fight.
The fact that there is a "People Of Walmart" site shows that there is a Psychographic that shop at that store that is a high enough percentage of the stores population to be unique.
You can't do a study of Obese Women outside the Urban Outfitters because the store doesn't cater to a crowd that is equally represented by the masses. It caters to "Skinny bitches" so your data would be skewed.
Trader Joe's caters to a crowd that doesn't like Big Companies, especially Monsanto, and Big Pharma. That makes their crowd less likely to get Adult Vaccines like Hep A.
Edit:
This was a response to a comment that eshvk made saying that you couldn't categorize a stores shoppers in to a demographic, and that "People of Walmart" didn't represent Walmart shoppers. The author deleted that comment, which was not written as well as I just stated his case. (and has been since been reposted above using something slightly closer to English, but with no more coherent an argument)
You, Sir or Madam, are a victim of bad science. Hell, I am one of those people who shops at TJ's because I live in San Francisco and it is excruciatingly expensive to shop at your neighborhood store that has hyper-inflated prices. I am also one of those people who is paranoid about getting all my vaccines; I grew up in Africa where I saw people die because they were too poor to afford a vaccine.
I also read the transcript of the american life article; there is simply nothing apart from anecdotes from these people about "the parents who don't vaccinate their children and also shop in WF/TJ". Show me a scientific observational study that shows that there is high correlation between every person who pays money in TJ/WF and their nature of being diseased, then we can talk!
Didn't you already delete your comment that said the same thing?
"One of" is not all, but there is a bunch of people who do make up the "type" of people Trader Joe's targets who are Anti-Establishment, Anti-BigCompany, Anti-Pharma. Those are the people who are likely to opt out of Adult Vaccines.
What information do you have that allowed you to come to that conclusion?
And if you somehow have vaccination stats on the people who shop or work there, couldn't this be more likely due to the location where a Trader Joe's is situated in and, by extension, the particular demographics it caters to rather than the chain itself?
Edit: Parent's post didn't include any corroborating info at all. Looks like that was edited.
Really, hepatitis? There's me washing my lettuce because I was worried about salmonella!
Your food chain already includes a lot of handling, and indeed a lot of your food has at some point been in the dirt :o or covered in blood :o so I wouldn't lose sleep over that element.
Also this is the first I've heard about requiring vaccines for handling food "in most places"... is that really a thing?
[Edit 2]
Citation is only for Hep A which is less prevalent than those that require Hep B, or other Vaccines. Finding a single map of all the places that require a vaccine since some are city ordinances was too time consuming.
Hepatitis A transmission through food is rare. The biggest states in the US do not require hepatitis A vaccination for food handlers. Food handlers are also not on the CDC recommended list of people that receive said vaccine.
Source: I don't know, maybe because I'm a certified food safety manager in California (last I checked that state had like 10% of the US's population) and there are ten million other scarier things relating to food safety than hepatitis A transmission through food.
The exact quote from the page is "By 2010, at least 10 states have mandated this vaccine for select groups of people, from food handlers to daycare attendees to kindergarten students." Nowhere does it say anything about "Largest Metro's" or cities that require this specifically for food handlers.
Last I checked through a cursory search, the top half dozen US states by population at least (which is roughly what? 1/2 the population of the US?) do not require a vaccine for food handlers, which is the context I'm looking for. I don't think I could give a damn if a state like North Dakota requires it when California considers ND's population to be a rounding error.
As you pointed out Cali is 10%. NYC, Detroit, Phoenix and Chicago all have city ordinances.
You missed that your State is on the list and you didn't know it. I didn't know I needed to cite Every ordinance for every City... I'm sorry, I'll do better next time.
Yeah, I kind of can't find anything relating to a required hepatitis A vaccination for any of those cities. You'd think searching something like "x city food handler vaccine" would show you something other than post-exposure news stories if it was really required. I actually had to dig around for the public health department sites.
And nope I didn't miss my state. I can't be held accountable for like the one county in CA where my certification isn't accepted, but the rest of our lovely state really doesn't care that much for food workers specifically when it comes to that particular vaccination.
Yeah, you know, I still don't see it anywhere. The citation you included doesn't say it anywhere - only for hepatitis B, which is much more prevalent. SF and Alameda County public health departments don't ask for vaccination records for employees, nor does LA's.
It isn't bigotry to say that you want people who handle your food to follow good food safety protocols.
I mean sure we call them the "unwashed masses" but just because Jesus said we don't have to wash our hands any more in Mathew 15:11 doesn't mean that I'm bigoted against Christians because I want the guy who makes my food to wash his hands.
No. What you did was insert a bunch of articles that talked about those people who shop at TJ's. That was just a pseudo-scientific way of saying something equivalent to, "Hey, this place has a lot of black people, I am going to stop going there."
No. If you want to paint me as a Racist. Let me make an analogy that does hold.
A lot of nice cars get vandalized in Hunter's Point, I don't want my nice car vandalize so I'm not going to park it in Hunter's Point. That doesn't say that everyone in HP is a vandal, just that more of them are than in say Santana Row.
What a crock of shit. If you're going to use the thinnest of lines to draw the shittiest of conclusions to justify your narrow view of the world, you're gonna have a bad time.
Friendly pro tip: saying something is a "crock of shit" does not in fact make it one. Do you have a specific reason for not agreeing with the parent comments assertion?
Obviously it's my opinion and to me, it's a crock of shit. Do I really need to spell out my specific reason? OP is making sweeping generalizations, based on pseudo-scientific bullshit, to justify his/her narrow view of the world.
I wonder how the delivery service handles out-of-stock items. The Trader Joes I shop at is routinely out of basic items. They told me that they have to restock several times a day, because the store is too small to have much product on the shelves.
What could they actually do, other than frown? Ban people who shop there several times a day? Seems like a shitty business move.
If I understand correctly, Trader Joes is using a rather flimsy trademark claim against Pirate Joes, but that claim could be made even more flimsy with better branding.
I can't speak for anyone else, but when I moved to DC, the regular supermarket options were all terrible (very small, don't carry lots of things I used to be able to get from suburban supermarket's, no parking, awful produce, etc.)
I found Trader Joe's to be a slightly less egregious Whole Foods, so I did most of my shopping there.
What finally wore me out was the fact that I couldn't do "all" of my grocery shopping there (I have no interest in buying hippy toilet paper or hippy soap), so I still had to shop at a "regular" grocery store.
Now, Amazon subscription takes care of most of our household stuff (like paper towels and dishwashing detergent and such), and we get produce delivered weekly by some local green grocer (which I let my girlfriend talk me in to, as left to my own devices I don't really eat produce).
"slightly less egregious Whole Foods" is a great way of putting it, though like Whole Foods, I find food from them does not last before spoiling as long as I would like.
The book The Paradox of Choice could just as easily have been titled The Paradox of Trader Joe's. They have the same thesis.
TJ's succeeds by having, to first order, zero to one brand of everything: If they stock it at all, it's probably the TJ's brand (secretly rebadged from its original manufacturer). This isn't true for every category, but it is true for most.
This reduces many shopping decisions at TJ's to binary ones: Is the TJ version of X good enough? Or not? The bad news is that any given packaged product has a decent chance of being lousy. But you may only need to learn that once, because there's no other TJ's product in its category to confuse it with.
When TJ's is deemed good enough, your work is done. You do not need to decide between the deluxe and the basic version. You do not need to try and remember which brand reminds your wife of her childhood and which brand she thinks tastes "off". Your buying decision now fits comfortably in a single byte of memory.
When you stumble upon a TJ's product you actually like, you can always find it again. The shelves are relatively free of the usual booby-traps, like the "fat-free" flavorless versions of everything that masquerade as the regular versions, or the Curse of the 174 Premium Brands All Named After Somebody's Grandma that is the bane of Whole Foods shoppers who are trying to remember what they bought last month.
Having one brand of everything feeds viral loops. The word-of-mouth on TJ's brands is astonishing. The canonical example is their two-dollar wine. Some people can't tell the difference between two-buck-Chuck and vinegar, others can, but everybody knows which wine I'm talking about. I can send you out to buy a bottle ("this is a product you will never forget") and be confident you will come back from the store with the right thing, which is frankly more than I can say for any other bottle of wine in the world.
Half of TJ's products have their own cult. You bite into an appetizer at the party and exchange knowing glances with the host. Do you like what you're tasting? Does the label look like a TJ's label? You will be able to buy your own box tomorrow, with near-100% confidence.
It is true that if you don't eat packaged products there is little point in Trader Joe's; the produce is average At best, awful at worst. And if you've taken the time to develop actual taste in packaged products TJ's is also useless, because unless your favorite brand is the TJ's brand, your favorite brand is not there. My wife and I are
buying less and less stuff at TJ's. But the one advantage that never goes away is efficiency. TJ's stores are pretty small. The shelves are easy to search, and the aisles shorter to traverse, because there are fewer brands of everything.
So this is a great comment, and I really do understand how these attributes make TJ's a viable business. The dots that still haven't been connected for me are the ones that draw the picture of how someone like Daniel upthread could wish for a TJ's to open up in his city.
Do you not have Whole Foods or some equivalent? WF has massively better produce, protein, dairy, cheese, bread, and wine/beer than TJ, and comparable staples.
A well-maintained Kroger or Safeway has massively better staples and significantly better produce and comparable protein and dairy; vs. Kroger, TJ's only wins at dairy, cheese, bread, and wine, and not really by much.
So, the appeal is "take it or leave it" simplicity.
While the various choices at a normal grocery store have certainly caused us confusion on an occasion or two, I'm trying to remember the last time it did for us. Once you get into a routine over the months, particularly if one member does the bulk of the shopping, how hard is it to remember?
And we do like some variety. We switch things up a bit and try different brands/styles on occasion.
Oh well. Those types of things rarely appeal to me anyway.
I know I have the unpopular view that services that do ride sharing are scary, as are many of the AirBNB's that are in random people's house.
And I know we don't do background checks on everyone who touches the produce... But we do require vaccines for people who touch our food in most places.
There isn't a nice way to say it, so I'll just say it. The Crowd that shops at Trader Joe's, or work at a service that is crowd sourced is more likely to be the crowd that doesn't get vaccinated.
Hepatitis being the most likely vector for something to go wrong which is why so many places require employees to have the HAV Vaccine.
EDIT: The comment about Trader Joe's Stems from an interview which is discussed here (making it easier to see the reference) http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2008/12/29/pandagon-anti_vaccinat...
Here is the interview: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/r...