Shoppers Swear Employees At Trader Joe’s Are Trained To Flirt With You. Is That True?

There’s friendly, and then there’s Trader Joe’s friendly: You’re just trying to buy some Unexpected Cheddar and peanut butter-filled pretzel nuggets and get out. Then, the Hawaiian shirt-clad cashier hits you with a very pointed question: “So, what have you got planned this evening?” (Eer, I don’t know, eating this cheese?)

Is this Trader Joe’s cashier flirting with me, or am I crazy, you wonder. That experience is so common that people jokingly worry that something is wrong with them when a Trader Joe’s cashier isn’t super friendly.

“Of course I get the one cashier at Trader Joe’s who hasn’t been trained to flirt with the customers. I shop here for two reasons, Buddy, double cream Gouda and meaningless validation,” romance author Sydney Scott joked last year on Bluesky.

In 2023, CEO Bryan Palbaum denied the longstanding rumor about mandatory flirting in his markets. The Trader Joe’s employees we spoke to say that’s still the case — what they’re instructed to be is friendly and unfailingly polite toward patrons.

“We were never told to flirt with customers, but we were certainly told that customer service is our number one priority,” said Will Padilla, who worked at the Arlington Heights, Illinois, location for a little over a year and never heard a hint of rudeness from anyone on staff in that time.

“I’ve heard of the rumor, but I think it’s a bit overdramatic,” he said. “I never personally flirted with any customer or coworker but I do have golden retriever energy and love talking to just about anyone.” (Sorry if you got the wrong impression, Arlington Heights shoppers.)

Management tends to recruit people who are naturally outgoing, said Michael Bischoff, who worked at a newly opened Milwaukee store while he was in college in the early 2000s.

“I don’t think there was any coincidence that most of our opening day staff were some charming MFs,” he told HuffPost via email.

“Just about everyone was bursting with natural charisma. I don’t think any of us ever considered what we were doing ’flirting’ in that sense, but [it’s] when you create that kind of positive aura, and everyone is keeping things light and breezy.”

It wasn’t forced or guided, he said, just a “natural outcome of blending those kinds of personalities in an environment where we didn’t yet feel like we were being exploited, and where senior leadership, at the time, worked really hard to keep our spirits high.” (In recent years, Trader Joe’s easy, relaxed identity has been complicated by its ownership’s opposition to union drives.)

They’re not flirting with you, but they may be flirting with each other ― and then some. In 2023, Slate published a highly entertaining deep dive into how everyone at the stores are sleeping with each other. (One employee referred to Trader Joe’s as the “single most incestuous company [he] ever worked for,” describing his first few months there as a sort of carnal “mayhem.”)

Leah Kern, a dietitian in the Bay Area who worked at Trader Joe’s in both Vermont and New York City for a few years, thinks store friendliness levels depend on the region you’re in. In more slow-moving Vermont, there was much more casual banter at the register, especially compared to New York City.

“During one of my first shifts in the latter, I was doing my normal thing of making conversation with the customers, and this guy asked for my number,” Kern told HuffPost.

“In the city, things move fast, and the amount that I was talking to this person probably signaled to them that I was interested, and I was like, OK, that was a mistake,” she said. “I now need to know that that amount of speaking in New York City might be considered flirting.”

Kern has a theory of why crew members may seem so engaged. Unlike some grocery stores, where cashiers are strictly tasked with ringing shoppers up, and shelf stockers stick to keeping supplies replenished, Trader Joe’s crew members move around all day. What you’re doing typically switches every hour, she said, at least that was the case when she worked there in 2021 and 2022.

“So if you have an eight-hour shift, then you might spend an hour on the register, an hour stocking shelves, an hour at the demo station, doing samples, maybe even an hour bringing the carts in from the parking lot or something,” she said. “By the time you go to check out customers, you have a lot of energy to be friendly, because you’re probably only doing that for an hour at a time, so you’re not so drained from talking to people all day.”

“The store wants you to be friendly,” she added. “They want to create that, like, a neighborhood store vibe. That’s one of their pillars, to have that local feel.”

There’s even a rotation called “helmsing,” where you walk around and talk to people, said Brianna Plaza, a food writer based in Brooklyn who worked at Trader Joe’s for two years from 2009 to 2011.

“You ask people how their day is, if they need help finding anything, what they’re cooking,” she said. “So there’s literally a rotation that is just talking to people, so you’re maybe bound to get a little flirting in there.”

The fact that friendliness is so easily read as flirting shows how rare personable small talk has become, said Kelsey, a former Trader Joe’s employee in Southern and Northern California.

“People are so disconnected, and a lot of people are uncomfortable with small talk,” she said. “A lot of people feel like it’s a rarity to, just like, strike up a conversation with a stranger. Normal conversation has become more rare, so it feels like it’s something more than what it is.”

So no, flirting is not required on the job, just chipperness. For what it’s worth, sometimes that chipperness does lead to actual flirting.

“I was, in fact, single while working there,” Bischoff said. “My attentions were largely focused elsewhere, but I did score one date in the checkout line one time. She was so unbelievably out of my league, we went to dinner once, had a nice enough time, and she never returned my calls after that!”