And now, the reason why is going viral from an old episode of Trader Joe's podcast*.
View this video on YouTube
*Yes, TJ's has a podcast.
“If you spend any time on social media, looking at things about Trader Joe’s, you will find there are lots of conspiratorial theories about our parking lots," said Tara Miller, who is the "director of words and phrases and clauses" for TJ's.
“We don't open stores with the world's most ridiculous parking lot on purpose," said Matt Sloan, who is the “marketing product guy*."
Apparently, it's not some sort of conspiracy*.
"When you design a parking space or you allocate spaces for parking for a retail store, it's based on the size of the store. So you mentioned how small our stores are relative to other grocers," said Matt.
"The number of parking spaces given a store, very basically, is determined by the square footage of that store's selling area," he continued.
"The argument could be made, 'Hey, Trader Joe's, just make your stores bigger.' But that kind of changes who we are. We have small stores, so they come with small parking lots. If we had bigger stores, sure we'd have bigger parking lots, but we'd feel like a different store," Tara explained.
TL;DR: The reason the parking lots are so small is because the stores are small, and the size of parking lots are determined by store sizes. Trader Joe's doesn't want to make their stores bigger because small stores are their thing.
Mystery solved.
