
Wait, Trader Joe was a real guy?
CNN
Turns out Trader Joe was a real guy, and his shrewd instincts led him to create a counter-culture grocery empire.
Joe Coulombe, a struggling convenience store owner in Los Angeles, decided in 1967 to open a grocery chain to appeal to the small but growing number of well-educated, well-traveled consumers that mainstream supermarkets were ignoring.
"I have an ideal audience in mind," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1981. "This is a person who got a Fulbright scholarship, went to Europe for a couple of years and developed a taste for something other than Velveeta" ordinary beer and Folgers coffee, he said.

A little-known civil rights office in the Department of Education that helps resolve complaints from students across the country about discrimination and accommodating disabilities has been gutted by the Trump administration and is now facing a ballooning backlog, a workforce that’s in flux and an unclear mandate.












