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If Greensboro were to send Trader Joe’s packing, it would be one of the few communities in the nation to spurn the popular purveyor of quirky products.

In the faddish world of retail marketing — at least for the time being — getting a Trader Joe’s ranks right up there as a hallmark of community cachet.

The possibility of landing a Trader Joe’s prompted one Arizona city to kick in $2 million last year to help a developer lure the trendy grocer, triggered a rivalry between Texas neighborhoods vying to host Dallas’ first “TJ’s,” and spurred one soon-to-be mom in Kansas to pace the arrival of her bundle of joy so she wouldn’t miss a Trader Joe’s grand opening.

“They come to town and pretty much dictate the rules, if you want to have a Trader Joe’s,” Mayor Marlin Kuykendall of Prescott, Ariz., said of the California-based grocer.

Kuykendall and his fellow Prescott City Council members used their capital-project fund to buy land for Trader Joe’s first store in their northern Arizona region. They then leased the site to a local developer so he could start building a shopping center at the preferred site.

Back east, a temporary snag last year in plans to open a Trader Joe’s near Pittsburgh sparked a letter-writing campaign from supporters near and far, said Scott Brilhart, community development director for Upper St. Clair Township, Pa.

“I’ve been working in this field for a while now, and you usually don’t get letters of support for a development,” Brilhart said.

The grocer’s cult-like mystique could be the most difficult challenge faced by Greensboro residents seeking to stop a commercial rezoning in the western part of the city for a shopping center reputed to include the Triad’s first Trader Joe’s.

Shopping-center firm Regency Centers proposes a four-building project just west of Friendly Avenue and Hobbs Road, anchored by a grocer widely assumed to be Trader Joe’s.

Local foes say they are not anti-Trader Joe’s and hope the grocer will come to town in another location. They just oppose expanding the West Friendly commercial district onto what are now residential lots occupied by six houses.

Opponents don’t want the additional traffic and other aggravations that come with virtually all commercial development. They fear a rezoning would cause a domino effect of commercial rezonings for other homeowners on West Friendly.

North Carolina currently boasts six Trader Joe’s outlets, three each in the Charlotte and Triangle regions.

In interviews last week, people living near Trader Joe’s in Chapel Hill and Cary said the grocer is a good neighbor and a popular shopping stop for them, their neighbors and folks throughout their region.

“We love it — probably go there four to five times a week,” said Bob Curtis, who lives in Hanover Place town houses directly behind the Cary store.

His neighbor Kitty Wiebusch said she and her husband moved to Hanover Place two years ago, mainly to be near Trader Joe’s.

“We weren’t even looking for a house,” Wiebusch said. “We actually spotted TJ’s and then began.”

She likes the store’s product mix, including staples of fruit, vegetables and dairy, plus less mainstream items such as sunflower bread, roasted seaweed snacks, truffle mousse pate and chocolate whoopie pies. All in addition to an array of reasonably priced wines.

But Wiebusch said she especially relishes the friendly nature of the staff, clad in Hawaiian shirts to denote their carefree approach to marketing. When an elderly neighbor started shopping there again after recovering from a fall at home, the staff gathered around, Wiebusch said.

“They were all greeting him,” she said. “They gave him a bouquet of flowers. I don’t know what more you could want in a neighbor.”

Similarly, Chapel Hill resident Virginia Guilfoile believes her neighborhood’s lifestyle benefits from its proximity to Trader Joe’s, just across East Franklin Street.

“They create a culture that is very appealing,” said Guilfoile, whose neighborhood includes town houses appraised for tax purposes at more than $650,000. “You can walk across the street to it instead of having to get in a car.”

But the Cary and Chapel Hill stores differ in a key way from what might happen in Greensboro: In both Triangle cities, Trader Joe’s simply moved into existing storefronts already zoned for business.

In fact, the norm in other cities around the country seems to be Trader Joe’s renovating existing stores or building anew on land already zoned for commercial use.

That’s what happened in Dallas, where Trader Joe’s opted to build on land once occupied by a theater.

Known for its unpredictable marketing decisions, Trader Joe’s leadership picked a struggling area in East Dallas over a wealthier neighborhood to the north that actively lobbied the grocer.

“This decision says, with an emphasis that can’t be emphasized enough, that our neighborhood is no longer the city’s funky stepchild,” East Dallas blogger and columnist Jeff Siegel posted last month.

Trader Joe’s isn’t universally loved.

It took flak, for example, from advocates for farm workers who marched on its stores in major urban areas to protest low wages paid for tomatoes picked for the grocer.

But the more usual Trader Joe’s crowds are like the 300 folks who waited at the doors of the new store near Kansas City on grand-opening morning last October. Some camped there overnight.

Once inside, happy customers posed for snapshots in the produce aisle “as if they were visiting the Grand Canyon,” the Kansas City Star reported.

One woman in the midst of a difficult pregnancy told the Star her mantra was, “If I can just make it until Trader Joe’s opens.”

Meanwhile, in the Pittsburgh suburbs, a newly proposed Trader Joe’s initially took fire from area residents for occupying a site once home to a furniture store, according to Brilhart, the community development director.

Neighbors feared Trader Joe’s would be so much busier it would snarl traffic in their western Pennsylvania community and cause excessive noise from a loading dock near their homes, he said.

So the project was delayed for a while last year, he said.

Traffic engineers determined the road system could handle the extra load, but township officials did require a new brick wall on the property line to shield neighbors from the loading dock, Brilhart said.

The store is open now and everyone seems happy, he said.

The Prescott situation in Arizona also would bear a slight resemblance to the Greensboro project in that it includes a new shopping complex next to one of that city’s major retail centers.

Prescott depends heavily on sales-tax revenue to run municipal government and was vying with another community for the new Trader Joe’s, Kuykendall said.

It was a no-brainer to help the local developer woo Trader Joe’s by using public money from a city account earning little interest at the local bank, he said. No such use of public money is planned for the Greensboro project.

But Prescott expects Trader Joe’s to generate more than $260,000 a year in much-needed revenue, plus the local developer is repaying the city’s $2 million investment with an additional $120,000 in annual interest, the mayor said.

The deal might not make sense if the anchor tenant was some “speculative company,” he said.

“But with a Trader Joe’s,” Kuykendall said, “I don’t think they’ve ever had anything but a success story.”

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com