In the summer of 2023, something quietly absurd happened. People started queuing around the block for a grocery bag. Not a designer collaboration. Not a limited-edition drop from a fashion house. A small canvas tote from Trader Joe's. Price: $2.99.
Within days, those bags were reselling on eBay for $50. Then $100. Then $500. People in Tokyo were posting them on Instagram. Fashion accounts were writing about them. A bag designed to carry your frozen mandarin orange chicken had become the hottest accessory of the summer.
This is the most interesting brand story of the last few years, and Trader Joe's didn't plan a single moment of it.
The scarcity paradox
The first thing that makes this story remarkable is the price. $2.99 is not aspirational. It is deliberately, almost aggressively accessible. Trader Joe's did not set out to create a luxury product. They made a small, practical canvas tote in a few colour options and put it next to the checkout.
But the bags sold out immediately. And kept selling out. And because Trader Joe's only exists in certain US states, and doesn't do e-commerce, and restocked in small unpredictable batches, a $2.99 bag became functionally impossible to get. The most affordable product in the store became the hardest to buy.
This is the scarcity paradox at its most elegant. The bag is cheap enough that anyone can afford it. But the supply constraint means almost nobody can have it. It is simultaneously the most accessible and the most exclusive product in retail. Supreme built an empire on this exact tension, except Supreme charges you $48 for a t-shirt. Trader Joe's did it by accident, for under three dollars.
IYKYK: the membership card for taste
There is a phrase that defines how cultural capital works now: IYKYK. If You Know, You Know. It is the dividing line between people who are in on something and people who are not. And the Trader Joe's tote is the purest expression of it.
If you see someone carrying one, and you understand what it means, you are part of a shared understanding. You know about the queues. You know about the resale prices. You know that this person either got lucky or knows someone who got lucky or went to extraordinary lengths for a grocery bag. There is an entire backstory encoded in a small canvas rectangle, and you either read it instantly or you don't notice it at all.
This is how status works now. It is not about the price tag on the object. It is about the cultural literacy required to understand why the object matters. A Birkin bag signals wealth. A Trader Joe's tote signals taste. And increasingly, taste is the harder flex.
Anti-fashion as fashion
Look at the bag itself. It is small. The colours are muted, friendly. The Trader Joe's logo sits plainly on the front with no embellishment, no special treatment, no design flourish. There was no creative director involved. No brand refresh. No campaign. It looks like exactly what it is: a cheap bag from a grocery shop.
And that is precisely the point. In a world saturated with branding, with logos competing for attention, with every surface treated as a billboard, the tote's complete lack of design ambition is its most radical design choice. It says "I don't try" while communicating enormous amounts about the person carrying it. The plainness is the statement. The understatement is the flex.
This is a pattern you see across culture right now. The most coveted things are often the least designed. New Balance 990s over Yeezys. A plain white Carhartt beanie. An old Patagonia fleece. The aesthetic is anti-aesthetic, and it only works if you understand it. Which brings us back to IYKYK.
Where you shop is who you are
There is something deeper happening here about the grocery store as identity. Where you buy your food has always said something about you, but it used to be primarily about class or geography. Now it is about taste.
Trader Joe's occupies a very specific cultural position. It is not Whole Foods (too expensive, too earnest). It is not Walmart (too mass). It is the quirky, approachable, slightly weird place that stocks things you cannot get anywhere else. It has its own personality. Its stores have hand-painted signs. Its products have names that sound like inside jokes. Shopping there feels like being in on something.
The tote bag extends that feeling beyond the store. It takes the Trader Joe's identity and makes it portable. When you carry it, you are not just carrying a bag. You are carrying a set of signals about who you are, what you value, and where you exist in the cultural landscape. That is an extraordinary amount of meaning for $2.99.
The internet-to-IRL pipeline
None of this happens without the internet. TikTok videos of empty shelves and queues around the block created the initial hype. Instagram transformed the bag into a visual meme, photographed at farmers' markets and on city streets and in airport lounges. Twitter discourse debated whether it was ridiculous or genius. The internet did what the internet does best: it took a small, real-world phenomenon and amplified it into a cultural moment.
But here is what makes it different from most internet hype cycles: the resolution was physical. You could not click a link and buy the bag. You had to physically go to a Trader Joe's, hope they had stock, and probably fail multiple times before succeeding. In an era where everything is available instantly online, the bag demanded something analog: patience, presence, and a bit of luck. The internet created the desire. The physical world created the constraint. And the gap between the two is where the cultural energy lived.
Brand building by accident
This is the part that matters most to me, as someone who has spent fifteen years thinking about brands for a living. Trader Joe's did not manufacture this moment. There was no campaign brief. No influencer strategy. No scarcity play designed in a boardroom. They made a good, cheap bag. The internet did the rest.
And that is the lesson. You cannot engineer IYKYK. You can only make something worth knowing about.
The brands that feel most alive right now share this quality. They do not chase virality. They do not optimise for engagement. They have a genuine point of view, they make things with care, and they trust that the right people will find them. Trader Joe's did not need to tell anyone their bag was cool. The bag told that story itself, through its simplicity, its price, and the cultural context it existed in.
This is what I mean when I talk about taste as the most powerful force in brand building. Taste is not a logo or a colour palette or a campaign. Taste is the accumulated set of decisions a brand makes over years that give it a genuine identity. Trader Joe's has been making those decisions for decades: the quirky products, the Hawaiian shirts, the hand-painted signs, the refusal to do advertising. Every one of those choices built the cultural capital that made a $2.99 bag worth $500 to someone.
The best brands feel like people. They have opinions. They have a sense of humour. They make choices that reflect conviction rather than data. Trader Joe's feels like someone you would actually want to know. And that is why people queue around the block for their grocery bag.
You can spend millions engineering a brand moment. Or you can spend decades building a brand that is so genuinely itself that moments happen on their own. The tote bag is not the strategy. The tote bag is the proof that the strategy was already there, embedded in every quirky product name and hand-painted sign, long before anyone thought to put it in a bag.
