Clever, but the guesses aren't useful, because "the middle" is rarely the most efficient place to get goods off trucks and rail. I know the TJs in Kansas are stocked from a Kansas Aldi distribution center, near rail and highways.

A better start might be mapping known Aldi warehouses.

https://careers.aldi.us/employment/olathe-warehouse-jobs/61/...

Trader Joe's presents an interesting punctuation problem. The most common rule, I think, for forming possessives is rule #1 of Strunk and White: "Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's. Follow this rule whatever the final consonant." But Trader Joe's already has an apostrophe. Should the proper writing of this headline should have been...

Where in the World are Trader Joe's's Warehouses?

Or should it have been...

Where in the World are Trader Joes's Warehouses?

It should be noted that it is a project from 2015.

But just looking at the clusters, esp. on the east coast and look at the marked known locations one can visually see that the 22 clusters don't make sense. You can visually cluster a lot of stores towards the existing warehouses and remove the need for the estimated ones in between.

But still this is an interesting approach as it helps in identifying the clusters that seem to be served by these known warehouses.

Maybe not taking the distance as the crow flies, but trying a street route could be an optimization. And then trying to find the minimal amount of clusters that still show the known locations at roughly the center.

Not sure if this would be a valid approach.

Back in the nineties a very popular East Lansing supermarket announced they were closing. A campaign was raised to get Trader Joes to locate in the space. A major campaign was raised and they gathered a pretty amazing 20-25,000 signatures online.

The organizers got a nice letter back from Trader Joes who said they really appreciated their enthusiasm but the East Lansing area was too small a municipal area for a Trader Joes but if that criteria changed they'd keep us in mind. A number of the group years later kept the campaign going and maintained an active Facebook page.

A couple of months ago Trader Joes announced an East Lansing store in that very strip mall they'd turned down decades earlier. Different store but the exact same development.

I wish Trader Joe's would start a delivery service since they don't partner with delivery vendors like Instacart. Great and unique selection of food!

Trader Joe’s is a favorite study in trying to explain how it manages to thrive with just a small number of SKUs (~4000) relative to typical grocery stores that carry 50,000 SKUs. Perhaps this might shed light on their warehousing strategy.

K-means is a nice approximation but not very precise in this context. Averaged driving time and fuel usage probably played a role in determining a warehouse's location.

The author ends their analysis a little early, which is a shame, because it is a fun but also very interesting research question.

Next step would be to plot the known/suspected warehouses and give an error measurement for the best predicted locations against those more or less known warehouses.

Further steps could be to look into a pattern of how those known/suspected warehouses are placed in relation to stores, and extrapolate that into the missing warehouse locations.

I like the model he created to "detect" the warehouses, but it's much easier to see the corporations via the state corporation agency. There is also the idea that They wouldn't have pure warehouses for everything and are direct white labeled direct from manufacturers.

Funny thing. The author now has a Trader Joe’s in his hometown.

Looking at the map I wonder where the CO, UT, NM stores get their supplies from? Seems like the only area without its own warehouse

Interesting bit of history of Aldi, the owner of Trader Joe. The grocery chain was founded by two brothers. They could not get along, so they decided to split the world to “Aldi North” and “Aldi South” chains. Both use the same logo.

The distribution of stores looks like this https://xkcd.com/1138/

I really enjoy this site's design. At first I thought that LocalCDN was blocking some CSS/JS but to my surprise, no - it just looks that way. I like it.