The Trader Joe’s at Holly Park Shopping Center is now open. Hark! People like William Needham Finley, IV need not venture Outside The Beltline to seek a better Trader Joe’s experience. The location of the store, near Costco, is a slam dunk for the company. Now if someone would put a really good butcher shop where Blockbuster was, we’d have an almost perfect neighborhood for food shopping

For those impressed by green companies and for those who hate unnecessary teardowns, this Trader Joe’s represents everything wrong with development in the modern era. The pedestrian unfriendly site was once host to Wake Paint and Wallpaper. In order to satisfy the signing of Trader Joe’s, the shopping center moved the paint store into one of the center’s original strips, into a space that was once a Winn-Dixie. So where is all of the whining about Trader Joe’s? They could have just taken the former grocery store space, and we wouldn’t have thrown away a perfectly good building, and wasted the energy and water it took to make the materials for this Trader Joe’s experience. Environmentalists and teardown critics need to be consistent if they are going to be taken seriously.

Just remember that when you clog the aisle to join your obnoxious geek friend in a loud conversation about how green you are when you’re shopping there (this happens a lot in the Cary store). Hopefully this location will offer a better experience. You “see the right people” at Costco, so surely Trader Joe’s will become the next ITB hotspot. My only question is whether or not the parking lot is designed adequately to handle the droves of Suburbans and Tahoes that will take over. ITB hotspots aren’t without their own challenges, but surely I’ll be more likely to utter this great Homer Simpson Halloween line in the Raleigh store than I could in Cary:

Urge to kill…fading…fading…fading — RISING! Fading…fading

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