Although it has yet to release official opening dates, Trader Joe’s—the Pasadena-born grocery store that you love for its peanut butter pretzels but tolerate for its pint-sized parking lots—has announced that it will debut eight new stores in Southern California.
More specifically, folks in Los Angeles County will have four new stores to choose from. Others will set up in Orange, Riverside and San Diego Counties. The (hopefully!) near future openings come as part of larger expansion efforts that include the inauguration of two dozen new shops across the country.
Here are the locations of upcoming SoCal markets, according to the grocery store’s “opening soon” page:
– South Pasadena (1129 Fair Oaks Ave)
– Northridge (9224 Reseda Blvd)
– Sherman Oaks (14130 Riverside Dr)
– Santa Clarita (19037 Golden Valley Rd)
– Ladera Ranch (27542 Antonio Pkwy)
– Murrieta (40388 Murrieta Hot Springs Rd)
– Poway (13644 Poway Rd)
– Santee (9680 Mission Gorge Rd)
Known for its top-notch and relatively healthy products sold at affordable prices, Trader Joe’s—named after its founder Joe Coulombe—first opened in Pasadena in 1967 (store number one is still standing today at the corner of South Arroyo Parkway and Pico Street). A little over a decade later, in 1979, the company was sold to Theo Albrecht, the German grocery guru and founder of the popular Aldi supermarket chain. Albrecht passed away in 2010, and ownership of the brand was transferred to his heirs.
Since then, the retail giant has amassed a fanbase that borders on the cultish, with people penning love letters to their favorite seasonal products, setting up Instagram accounts dedicated to their shopping hauls, using social media to bemoan the discontinuation of their go-to frozen meals or compliment the aesthetic of all Trader Joe’s employees. Grocery store merch, including relatively cheap totes and keychains, often also goes viral and lands on secondary markets for sometimes quadruple original prices.
That is all to say: People tend to love Trader Joe’s and we suspect that the opening of eight new locations will lead to a collective scream of joy among Angelenos—though maybe also some screams about the inevitable parking woes.