Trader Joe’s tops Forbes’ 2026 list of best large employers

Trader Joe’s landed the No. 1 spot on Forbes’ 2026 America’s Best Large Employers list, but the Santa Barbara store offers the sharper test of what that ranking means in practice. At the De la Vina Street location, the work is still the work of retail, stocking produce, unloading trucks and rotating through registers, even as the company sells itself as a place that turns grocery shopping into “a welcoming journey full of discovery and fun” and leans on friendly Crew Members to create a warm sense of community.

Forbes said the ranking was built from anonymous survey responses from more than 217,000 employees at U.S. companies with more than 1,000 workers. Workers rated salary, work environment, benefits and opportunities to advance, which put Trader Joe’s ahead of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Google, Microsoft and Stanford University. The methodology matters because it reflects how employees themselves judge whether a workplace is worth staying in, recommending and building a career around.

Santa Barbara gives that score a human face. Eric Friedman, the city’s District 5 councilmember, started at the De la Vina Street Trader Joe’s in August 2017 and kept working there through the Thomas Fire, debris flows and the COVID-19 pandemic while also serving on City Council. His path is unusual, but it also shows how the store can function as more than a stop for groceries. In Santa Barbara, the job has been part paychecks, part civic thread.

The store’s workforce also cuts across generations and ambitions. The Independent said employees there included university students and longtime workers approaching a decade with the company, a mix that helps explain why Trader Joe’s retains its neighborhood-store identity even as it grows. The company says it has been transforming grocery shopping since 1967, and its first Trader Joe’s opened in 1967 in Pasadena and South Pasadena, after the business began as Pronto Markets in 1958.

Trader Joe’s now says it employs roughly 50,000 people nationwide and has grown to more than 450 locations. That scale makes the Forbes ranking more than a vanity metric. For crew members and managers, it is a reminder that the company’s reputation still rises or falls on the day-to-day experience inside each store, where culture, flexibility, support and advancement have to feel real if the brand promise is going to hold.