Trader Joe’s plans Anaheim Hills store, hiring and training ramp up

Trader Joe’s has put its Anaheim Hills site into its store network as store 295, with the former Big Lots at 6336 E. Santa Ana Canyon Road marked “coming soon” and no opening date posted yet. The company’s Anaheim Hills page is live, a clear sign that the project has moved past the paper stage and into the kind of buildout that usually turns into hiring and training work for crews on the ground.

The new store sits in Anaheim Hills Village, at the intersection of East Santa Ana Canyon Road and South Fairmont Boulevard. That matters because this is not a ground-up build on raw land. It is a retail reuse project, which often lets a grocer move faster than a new construction site but still forces the company to solve the practical problems that decide whether a store opens smoothly: back-of-house flow, parking, delivery access and how the box fits into an already busy neighborhood.

For employees, that is the part worth watching. Trader Joe’s openings are where the company’s culture gets translated from a storefront slogan into daily routine, and the work starts long before the first customer walks in. The crew has to learn the layout, product flow, cashier rhythm and the chain’s style of customer interaction before a busy weekend puts the store to the test. In a market like Orange County, a new location can also create transfer chances for nearby crew members and add one more store for managers to compare against when they are building schedules, sharpening service standards and getting the team ready.

The Anaheim Hills project has also been on local radar for about a year, since permits first surfaced and residents began following the site’s progress. That long runway helps explain why the opening has become a neighborhood conversation piece before the doors have opened. It also shows how Trader Joe’s growth now shows up: not in a flashy new campus, but in a familiar retail shell where the real work is hiring, training and getting the store ready to operate at the company’s pace.

Trader Joe’s describes itself as a national chain of neighborhood grocery stores, and its 2026 expansion has been broad. The company has already announced at least two California openings this year, including Anaheim Hills and Paso Robles, and earlier April reporting pointed to 18 new stores across 12 states in the coming months. For Southern California workers, Anaheim Hills is one more reminder that the chain’s next chapter is still being written one former big-box space at a time.