TikTalk: Check your Trader Joe’s privilege


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A store front of a Trader Joe's. The name of the store is in red letters against a white building with red curtains. Flowers are on the windows, and shopping carts line the front of the store.
Trader Joe’s are most often located in affluent neighborhoods with low environmental risk. (Photo courtesy of Anthony92931, Creative Commons.)

How long is the Trader Joe’s line? That’s the question so frequently asked by USC students that there is now an entire Instagram account dedicated to it: @howlongisthelineattraderjoes. As USC’s very own store has gained popularity on social media for talking about Trader Joe’s, others have also done the same. 

TikTok user @kel.drigo.gov gained her 23.1k followers because of Trader Joe’s. Yet, it is not for reasons you might think. She does not talk about all of the good(s) Trader Joe’s has to offer, nor does she give updates on the length of the line at her local Trader Joe’s. Instead, she brings to light how everyone’s favorite neighborhood grocery store has been left out of non-white neighborhoods. 

Kel represents this phenomenon by creating maps in which she adds the location of Trader Joe’s in a city with the racial dot map of the area. According to the Cooper Center’s Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia — which is where Kel gets her maps from — “[their] racial dot map … provides an accessible visualization of geographic distribution, population density and racial diversity of the American people in every neighborhood in the entire country.”

With a clear picture of racial demographics within cities and suburbs and the various locations of Trader Joe’s in those neighborhoods accompanying them, it is hard to deny that white neighborhoods are the only places with multiple locations of the market. While areas with high Latinx, Black and Asian populations do not even have one location within their radii. 

Users comment on Kel’s videos suggesting cities she should create maps for. In major cities such as Chicago, New York, Houston, Atlanta and Los Angeles the trend is the same.

When creating the map of Los Angeles, it was not even surprising to Kel that another major city in the United States had Trader Joe’s in predominantly white, wealthy neighborhoods. Different to her previous videos, she decided to combine L.A.’s environmental risk map with the locations of Trader Joe’s saying:

“It’s basically an inverse of the Trader Joe’s map, it shows in red where residents’ health is most severely and negatively impacted by environmental factors. The white neighborhoods are green, so instead of having a reasonably priced organic kale, L.A.’s Black and Latino residents have toxic waste.”

With this map, she added the element of environmental racism as another point of inequality. Of course, it is outrageous to say that Trader Joe’s locations correlate directly with environmental racism; however, it is interesting to compare these factors. 

Marginalized groups tend to live in areas with environmental dangers, which also means that maps of Trader Joe’s would be the exact opposite of environmental risk maps. Simply put, the areas with higher environmental risk would not have a Trader Joe’s in sight, and those with lower environmental risk would have a handful of Trader Joe’s to choose from. 

Kel received a lot of flack for not including the USC Trader Joe’s on the map. However, she explained, in her own way, that including this location was not important. This one Trader Joe’s does not solve the problem, especially since the only reason that this Trader Joe’s is here is because of USC — a private institution with privilege that has gentrified the South Central community. 

The truth of the matter is that Trader Joe’s is not the only grocery store that is associated with wealthy, white communities. Travel through any major city and it will be apparent that plenty of other chains have decided to exclude their storefronts in non-white neighborhoods. For all of us here at USC, we don’t think twice about having a Trader Joe’s just blocks away from where we live, but what Kel has brought to light is just how much of a luxury that is. 

The next time you go to Trader Joe’s to get your favorite snack or to buy your favorite frozen meal, remember that it is a privilege to have inexpensive, affordable meals at your disposal. Many families who could benefit from these resources do not.  

Trinity Gomez is a junior writing about TikTok and popular culture. Her column, “TikTalk,” runs every other Tuesday.