Two or three times a week, Jamie Forsman greets a customer at Trader Joe’s Outpost in Presque Isle who thinks they’re stepping into a famous grocery store.
Instead, they’re met with work boots piled to the ceiling, jackets and outdoor accessories crammed into every inch of the 1,000 square feet of retail space.
“Even just the other day, somebody came in and said, ‘So where’s the grocery part of it?’” Forsman, the store manager, said.
The reason is obvious to many: the business shares its name with the wildly popular national grocery giant called Trader Joe’s. But there’s only one of those in Maine, and Trader Joe’s Outpost would likely fit in its freezer aisle. Still, the Aroostook store carries on a long family business tradition.
“I’ve had a gentleman call me and ask me for organic peanut butter,” Forsman said. “It happens more often than you’d think.”
It’s a sign of the grocery store’s popularity, despite its scarcity in the Pine Tree State.
The company has nearly 600 locations around the U.S., but its store on Marginal Way in Portland is the only one in Maine. It’s a fact many, especially in the southern half of the state, have long sought to reform, and one that economic development officials often bring up.
A Change.org petition created in December 2020 gained 151 signatures seeking to bring the store to Augusta.
“A missing piece of the puzzle is having, like, a Trader Joe’s or Market Basket, and I think they would do very well here,” said Brunswick’s economic development director during an interview with the Bangor Daily News in 2023.
But Aroostook County has its own unique Trader Joe’s — at least its own version of one. And it fits adeptly into the area’s retail puzzle.
Trader Joe’s, the grocery store, adopted its name from Trader Vic’s, an international tiki-themed restaurant, in an effort to capitalize on the tiki culture craze of the 1960s.
Meanwhile, Trader Joe’s Outpost got its name from — well, a trader named Joe.
Joseph Sleeper Sr. immigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon in 1910 and began selling items door to door, first on foot, then by buggy, in Caribou, New Sweden, Stockholm and Woodland. In 1914, Sleeper opened a general store in Caribou.
One hundred and eleven years later, Sleeper’s is one of the most established brands in Aroostook County.
It’s both a market and a clothing store, and perhaps the only place in Maine where you can buy a live lobster and a pair of steel-toed boots under the same roof. In a word, “general.”
So when the Sleeper family looked to expand their offerings of clothing and outdoor gear to Presque Isle in the early 2000s, they chose the name “Trader Joe’s” to honor that legacy.
They tacked the word “outpost” onto the end of the name — yes — to avoid confusion with the national chain. But it also represented how the family saw its business.
“You want to maintain the identity of what his vision was way back when,” said Sleeper’s grandson, who is also named Joe Sleeper. “Was my grandfather Joe and was he a trader? Yes. But the outpost portion of it does really reflect who we are.”
Trader Joe’s Outpost originally opened in the Aroostook Centre Mall before moving to its current location at 765 Main St. in 2020. The location is smaller, but drives more business, Sleeper said, and didn’t lose much in product offerings.
“When we first opened it, it was very full because I took a lot of the inventory from that mall store and put it in there,” Sleeper said. “It was overwhelming. I still get people that comment “It’s overwhelming.’”
It’s a vastly different shopping experience from a Trader’s Joe’s grocery store. The outpost sells no organic foods or unique snacks, but offers gear for a population that loves the outdoors and often works in the dirt.
But even when a confused customer walks through the door, Forsman has a strategy to reel them back in.
“[I say], well, we’re an outpost, not a grocery store,” she said. “But if you go to Sleeper’s, you’ll feel like you’re at Trader Joe’s.”
