My highlights from the book:

1. I wrote this book to help entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. That's why there's a lack of miracles and a surplus of marketing details including buying, advertising, distributing, and running stores; and lots of discussion of how we built a successful business on high wages.

2. The general theme in winning corporations is a view of profit and wealth-creation as inevitable by-products of doing other things well. Money is a useful yardstick for measuring quantitative performance and profit and an obligation to investors. But making money as an end in itself ranks low.

3. Along the way in this book, you'll find the angst of a struggling entrepreneur and the slings and arrows of outrageous good fortune and bad fortune.

4. Trader Joe's was not so much born as extruded.

5. Justin Dart, the famous President of Rexall bought Tupperware, against the unanimous  vote of his board of directors (“nothing but a goddamned party formula!"). Within a year, Tupperware was generating a third of Rexall's profits. Dart gave orders to liquidate all 1,100 drugstores he owned to raise cash so he could go into partnership with El Paso Natural Gas and produce all the plastic that he needed for Tupperware. What was vertical integration for Tupperware was going to be horizontal disintegration for The Owl Drug Co., and Pronto.

6. We had $4,000 from Alice's savings from her teaching school before she had the kids (we lived on my $325) and we sold our little house in which we had an equity of $7,000. I borrowed $2,000 from my grandmother and $5,000 from my father.

7. Chapter 11 was a possibility. But I was reading The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman, with its implicit concept of multiple solutions to non-convex problems.

8. The most basic conclusion I drew from her book was that, if you adopt a reasonable strategy, as opposed to waiting for an optimum  strategy, and stick with it, you'll probably succeed. Tenacity is as important as brilliance.

9. This is my favorite of all managerial quotes: If all the facts could be known, idiots could make the decisions. —Tex Thornton, cofounder of Litton Industries, quoted in the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1960s.

10. Non-convex problems are puzzles in which there may be several good but not ideal answers which classical search techniques may wrongly identify as the best one.

11. I concluded that I didn't have to find an optimum solution to Pronto's difficulties, just a reasonable one. Trying to find an optimum solution in business is a waste of time: the factors in the equation are changing all the time.

12. The one core value that I chose was our high compensation policies. This is the most important single business decision I ever made: to pay people well.

13. Turnover is the most expensive form of labor expense. Good people pay by their extra productivity. You can't afford to have cheap employees.

14. That thirty-two-year-old almost-bankrupt president of Pronto knew nothing about wine, or anything else he sold. In this, he [he is talking about himself] was like all grocers of that day, and today. The buyers at the supermarket chains knew nothing about what they sold, and they don't want to know.

15. The basic problem is that convenience store retailing is a commodity business that is hard to differentiate. What I needed was a good but small opportunity for my good but small company: a non-commodity, differentiated kind of retailing.

16. Yes, I could have sold out to 7-Eleven and gone to work for them, or somebody else. But the only real security lies in having your own business, and this left-hander was well ahead of the curve on that one.

17. In the late 1920s, however, network radio began to spark. The first great success was Amos 'n Andy. They were sponsored by an obscure brand of toothpaste from Chicago called Pepsodent. Overnight, it became No. 1. (See Charles Luckman's autobiography, Twice in a Lifetime.)

18. As we evolved Trader Joe's, its greatest departure from the norm wasn't its size or its decor. It was our commitment to product knowledge, something which was totally foreign to the mass-merchant culture, and our turning our backs to branded merchandise.

19. I felt that the newly educated group that was slowly emerging would be dissatisfied with this mass culture; that they would want something different.

20. And now, the internet has fragmented electronic media almost to an infinite extent. Trader Joe's was part of this fragmentation. It created an opportunity for independent-minded people to split off the main track. You might think of Trader Joe's as one of the more esoteric cable channels; the supermarkets as NBC-CBS-ABC.

21. I’m going to disillusion those dear souls who think that Trader Joe's sprang, fully developed, from my brain, like Athena from the head of Zeus. To continue the metaphor, it was more like an elbow here, a toenail there over a period of eleven years, with an occasional painful delivery of a major hunk of torso.

22. Most of my ideas about how to act as an entrepreneur are derived from The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset, the greatest Spanish philosopher of the twentieth century. I believe this book still offers the clearest explanation of the times in which we live. And I believe it offers a master “plan of action" for the would-be entrepreneur, who usually has no reputation and few resources.

23. If you want to know what differentiates me from most managers, that's it. From the beginning, thanks to Ortega, I've been aware of the need to sell everybody.

24. I took a cue from General Patton, who thought that the greatest danger was not that the enemy would learn his plans, but that his own troops would not.

25. As I learned time and again, success in business often rests on a minute reading of the regulations that  impact your business.

26. Growth for the sake of growth still troubles me. It seems unnatural, even perverted.

27. Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement. —Samuel Johnson in 1759

28. Other elements of design [of the Fearless Flyer] are owed to David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man. The numbered paragraphs, the boxes drawn around the articles, are all Ogilvy's ideas. I still think his books are the best on advertising that I've ever read and I recommend them.

29. We assumed that our readers had a thirst for knowledge, 180 degrees opposite from supermarket ads. We emphasized "informative advertising," a term borrowed from the famous entrepreneur Paul Hawken, who started publishing in the Whole Earth Review in the early 1980s. These informative texts were intended to stress how our products were  differentiated from ordinary stuff.

30. I don't believe in advertising budgets that are based on a percentage of sales. You figure out the dollars needed to do the job right, and go ahead and spend them. As it turned out, the big sales generated by the Fearless Fryer dropped the cost of advertising as a percentage of sales after the fact.

31. The expansion of the Fearless Flyer to twenty pages was an important factor in the jump of Trader Joe's sales after 1985. Down deep, the Fearless Flyer was an educational medium and hundreds of customers kept three-ring notebook collections of the issues so they could refer back to the articles.

32. Word of mouth is the most effective advertising of all. I have been known to say that there's no better business to run than a cult. Trader Joe's became a cult of the overeducated and underpaid, partly because we deliberately tried to make it a cult once we got a handle on what we were actually doing, and partly because we kept the implicit promises with our clientele. Beware of ever betraying the True Believers!

33. All businesses have problems. It's the problems that create the opportunities. If a business is easy, every simple bastard would enter it. My point is that a businessperson who complains about problems doesn't understand where his bread is coming from.

34. "Retail" comes from a medieval French verb, retailer, which means "to cut into pieces." "Tailor" comes from the same verb.

35. In our cheese departments we were literally taking whole wheels and cutting them into pieces. I took this as an analogy for what we should do with everything we sold.

36. We violated every received-wisdom of retailing except one: we delivered great value, which is where most retailers fail.

37. Some of our great values in fruit juices were generated by getting the glass containers for cheap. Odd lots (though big ones) of glass containers show from time to time. Let's say that Sunsweet prune juice tries an odd-shaped container and then drops it. The leftover inventory gets closed out at bargain prices. We'd buy up these odd lots and ship them to, say, our apple juice supplier. Since so much of the cost of fruit juice is in the glass container, we were able to reflect big savings in the retail price.

38. His slowness of perception bothered him at times. "At the start I see my subject in a sort of haze. I know perfectly well that what I shall see in it later is there all the time, but it only becomes apparent after a while. Sometimes it is the most important things that come out last." —Jean Renoir in Renoir, My Father, the warm memoir of Auguste Renoir. Here he discusses how Auquste created a painting.

39. Look at any supermarket ad. You'll learn precious little about the any product in it; you'll see only name, size, and price. Partly this is because the grocers themselves don't know anything about the provenance of what they sell, and they don't want to bring up the subject of individual differences.

40. Products need to be differentiated in order to avoid direct price comparison.

41. My preference is to have a few stores, as far apart as possible, and to make them as high volume as possible. Too many stores, too many irreversible leases, too much geographical saturation was a recurrent theme in the failure of American retail chains in the twentieth century.

42. Giving discounts to people over sixty is, to borrow a phrase from Charlie Munger, "a type of dementia I can't even classify." Here you have the fastest-growing, most affluent part of the population, and you give them a discount?

43. I want to make it quite clear that I called the shots. I reject management by committee. I think, however, that my regime was somewhat short of despotic. I like this quote about Pierre Monteux, the great conductor of the San Francisco Symphony. Monteux never tried to get a performance out of an orchestra. He was always giving one with them.

44. No fixtures. The store would have most of its merchandise displayed in stacks with very little shelving. This implied a lower SKU count: a high-SKU store needs lots of shelves. The average supermarket carries one SKU per square foot. Trader Joe's carried one SKU per five square feet! Price-Costco, one of my heroes, carried about one SKU per twenty square feet.

45. One of the really nice things about my career is that I was never an absentee dad. Workaholic, yes, but not absentee. What price glory? When is enough, enough?

46. I detest the term "exit strategy" when I hear young entrepreneurs bragging about theirs, as if a business is something one builds and casts off.

47. But do I regret having sold? Yes. I admit it. To mine own self I was not true when I sold. I regret not having had the guts to ride out the loss of the surtax exemptions, the employee ownership problem, the threat of death taxes, Carter's threat to eliminate capital gains preference, and all the other fears, real or phantom, of late 1978. I have to admit the truth, that I regret having sold Trader Joe's. And I have had to pay something for this, beyond the loss of my shadow.

Learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs by listening to Founders. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work.