Petition Demands Trader Joe’s Change “Racist” Packaging
Trader Joe’s responds: We’re already working on it, and “we expect to have the work completed very soon”
Trader Joe’s is one of those quirky, fun kind of stores that has seen enormous success in part because of its lighthearted quirkiness. Light-heartedness, really anything remotely resembling humor, is in the process of being rooted out and banned by the cancel culture scolds, so of course, they came for Trader Joe’s.
Apparently, some bored high schoolers with too much time on their hands decided to start a petition to get Trader Joe’s to change the packaging on some of its international products.
Petition demands Trader Joe's change its 'racist' food packaging. Current packaging, says petition, belies "a narrative of exoticism” & “exoticizes other cultures — it presents 'Joe' as the default 'normal.'” The company says it will try to comply. ?
https://t.co/wBoOdfPX7t— Christina Sommers (@CHSommers) July 19, 2020
The San Francisco Gate reports:
As companies are hurriedly moving away from problematic depictions of race — from Aunt Jemima to the Washington NFL team — Trader Joe’s is yet another brand being asked to change its packaging of international products through a petition.
The products in question are food items from various parts of the world that are re-branded under the Trader Joe’s umbrella. But rather than the typical Trader Joe’s name emblazoned on food items, oftentimes products are given offshoots of the name Joe. Instead, these items are dubbed “Trader Giotto’s” or “Trader Ming’s” or “Trader José” to refer to Italian, Chinese or Mexican products, respectively, among other ethnic-sounding names for products.
The petition asking the grocery chain to rename the products has said the various labels belie “a narrative of exoticism that perpetuates harmful stereotypes.”
“The Trader Joe’s branding is racist because it exoticizes other cultures — it presents ‘Joe’ as the default ‘normal’ and the other characters falling outside of it — they are ‘Arabian Joe,’ ‘Trader José,’ and ‘Trader Joe San,’ the petition states. “… The common thread between all of these transgressions is the perpetuation of exoticism, the goal of which is not to appreciate other cultures, but to further other and distance them from the perceived ‘normal.'”
These junior Karens-in-the-making not only took issue with the packaging, but they also were offended that the original Trader Joe founder thought of the idea for the store’s theme in 1967 after reading a book entitled White Shadows in the South Seas and visiting Disneyland’s Jungle ride.
In 1967. But that’s par for the course on the left because they are unable to see anything outside their radical race theory myopia. There is no context, no historical reality that might provide socio-cultural context, there is no room for any thought that does not conform to their current worldview and to their strict ideological diktats.
But I digress, back to the ruling and demands of a high school senior and her pals . . . .
The announcement comes following a Change.org petition organized by California high school senior Briones Bedell, which has garnered more than 1,300 signatures as of Sunday.
. . . . In addition, the petition points out that the company’s founder, Joe Coulombe, was inspired to build the Trader Joe’s brand based on the book “White Shadows in the South Seas” and Disney theme park attraction The Jungle Cruise.
“The book, White Shadows in the South Seas is racist because it perpetuates the myth of the ‘white god’ and the ‘noble savage’ stereotypes. It becomes even more racist in context because the founder of Trader Joe’s said that he was inspired by this book in some way when creating his company, a book which shows traders’ exotification of non-Western peoples turned into violent exploitation and destruction,” Bedell wrote. “The Disney Jungle Cruise is racist because it displays caricatures of non-Western peoples alongside exotic animals, as an attraction at a theme park to be gawked at.”
Bedell said that “given this essential context,” the packaging becomes “even more trivializing and demeaning than before.”
For its part, Trader Joe’s says that they have been in the process of changing the packaging for some time and will continue on that path.
“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,” said Kenya Friend-Daniel, national director of public relations for Trader Joe’s. “With this in mind, we made the decision several years ago to use only the Trader Joe’s name on our products moving forward. 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.
“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.”
You can read the petition here, and you can read the Trader Joe story here. I archived it here in case they are pressured to rewrite—or simply delete—their history in this current frenzy to get us to dystopic Year Zero.
[Featured image via YouTube]
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Diversity (e.g. racism, sexism) racket. Black hole… whore h/t NAACP
Some, select Black Lives Matter. So Pro-Choice. #BLM
Kick The Culture War Off Campus
Authored by Jim DeMint via RealClearPolitics.com,
America’s college campuses are the intellectual headwaters of the “woke” mob now poisoning the great rivers of freedom in our country. This mob has taken over the political left, devastated our cities and now threatens every American with traditional values and common-sense conservative views.
Colleges and universities have been a bastion of liberalism and progressivism for so long it’s a cliché. But that cliché has led to complacency. Conservatives don’t like that college campuses have always been hotbeds of bad ideas – from communism to anti-Semitism to the so-called “critical theory” behind woke-ism. But the campus left has rarely been more than an irritant. Conservatives on the whole haven’t taken radical professors, brainwashed students and cowardly university administrators seriously because they were unserious people spouting unserious ideas..
Narcissists, Psychopaths, & Manipulators Are More Likely To Engage In “Virtuous Victim Signaling”, Study Finds
Authored by Elizabeth Nolan Brown via Reason.com,
New study links virtue signaling to “Dark Triad” traits. Being accused of “virtue signaling” might sound nice to the uninitiated, but spend much time on social media and you know that it’s actually an accusation of insincerity
Their conclusion? Psychopathic, manipulative, and narcissistic people are more frequent signalers of “virtuous victimhood.”
The so-called “dark triad” personality traits – Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy – lead to characteristics like “self-promotion, emotional callousness, duplicity, and tendency to take advantage of others,” the paper explains.
And “treated as a composite, the Dark Triad traits were significant predictors of virtuous victim signaling.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/narcissists-psychopaths-manipulators-are-more-likely-engage-virtuous-victim-signaling-study
Little surprise the world is such a mess. Imagine the actual good that could be done if people stopped having fits over nonsense like this. Pretty lame.
It’s not ‘lame’ – it’s a violent fascist/communist plot to take over our country.
People buying into this are either the cultists running wild in our streets, the criminals funding them or average people thinking this is in any way over.
We’re at war: While our economy is creaking by, our electricity is still on, our water is still running, our toilets still flush and Our grocery stores still have food: wait till those things start being sabotaged.
We are at war.
Those un-educated High School creeps need a one-way ticket to communist China.
I think I’ll start a petition demanding the Democrat Party change it’s name. Their current name reminds me of the racist Democrat Party of the 60’s I remember from my youth, with segregationists like Gov. George Wallace, and their connection to the KKK and Jim Crow laws. It offends me, every time I hear that horrible, racist name, and I demand they change it.
I wanna be part of the powerful lunatic fringe!
“Cultural exoticism” . . . yet another imaginary concept which manages to have nothing whatever to do with racism.
I’m sure they’re dealing with short-attention-span types. So Trader Joe’s should be able to stall this one as long as it wants. Put it off until they run out of labels, maybe.
Control and free shit by terror.
Don’t go for it, folks – because it will NEVER end. EVER. Not even after they slaughter you.
Another pathetic corporation caves. It never ends. Why would it?
But they didn’t cave. They stated they had already decided to remove the altered names and re-brand the items with the “Trader Joes” name long before this precious snowflake came along with her lunatic petition and that they’ll continue with the re-branding over the next couple of years until it is complete.
All your saying is they already caved prior to this idiot…
It’ll ‘end’ when we start wielding our economic power and give these companies an ultimatum.
But Trader Joes made a point of catering to wokeness long before wokeness metastasized.
The left is welcome to eat as many of their own as they can stomach.
“exoticizes other cultures”
Uh … that’s what “exotic” means.
A little etymology:
exotic (adj.)
1590s, “belonging to another country,” from Middle French exotique (16c.) and directly from Latin exoticus, from Greek exotikos “foreign,” literally “from the outside,” from exo “outside” (see exo-).
There are, of course, OTHER cultures …
Some kids need to have the everloving snot beat out of them. Not spanked, but smacked around til they bounce off the walls.
Most certainly, we, society as a whole, has already put up with too much crap from these createns.
You’re right: pain is the only way to get them out of the cult they’ve been brainwashed into.
Oprah Winfrey is in the upper echelons of the cult.
There was surely a teacher involved in this. The kids are a front.
Maurices was pressured to remove the Confederate flag from their excellent BBQ sauce, so why not?
Did they finally cave? They lost all their business for sauce in the grocery stores many years ago as they refused to bend.
They had expanded the restaurants out from Columbia quite a bit and all that closed as well.
Yes, they caved years ago when supermarkets refused to sell their products. I’ll have to look but I don’t think our local supermarkets carry Maurices any more even though they removed the flag from the label. Appeasing your enemies doesn’t make them your friends. If you’re ever in Greenville, SC, Henry’s Smokehouse sells some really good mustard based BBQ sauce.
More on Maurices: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/living/food-drink/article119660858.html
Oh, and I concur on the excellence of the BBQ sauce. I keep it in the cupboard. I cannot reproduce it and nothing else is quite like it.
Thanks snopercod.
I thought when the sauce was pulled from the grocery store shelves it was because Maurice would not cave.
Growing up in the segregated South I knew many folks that were racist to the core and otherwise very good people. It was always a real dichotomy. In later years they would change little by little, a good thing.
I’ve eaten many a BBQ sandwich at Piggy Park. While I am partial to real BBQ, eastern NC BBQ, I’ll settle for a fine mustard based one on occasion 🙂
I lived in Greenville for 25 years. Greenville was sandwiched between my years in Greensboro (birth to 12) and my current home in Huntersville (near Charlotte).
Even though I don’t care one bit for this chain, if they’d stood up to bored high school girls I would go and patronize the place. Now, it’s one more place I can drive by and laugh.
Grizzly is right!
They DID stand up to extortionate black leaders in Portland by telling to take their demands and stick them. TJs walked away from NE Portland and took over 40 new jobs with them. They opened elsewhere.
“… The common thread between all of these transgressions is the perpetuation of exoticism, the goal of which is not to appreciate other cultures, but to further other and distance them from the perceived ‘normal.’”
If this is true, why would anyone have thought doing these things – making the products seem “abnormal” – sell product? The whole point of packaging is to make something inviting, something you want to buy and bring into your home, and, in the case of food, something you want to eat and put into your body. Packaging is meant to make a product acceptable and desirable, not to make something appear odd. I thought the concept of “other” took something (a person, thing, culture, religion, music, etc.) and made it appear unacceptable and unwanted?
I think it’s clear that if the goal of “exoticism…is not to appreciate other cultures, but to further other and distance them from the perceived ‘normal’,” then this is not exoticism. OTOH, enticing people to buy products from foreign lands and to try cuisines from other cultures with eye-catching, playful packaging is obviously meant to develop in the customers an “appreciat(ion) of other cultures” so that customers will buy more of their products.
I called this 6 months ago. It was like predicting the highly predictable SJW future.
I find it hilarious the author of the petition is outraged by Trader Joes marketing but doesn’t seem to mention that on the IMBD page for the silent movie she links to there is a big Amazon Prime link to the actual movie. You can watch it for as little as $2.99 with Amazon Prime. Why isn’t she demanding that Amazon stop profiting from showing the racist film and remove it immediately. What a hypocrite.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019574/
Thank G*d Banana Republic from the mid-80s isn’t around anymore.
1,300 signatures? Trader Joe’s is going to cave because of 1,300 signatures? No doubt mostly from people who have never been in one.
“The book, XXXX, is racist because…” …there are probably university courses designed to help Karen’s-in-training like this to fill out petitions.
1300. On a given day that many wait outside, socially distanced and masked, waiting to get into the Folsom store because of limits of occupancy that are in place.
And a petition from some kid who has probably never “shopped”, except for music and clothes. Are they using “Lord of the Flies” as some kind of instruction manual?
Banana Republic is still around. It’s part of the Gap group.
Sounds like standard, fresh-out-of-the-box bullshit to me.
This is too funny not to be seen:
https://9gag.com/gag/a1W1K4v
And, at the same time sad.
Sorry for posting double replies, but that would be a good link for the blind audition thread. The two women could submit that video for their audition to the US winter Olymptics Ice Skating team.
“Quirky” doesn’t begin to describe the people who work at Trader Joe’s. It’s my favorite place to shop for wine. Everyone always seems to be in a good mood there. Of course, the progressives are bent on destroying such an enjoyable shopping experience.
One of my last Encounters there buying a case of Charles Shaw Sauvignon Blanc:
“You sure like Charles Shaw””
“Yeah, it’s cheaper than a co-pay.”
Tell these wining a-holes to pound sand.
When did “exoticification” become a word?
Around the same time as “heteroniormative”.
I don’t think anyone commented on the name of the Trader joe’s spokesperson: “Kenya Friend-Daniel, national director of public relations for Trader Joe’s.” He, she or it has appropriated the name of an entire African country! Is that allowed?
I guess it’s too late to send them my years-old suggestion that the Jewish foods be labeled “Yossele der Soicher” (or at least “Trader Yossel”).
Speaking of getting rid of “exoticism”, since Quaker Oats is dumping Aunt Jemima, why aren’t they also dumping their own Quaker? Isn’t he too “exotic” and “other”?
Trader Joe’s could do the right thing, follow Red Bull’s example, and tell the SJWs to pound sand. I’d be willing to bet that the petitioners have never set foot in one of the stores.