In praise of Trader Joe’s parking lots

I don’t usually talk about it, but I love Trader Joe’s parking lots. Bringing this up in polite company is overly antagonistic, as many people view the lots as one of Dante’s rings of hell. (The only thing worse is the Wedge Coop parking lot on Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis, an escalation that illustrates my point.) But to me, Trader Joe’s parking represent an ideal U.S. urban form, the platonic balance of access and automobile accommodation. Most people do not share my laudatory tone. Mentioning Trader Joe’s parking lots at a workplace water cooler launches conversation into histrionics. One comes to grasp the depth of people’s feelings when discussing parking their car, and Trader Joe’s unleashes pools of emotion otherwise reserved for Vikings NFC championship games. To get to the bottom of the situation, I reached out to Trader Joe’s corporate, which forwarded me to the Inside Trader Joe’s podcast, a soothing bit of marketing demystification hosted by two company vice presidents. “We don’t open stores with the world’s most ridiculous parking lot on purpose,” said Matt Sloan, vice president of culture and innovation for Trader Joe’s. It turns out that the company’s philosophical moorings are laid in its original store in Pasadena, Calif. The small location has been open for over 50 years with only 30 parking spaces, a flat number to this day. This kind of footprint is relatively normal in the intense land-use densities of Los Angeles, but the corporation has kept its small-scale footprint as a hallmark of most designs throughout the rest of the country. In general, the rule of thumb is that Trader Joe’s parking lots reflect a ratio with the size of the store. As Tara Miller, vice president of marketing, pointed out, most Trader Joe’s stores are a fraction of the size of their larger grocery competitors. Following zoning rules, the parking is scaled in proportion to that original footprint. “You don’t really want to have a big empty parking lot,” said Sloan. “It’s a tricky and interesting balancing act. The number of parking spaces given a store is determined by the square footage of that store’s selling area.” The company’s urban format stores have smaller parking lots and more walkable entrances, two things that I admire in the core city. This is why my favorite Trader Joe’s parking lot, the one on St. Paul’s Lexington Parkway, is a design success. It first offers a small surface lot by the entrance featuring 20 parking spaces that are almost always full. Fighting to get in and out of this lot is for the foolhardy or the ramp averse; I’ve never tried it. Instead, I savor the below-ground ramp, a hidden refuge offering two dozen spaces neatly arranged in a one-way loop around a well-lit elevator that takes you right into the store’s hallway. Entering this ramp is a bit scary — you never know what you’re going to find down there — but there’s almost always room for a regular-sized automobile. The concrete curve leading you into the darkness is festooned with cartoon animals, a welcome balm. The underground parking ramp at the St. Paul Trader Joe’s is a hidden refuge offering two dozen spaces neatly arranged in a one-way loop around a well-lit elevator that takes visitors directly into the store’s hallway. Credit: Bill Lindeke In exchange for smaller parking lots, Trader Joe’s stores typically provide pedestrian entrances that come right up to the sidewalk. In the St. Paul case, they rerected shade and protection from cars with a large veranda, typically lined with crates of vegetables. This is the typical trade-off with urban-format retail: smaller parking versus street-front entrances that invite pedestrians, and I wish it was more common in the Twin Cities. The St. Louis Park Trader Joe’s lot is the other crown jewel of our local grocery system. It was the first Twin Cities location, opening in 2006. It offered textbook “new urbanism” development patterns, with the parking behind the store and the main entrance opening onto the sidewalk. (Compare it to the newer Trader Joe’s a few miles down France Avenue in Edina, basically just a big-box strip mall. It’s not your imagination: Trader Joe’s parking lots have been growing over time, especially as they have expanded into second-ring suburbia.) The St. Louis Park Trader Joe’s parking lot lot is the other crown jewel of the Twin Cities system. It offers textbook “new urbanism” development patterns, with the parking behind the store and the main entrance opening onto the sidewalk. Credit: Bill Lindeke Trader Joe’s small-format parking lots stand in contrast to the gargantuan expanses of asphalt you’ll find at most other American grocers. Most Cub Foods, Targets, or Hy-Vees are fronted by massive surface lots, often larger than the large buildings they are meant to serve. The asphalt expanse serves as an advertisement for vehicular convenience, that you will never have to white-knuckle your way around parking congestion. There will always be blacktop for you, even if it’s 500 feet away from the entrance. The problem is that parking convenience comes at a cost and greatly degrades the urban fabric of their suburbs. Massive, front-facing parking lots — rarely half full — damage the environment with impermeable surface and stormwater runoff. They are almost always devoid of anything other than seagulls or plastic bag tumbleweed. More fundamentally, they waste space and push destinations farther apart. Combine a few of these parking moats together, and you assemble an alienating, ugly and unwalkable place, one where it’s more convenient to drive to from the Crumbl Cookies to the Caribou even though they are technically “across the street” from each other. (This happened to me recently in Woodbury, and I felt ridiculous.) For all its pre-packaged pros and cons, Trader Joe’s retail design philosophy has more in common with a Japanese 7-11 or a New York City corner store, where you can find a dazzling array of products packed into a small space, reflecting an efficiency of scale synonymous with urban life. In the same way, Trader Joe’s urban format parking should be the norm, not the exception. Next time you’re confronted with a Trader Joe’s parking lot, embrace the chaos and anxiety. Confront your fear of parking density, and reflect instead on well-balanced design and spatial efficiency. Let us take a dose of parking claustrophobia, and enjoy the affordable cheese that comes with it.