Return to Sender: Friday. [Trader] Joe Friday.

Dear Trader Joe’s of Philadelphia:

Thank you for making our weekly Friday shopping excursions so nice and easy and fun. Thank you to your cashiers for knowing how to identify all of our produce without asking us what it is and how to spell it. Thank you to your floor managers for always personally checking to make sure that you don’t have one more jar of $2.99 roasted tomato basil spaghetti sauce. Thank you to the sample lady for asking us if we’d like seconds, even though the sign clearly says we should limit ourselves to one.

We have to say, when one of your employees walked up to us shortly after your opening to say “I hate to interrupt your Trader Joe’s shopping experience, but I just had to say that I see a lot of beautiful women around here, but none compare with you,” and then ran away in embarrassment, we were hooked on the store. Many men in Philadelphia hit on us – none have ever done it with so much class; when the men at our regular grocery store hit on us, it usually involves a pun on the cantaloupes in our shopping basket. Once, another Trader Joe’s employee actually tipped his hat at us. Seeing as men don’t usually even wear hats these days, we considered that to be a most gentlemanly gesture. (It even prompted us to wonder: why isn’t there a hat-tipping emoticon on AIM, anyway?)

When it rains, your cashiers put our groceries in plastic bags, because they know that nothing ruins a good day’s shopping like a bag that dissolves in the rain and leaves all our organic hummus and quinoa and soy milk in the middle of Market Street. When it’s not raining, your cashiers carefully double up the paper bags so that there’s no risk of the heavy groceries falling through the bottom of the bag, and then ask us if we’ll be walking so that you can put our groceries into two evenly-weighted double bags. Once, we had a cashier agonize over which bag to put a 2.8 ounce bag of dried strawberries in. “The weights of the bags are so close,” he told us. “I don’t want to jump to any conclusions.” We didn’t mind – but the people in line with the rapidly-melting Tofutti ice cream probably did. The cashiers make small talk us while they ring us up and always wish us a nice day/weekend/holiday as we leave. We secretly have a crush on every one of them. Even the guy who mumbles and chuckles but doesn’t seem to speak.

We love the sense of community that rings out across the store every time a bell sounds. “Two bells!” the ringing cashier will yell. “Two bells!” the nearby employees will repeat. It’s like a secret code, known only to TJ’s employees. Only it’s not so secret, since the bell codes are posted on the wall.

We love that all your employees wear Hawaiian shirts, even if it’s seventeen degrees outside. Inside, it’s always summer. We love that the price difference between organic and non-organic products is a matter of about thirty cents. We love that you sell about forty different varieties of rice and about a hundred types of pasta. We love that if we want it, you’ve got it – in three frozen varieties, plus in the deli case and the dry goods aisle. We love that you have products with puns in their names, like “Rosencrunch and Guildenstern,” and, our personal favorite, “So This Strawberry Walks Into a Bar…” We love that when we ask the woman at the sample counter how she is, she gives us an honest, albeit long answer that includes information about her asshole ex-boyfriend, about the real way she likes to use the sample ingredients, and most of all about customers who aren’t as enthusiastic about Trader Joe’s as we are. We don’t understand how anyone isn’t in love with Trader Joe’s, so it makes us love the sample lady even more.

So thank you, Trader Joe’s, for becoming such an important part of our lives. You complete us. You had us at “We tried it, we liked it; if you don’t, bring it back.”