Some call it the Thunderdome.
Others, the Asphalt Hunger Games.
On a good day, I think of it as the lesser-known Tenth Circle of Hell.
But you know it as the parking lot at Trader Joe’s, a quirk of the built landscape so infamous there are those who claim it’s haunted, or cursed, or government psyops, or a demonic presence that worms into your being, altering otherwise stable personalities.
A Trader Joe’s parking lot, typically, is crowded. Spots are tight, and there are rarely enough. All vehicles, big or small, get limited room to maneuver — in fact, the tempers of anyone who decides to park here will rise in inverse proportion to the snugness of the lot itself.
Navigating one on a Sunday afternoon is to be thrust into Tetris. One Instagram user compared the experience to solving a Rubik’s Cube, “except you’re colorblind and in a straightjacket.” Ernie Wong, president of Chicago’s Site Design Group, a landscape architecture firm known for its work on the Riverwalk, the Old Chicago Post Office, Pioneer Court at the Tribune Tower, and plenty of Chicago parking lots, told me: “I drive to Trader Joe’s on Roosevelt, and I hate that parking lot. And yet I will do it! I mean, I do do it! I feel I am a patient parker, I wait my turn, but look, it gets stressful, so I wonder: Is there a value to the amount of stress Trader Joe’s parking lots create in me?
“How much am I willing to deal with?”
Understand that the California-based grocery chain, which opened its first location in Illinois in 2000, freely acknowledges that the designs of its parking lots have a reputation for straining nerves. They say the gripe dates back to their very first store, in Pasadena, which has had the same small parking lot since it opened in 1967, nearly 60 years ago.
So, yes, they hear you swearing in your car.
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And yet, there are now six stores across Chicago, and another four opening in the next couple of years — not counting an additional 20-odd locations in the suburbs. As Trader Joe’s expands throughout the region, and as more Midwesterners find themselves wondering what kind of (expletive) idiot thought it was a good (expletive) idea to design a (expletive) parking lot like this, it’s time to explain why parking lots are the way they are. And why you might want to pump those brakes and ask the truly counterintuitive:
Are Trader Joe’s nightmarish parking lots actually … models of smart urban design?
Are we wrong about Trader Joe’s parking lots?
The answer is not simple, but a window into how parking lots shape our day.
That’s why I decided to visit, and rank, every Trader Joe’s parking lot in Illinois.
Best of the least worst
The best Trader Joe’s parking lot in Illinois (No. 1) — essentially, the least frustrating — is at the Libertyville location, alongside Highway 21. Though in a strip mall, the store has a large, self-contained parking space to itself, with wide lanes — the one drawback being (and there’s always something) that the ample space invites drivers to speed, and they do. The modest lot at Trader Joe’s in Hyde Park (No. 2) is similar: plenty of spaces, none especially far from the front door — but traffic on 54th Street barrels in from the north. Same deal in Batavia (No. 3), surrounded by cornfields and plagued by drivers who insist on backing into spots on even the busiest days. It’s generally calm, except for the Teslas flying in off of Fabyan Parkway and ignoring well-marked yellow caution lines.
The steadily busy traffic flow at Trader Joe’s in Naperville Plaza (No. 4) — hectic even on a Tuesday morning — feels relatively patient. This is one of those strip malls so old now (it was developed in 1961, when Naperville only had about 12,000 residents) that the space seems oddly nostalgic, with peaked roofs. There is even a Casey’s Foods for the brand names that the Trader Joe’s-brand-only universe won’t offer. The biggest problem here is that it’s impossible to leave and merge onto that racetrack called Washington Street.
Still, that’s four Trader Joe’s lots that won’t drive you (too) crazy.
Because, at least there, local zoning ordinances for parking nicely matched demand. In short, Trader Joe’s have smaller-than-usual parking lots because they prefer smaller-than-average stores. According to a company spokesperson, every Trader Joe’s in the Chicago area is intended to be unique, but in general, they average 8,000 to 12,000 square feet of floor space. For comparison, many Jewel-Osco locations offer around 50,000 square feet. This matters because, in most cities and towns, commercial parking is zoned according to business size. For instance, the city of Chicago requires about 2.5 to 5 spaces for every 1,000 feet of store, depending on the type of shop. There are, of course, exceptions, so many that critics complain that zoning for parking can seem arbitrary.
“Sometimes the standard is square feet, sometimes it’s another metric,” said Alex Montero, chairperson of Strong Towns Chicago, the local chapter of a national group that advocates for livable, walkable cities. “A bowling alley might require a certain number of parking spaces per bowling lane. And the thing is, there’s a tendency everywhere — this is a universal problem — to overestimate the problem. Why? Because every politician has had the frustration of not being able to park next to the front door.”
A Trader Joe’s spokesperson declined to comment directly on its parking lots, but rather directed me to a podcast hosted by a pair of its marketing executives, who said they have heard the whispers, the claims that their parking lots are part of a conspiracy to drive people insane — but, look, their stores are small, and that brings bureaucratic standards.
Chicago, like many cities, adopted its parking zoning standards in the mid-20th century, as suburbs grew and cities shrank. In general, developers have never been fans of these rules. “The cost of building spaces is enormous, and worse for garages,” Wong said. Around $8,000 for an outdoor space is typical. “I mean, dimensions alone — in Chicago, the smallest a space can be is 8 feet wide by 18 feet long. That means tight, annoying, car doors get banged. But even that requires 22 feet of backing-up space behind it. Gets expensive! Trader Joe’s caters to high-density neighborhoods, which in theory means more customers walk in and don’t need a car. At least in theory.”
Big-box problems
Take the Trader Joe’s parking lots in Glenview (No. 5) and Schaumburg (No. 6).
Both offer plenty of spaces, both are in strip malls, not far from busy roads, but since there are other stores nearby, with their own parking requirements, the Trader Joe’s lots here begin to feel claustrophobic, penned in by surrounding buildings (Schaumburg) and rows of drive-up ATM lanes (Glenview) that seem underused in an online banking age. When traffic here gets intense — which is often — courtesy zooms out the window.
“We tend to see (zoning ordinances) pile up until it’s hard to revisit them or even make sense of them,” said Tony Jordan, president of the Parking Reform Network, a Portland, Oregon-based organization that aims to spotlight how parking policy impacts communities. “People take it for granted, but parking requirements have forced a style of development on us, and that style is a mix of strip malls and big-box chain mega-lots. Those (rules) were written when places were growing and people imagined a crisis, and so it’s not as if every community always wanted it this way, it’s that changing it is hard.”
Think of the parking lots at Trader Joe’s in Algonquin (No. 7), Lake Zurich (No. 8), Downer’s Grove (No. 9) and Orland Park (No. 10). These are big-box parking lots with big-box parking lot problems: Cars camp out, choking lanes as their drivers pray for a miracle, a short walk to the front door. But also, the sheer number of spots creates a drab, impersonal oasis of pavement, very much out of touch with the Trader Joe’s vibe.
“Good food. Good mood.”
If you don’t shop here, I’ll explain: Trader Joe’s, which comes off as laid-back and chatty as it can often feel cultish and eccentric, set out to create a chain of intentionally smallish grocery stores, even pleasantly crowded ones. Presumably, it should look like people want to be there — every day, all the time, too. There is no online ordering and no loyalty programs, no coupons, no traditional sales, no bulk-sized family items, no diapers, no baby formula, no fish counter, no deli counter.
But there is a tiki aesthetic, sometimes playful Hawaiian shirts on the staff and a lenient return policy if you don’t like one of their products — many of which would look obscure (Turkish simit bread, Thai mee krob noodle snacks, etc.) on other supermarket shelves but all of which are Trader Joe’s branded, though produced by third-party manufacturers that are rarely identified. Prices are generally reasonable, but even popular items can frustratingly vanish overnight. At the checkout, be prepared to have an unnaturally chatty conversation with the clerk.
The whole place comes off like a psychological study in consumer behavior. But, in fact, it was the creation of an Air Force vet named Joe Coulombe, who realized that his small chain of local convenience stores was getting crushed by 7-Eleven. Simultaneously, he also recognized his customers were getting better educated. Or as he put it, “overeducated and underpaid,” yet more willing to try unusual foods.
For his new stores, he eyed locations in walkable neighborhoods and university towns, and adapted the name from “Trader Horn,” the 1927 memoir of an ivory trader in Africa.
Coulombe died at 89 in 2020, but across 60 years, his anti-supermarket quirks never much wavered. And so, as you enter the parking lots of Trader Joe’s in Northbrook (No. 11) and La Grange (No. 12), handmade-looking signs greet you, promising “Good food. Good mood.” But there are also 662 Trader Joe’s in the United States now, and expansion means compromise and, in the Chicago area, embracing a big-box ubiquity.
Further down the list
There’s nothing uniquely awful about, say, the parking lots at Trader Joe’s in Arlington Heights (No. 13) or Glen Ellyn (No. 14), except they’re also larger than necessary and generic. You’ll have no problem parking in either, but the long-term cost could get ugly.
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“We don’t always notice how empty parking spaces take up so much space, pushing everything else out,” said Henry Grabar, author of “Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World.” “It’s like a form of dark energy, right in a city code, contributing to heat islands, guaranteeing relatively low land values in places, but also pushing shops and gyms and classrooms and ultimately us away from each other.”
Maria A. Villalobos, director of the master’s program in landscape architecture and urbanism at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said: “Even if we look past ecological concerns about oversized parking lots, there’s cultural ones, the stretches of emptiness, the way they kill vibrant streets, the way they get built at times on Native American cemeteries, the way a place of significant cultural importance can be literally flattened to accommodate their size.”
In other words, perhaps what’s terrible about Trader Joe’s truly tightest spaces is what also makes them thoughtfully designed — a hassle in the service of smarter cities?
That two-floor garage at the Lakeview location on Diversey Parkway (No. 15) has the kind of blind spots and narrow ramps better suited to the “Fast and Furious” franchise. The Lakeview store on Lincoln Avenue (No. 16), the first Chicago location, somehow manages to be both welcoming and cramped — weekend standoffs here between motorists vying for the same space have been known to involve crying. The parking lots in Park Ridge (No. 17) and Oak Park (No. 18) share an awkward patchwork of odd angles, medians and crosswalks that generate frustrating pockets of gridlocked traffic.
Trader Joe’s lots are so annoying, it’s like they beg you to walk, not drive. Being small, they tend to retrofit into existing real estate (conserving urban space). In May, in a column for the nonprofit news website MinnPost, Bill Lindeke, an urban geographer with the University of Minnesota, wrote that when it comes to Trader Joe’s, “Confront your fear of parking density, and reflect instead on well-balanced design.”The good news: a new era of parking lot reform may be here.
Abandon all hope …
On June 1, Illinois’ People Over Parking Act went into effect, statewide legislation that prohibits cities and towns (including Chicago) from mandating that minimums of off-street parking spaces be created when a new construction development is near a train or bus stop. In places as varied as San Francisco and Elkhart, Indiana, there are plans to redevelop empty strip mall expanses into mixed-use community hubs with new housing. At the Illinois Institute of Technology, new students in urbanism often start with parking design, Villalobos said: “They see even at this school, overscaled lots that didn’t take into account that many of them don’t drive. They want a more responsible city, and transforming parking lots is a beginning.”
The bad news: these Trader Joe’s parking lots, the worst of the worst, are staying.
There are about 40 spots in the garage at 630 N. Rush St. (No. 19) for the River North location (at 44 E. Ontario St.), which is not enough, so as you leave in frustration, note the steep exit ramp empties into fast-moving traffic on Rush. And even that’s preferable to the tunnel winding beneath the bowels of the South Loop Trader Joe’s (No. 20). God help if anyone is ahead or behind you, waiting for one of the two dozen spaces to open. SUV paint scars along the concrete might as well spell: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!”
Rational thought has no home in the Evanston lot (No. 21), which is microscopic, self-contained and only accessed amidst traffic flying down Chicago Avenue. Nearly every day here feels like a supermarket two days before Thanksgiving. Nerves shatter. A man once yelled at me for stealing his space, which he had claimed from the other side of the lot.
Still, absolute hell on Earth, the final boss of Chicago-area Trader Joe’s parking lots, the true pit of despair, is found at Trader Joe’s off Clybourn Avenue in Lincoln Park (No. 22).
You enter from the back, inch up a ramp with fellow drivers, then make a sharp right into a garage populated by a dense forest of thick concrete pylons, which are always fun to angle between. Here is a parking lot so tight a sign tells you: “In THIS garage, objects in mirrors ARE closer.” Here is a parking lot so unholy, a live person holding STOP and GO signs is stationed at the top of that entrance ramp, so entering cars don’t hit exiting cars.
That man, on weekdays, is Freddie Stewart.
He has done this job for 12 years.
He should be broken, but he sounds calm, rational, almost grateful.
“People tell me when I’m not here with my signs, it’s pure chaos. See that stop sign? Nobody stops at it. See this guy? I’m holding a stop sign, he’s not stopping. This is what I deal with here. Stop, go. Chicago, you’ve done this before, right? For the most part, though, it’s an easy job. I hear it’s crazier on weekends — when I’m not here, thankfully.”