Joe Coulombe sold Trader Joe’s to Theo Albrecht back in the 1970s. Albrecht had already lived an interesting life:
Albrecht had wanted to be an architect as a young man. But when he returned home from North Africa following the war, he discovered that the destruction in Essen was almost total. Essen had been home to weapons producers for the Third Reich, and it was the target of a long and intense Allied bombing campaign. As a prelude to Dresden, Essen was firebombed on the evening of March 5, 1943, when 442 aircraft attacked the city, leaving some 50,000 people homeless. Albrecht gave up his dreams of becoming an architect, choosing to stay on with his mother and her struggling corner shop. Eventually he was joined by his brother, Karl. In 1961, the brothers named their newly expanding grocery company Albrecht Discount, Aldi for short. Theo kept a low profile. In fact, the most public thing he ever did was to disappear against his will.
In November 1971, Albrecht was kidnapped at gunpoint. Initially the German police were confused. It was not Baader-Meinhof or Black September that had orchestrated the abduction. Instead it was Heinz-Joachim Ollenburg, a down-on-his-luck lawyer with gambling debts, and his accomplice, a bumbling thief nicknamed “Diamond” Paul Kron. The kidnappers, too, were at first confused: They didn’t believe the man in their possession wearing an inexpensive suit was Albrecht and demanded some form of identification. Albrecht was held captive for 17 days, during which time he reportedly negotiated down his own ransom of 7 million deutsche marks. Later he wrote off the sum as a business expense on his taxes.
By the time of his death last year, Albrecht and his brother had built Aldi into an umbrella corporation that included more than 9,400 stores in 20 countries. Trader Joe’s was not the brothers’ only foray into the American marketplace—there are Aldis across the eastern half of the United States. To navigate German laws of corporate transparency aimed at large organizations, the Albrechts broke Aldi into 66 smaller units. Theo ran Aldi North, and Karl managed Aldi South. “The brothers lived under intense security,” says Coulombe. “They never drove in the same car.” In 1979, Coulombe finally agreed to sell Trader Joe’s to Albrecht for an undisclosed sum. He stayed on, running the company’s operations until 1989, when, he says, “Herr Albrecht and I got into an argument over hiring my successor, and that became the turning point.” Coulombe left his company for good, and his contribution was eventually erased from Trader Joe’s corporate history.
After he’d been released by his kidnappers, Albrecht spoke briefly with reporters. “I am, of course, very, very tired,” he said. “It was a very exhausting business.” That was the last public statement he ever made.