Adios, Trader Jose. You’ve Been Canceled

Hotair ^ | 07/20/2020 | Karen Townsend

[SeekAndFind]

The latest corporate victim of cancel culture is Trader Joe’s. This time the complaint centers around racist packaging. Trader Joe’s products don’t have photo images that are offending the grocery chain’s more delicate customers but the wording on the labels of ethnic food products is being canceled.

Trader Joe’s prides itself on providing a relaxed, fun kind of shopping experience. The labels on many of its products are designed to be quirky. One of the ways the company promoted ethnic food products was by turning the Trader Joe name into a generic name of a different culture, like Trader Jose or Trader Ming. It’s a marketing gimmick. This is 2020, though, and the cancel culture mobs run our lives. The grocery chain is changing its packaging on international cuisine.

A California high school student started an online petition calling for the change. With only 1,400 names on the petition, the company is making news for caving to the demands of a few. Let’s be honest, 1,400 names on an online petition is a really small number of people these days, especially for one that criticizes a national grocery store chain. Trader Joe’s, however, says the company was already in the process of changing its labels for ethnic food products, long before the petition was created. As a matter of fact, the company claims the change was happening “long before” the petition made the news.

“We have been in the process of updating older labels and replacing any variations with the name Trader Joe’s, and we will continue to do so until we complete this important work,” Friend-Daniel said. “At this time, I don’t have an exact date but we expect to have the work completed very soon. Packaging for a number of the products has already been changed, but there’s a small number of products in which the packaging is still going through the process.”

Trader Joe’s packages its Chinese, Mexican, Italian and Middle Eastern foods under the brands “Trader Ming’s,” “Trader Jose” “Trader Giotto” and “Arabian Joe.”

The national public relations person for Trader Joe’s says the change has been ongoing for several years. If so, it seems like a long time for label changes, right?

“With this in mind, we made the decision several years ago to use only the Trader Joe’s name on our products moving forward,” Kenya Friend-Daniel, Trader Joe’s national director of public relations, told USA TODAY in a statement Saturday. “Since then, we have been in the process of updating older labels and replacing any variations with the name Trader Joe’s, and we will continue do so until we complete this important work.”

An exact date for when the products’ packaging would be changed wasn’t known but was expected very soon, Friend-Daniel said in the statement, adding some products have already been changed.

The student who created the petition isn’t satisfied with the corporate response. This is my shocked face. That is what always happens. When a company or individuals cave to the cancel culture mob, no matter how small that mob may be, it is never enough. Appeasement never satisfies them. The discontented voices jump on the weakness of appeasement and demand more. That is what is happening in this case, too. The student claims that the wording on labels “belies a narrative of exoticism that perpetuates harmful stereotypes.” The student brings the drama.

After Trader Joe’s statement that the labeling would be changed, Bedell wrote that the company should “commit to a date in which the packaging changes will be completed. If a date cannot be established, we ask that Trader Joe’s immediately remove all products that the company recognizes have not been inclusive and have not cultivated a welcoming, rewarding customer experience.”

In one part of the company’s statement, Bedell’s words – “a welcoming, rewarding customer experience” – are actually used as an explanation is offered. The labeling is part of the corporation’s whimsical approach to marketing. “Exoticism” seems like an overreach.

“While this approach to product naming may have been rooted in a lighthearted attempt at inclusiveness, we recognize that it may now have the opposite effect — one that is contrary to the welcoming, rewarding customer experience we strive to create every day,” Kenya Friend-Daniel, a spokesperson for Trader Joe’s, said in a statement.

Trader Joe’s is one of America’s most popular grocery store chains. The high school student thinks this is an urgent matter. To her, just emptying out the store shelves and not offering products with those labels on them is a reasonable demand. My eyes can not roll any farther back. Perhaps in San Francisco, where she lives, this is a normal reaction, but not to most areas of the country. If this is the biggest problem in her life, she has a pretty darn good life. All these years that Trader Joe’s has been operating, only now it is unacceptable?

Ms. Bedell, a rising high school senior and human rights activist, said “the branding remains on shelves and unaddressed” at her local Trader Joe’s in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“There’s an abundance of products in their stores, and I think it’s still important — the petition remains important — because Trader Joe’s lacks the urgency needed in the current climate to remedy the issue,” she said.

The reason Trader Joe’s is a popular grocery store chain is that its stores are clean, the employees are friendly and helpful, and the stores do, in fact, offer a pleasant shopping experience. At least that has been my experience. I doubt that I am alone in not even particularly noticing the “exoticism” in the labeling and I definitely never thought the store is trying to use inappropriate cultural stereotyping. Grocery shopping can be tedious, most of us are happy that some retailers are interested in putting a little fun into it.

[SeekAndFind]

[Jamestown1630]

There are so many things going on in the world, so many ways that people could be helping other people; and this is the silly stuff everyone is dwelling upon...

[Lurkinanloomin]

The woke have no sense of humor.

[Carriage Hill]

They’re more than “dwelling”... they’re OBSESSED.

[Fury]

A recommendation - call ALL food Soylent Green or Red or Yellow.

All of it.

[ConservativeInPA]

If Trader Joe’s caves to this cancel culture BS then they side with the enemy. Conservatives should find somewhere else to shop.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

Conservatives should find somewhere else to shop.

Conservatives are running out of places to shop.

[Wilhelm Tell]

Fanatics never have a sense of humor.

[joshua c]

This is the LEFT eating its own.

What does the LEFT have against ethnic food? First GOYA, now this.

[ilgipper]

We are in societal collapse when a perpetually-offended minor somehow drives corporate decision-making at the same time American institutions like law enforcement are being shunned by the same corporations and small business owners are under the government boot to shut down. Fascism is on the march.

[webheart]

For decades, businesses have been reacctive about bad publicity. Usually it took 6 to 8 hours for bad publicity to form since that was how long it took to get to the evening news or the newspaper. Businesses would have that long to formulate their responses, or to not respond. Today, it only takes a few seconds for bad publicity to happen, and the response times are measured in minutes. Safe to say, they don’t put much thought into their reactions, it’s all about hurry up before more bad publicity happens.

The reality is that this new bad publicity has a much shorter duration of activity during which a company’s image can be harmed. Many of them could easily ignore the bad publicity events for 3 days, and probably hundreds of other events would capture the attention of the audience, and it would be over like a summer rain.

The people who run companies by Twitter are the same who ran their companies using ABC and CNN as their barometers. They don’t really understand how it works. They also don’t understand that important decisions made by consumers like me do not take tweets into account.

[Seruzawa]

Cowards.

[Fiji Hill]

I knew they would cave as these corporate types always do.

[Fiji Hill]

First GOYA, now this.

If the suits running Trader Joe's had stood tall and told the protesters to go jump off a pier, the public would have supported them as they did GOYA and Chick Fil-a (before it got woke).

[zaxtres]

Actually a lot of people find it easier to appease (remember the words “Can’t we all just get along?) than it is to fight back. As the latter causes more energy and focus than appeasing does. In addition to appeasement, it is less costly. That is what cancel culture is about: capitulation. They being the SJWs do not need a whole lot of support in today’s society. A single individual just needs to get the ball rolling be persistent and let the media know that it is happening. There isn’t as much energy and focus going into something like Trader Joe’s. There might have been more energy and focus in the beginning as companies fought back but that has been drastically reduced because of fear of what might happen. This then becomes extended when a company capitualtes easily and bends to the will of these miscreants. This has all been brought about by what started in the 90s when we gave our children participation trophies and they, the children, became lazy as parents repeated the mantra “Give them better than I had when growing up”. This enabled and empowered the entitlement culture where denying them was the same as not having equal rights. And you can forget opportunity because it isn’t about getting the opportunity because it is about receiving the item rather than the opportunity that everyone else has. America is having her insides torn asunder and these hooligans are prime to do it. This is not a cancel culture it is all about bad parenting and the mindset that took place in the 60s being brought today. A key government agency that was instrumental in this was not public education although they are second on the list. That agency was Child Protective Services to which even the schools must answer to. It is through CPS that started the change in America and the children of America that has suffered for it.

[Dagnabitt]

The Left are a miserable and humorless group of people.

[windsorknot]

So much virtue signaling to be done; so little time. Even after all of the superficial measures are completed, nothing substantial is accomplished.

[Cuttnhorse]

Punctuation is your friend.

[dforest]

My Son served in our military and manages a Trader Joes.

[chickenlips]

I want to know what Joe traded? And who did he exploit in his trading? Was he related to anyone owning the NYTs? Answers, we need answers.