Pacific Beach is losing one of its fixtures when longtime Trader Joe\u2019s manager Kim Guentert retires after more than 40 years with the specialty grocery store. According to Trader Joe\u2019s first mate David Larkin, Guentert opened the Pacific Beach location in September 1986, marking it the first Trader Joe\u2019s in San Diego. After the store\u2019s successful launch, Guentert moved around the city to open other stores around the city until he returned to Pacific Beach six years ago, according to Larkin. “I\u2019ve worked with Kim a little over two years. He\u2019s been a great teacher with 40 years in the business. Another captain will come in, but it\u2019s going to be hard to replace him,” he said. Trader Joe\u2019s crew members Eddie Velasquez and Devin Kiyoshi White said Guentert has brought a dry sense humor to a job that can be hectic at times. Both said that anytime they have to use one of the store\u2019s computers, Guentert reminds them, “That thing is not a toy,” as if they were school kids caught messing around with something they were forbidden to touch. “But that goes for any mechanical object here,” White said. But that doesn\u2019t mean the employees don\u2019t tease him back. Velasquez said the employees often assign the head manager to tasks they don\u2019t want to do, such as stocking the nutritional bars. “It\u2019s one of those things that no one wants to do, it\u2019s so tedious and takes up time, but for Kim, timewasters like that is everything he needs after working here after however many years,” he joked. “It\u2019s pretty funny. Every time he\u2019s done with that, he stands up and says, \u2018Done with bars, time to take a break,\u2019 and he\u2019ll head out and have a smoke.” Larkin said Guentert\u2019s smoke breaks have been the butt of several jokes among the Trader Joe\u2019s crew. “We had a full store meeting and played \u2018pin the smoke on the captain.\u2019 He was notorious for taking a lot of smoke breaks. That went over really big. He was a real good sport about it and the crew got a lot of mileage out of that. We had one of our artists do a likeness of him. It was awesome. Velasquez said the crew has been ribbing him lately about finally learning how to do certain manager duties, such as returns, when retirement is right around the corner. “About a month ago he finally learned how to give an employee discount. All you do is turn a key one way and push a button. Whenever he walks up with his key, everyone stops \u2014 \u2018Hey, Kim\u2019s gonna use his key.” Along with his sense of humor, White said Guentert also has an approachable management style, often inviting crew members to chat about their jobs and to make sure that the store and its employees are doing well, creating a great work atmosphere. “Despite the fact that he\u2019s a running a store, he\u2019s never too busy to go outside and talk to you about the state of the store, how things are going, anything pertinent about what you are doing,” White said. For this surprise story, Trader Joe\u2019s crew members said Guentert hasn\u2019t announced his retirement plans, but they doubted his plans included playing with any toys.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pacific Beach is losing one of its fixtures when longtime Trader Joe\u2019s manager Kim Guentert retires after more than 40 years with the specialty grocery store. According to Trader Joe\u2019s first mate David Larkin, Guentert opened the Pacific Beach location in September 1986, marking it the first Trader Joe\u2019s in San Diego. After the store\u2019s […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11559","_seopress_titles_title":"Trader Joe\u2019s says goodbye to founding manager","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11559,11551,11593],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beach-bay-press","category-news","category-no-images"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}