CBRE’s Val Achtemeier, Darla Longo and Barbara Perrier are long accustomed to winning awards and honors. After all, they are among the company’s top brokers nationwide. But they are to receive a particularly important one later this month: the City of Hope’s highest honor, the Spirit of Life Award, given to those who have a track record of significant professional and humanitarian accomplishments.

The three women have consistently been in the top 3% of brokers at the company and have achieved the firm’s top title for producers – vice chair. Not only do they have a close professional association, but they have developed a lasting friendship – which they said makes the award to all three at once particularly gratifying. Each of them has long supported nonprofits, with Achtemeier serving on the executive board of City of Hope’s Los Angeles Real Estate and Construction Council for 20 years. City of Hope is one of the country’s largest cancer research and treatment organizations.

The three will be honored at a celebration Sept. 14 at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. 

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It’s been an odd month or so for the
Monrovia-based Trader Joe’s. 

First, it got some good news: the grocer ranked first in the supermarkets category of the American Innovation Index, beating out No. 2 Whole Foods Market by a wide margin. That distinction implies Trader Joe’s is really loved by its patrons.

Then there’s the bad news: Trader Joe’s has had to recall an unusually high number – six – of its products over the last month plus, including its popular “Unexpected Broccoli Cheddar Soup” because it possibly included insects. What’s more, the grocer went to court in Los Angeles last week in an escalating fight with a group trying to unionize the company. 

Finally, the new top execs of Trader Joe’s – Chair and Chief Executive Bryan Palbaum and Vice Chief Executive Jon Basalone, who replaced longtime Chief Dan Bane, who retired July 2 – are getting at least some pushback from their Aug. 14 company podcast in which they revealed they have absolutely no intention of installing self-checkouts at the company’s stores. If they expected uniformly warm applause for eschewing soulless technology, they didn’t get it.

Several people online complained that they prefer the speed and anonymity of a self-checkout lane. For example, Lindsay Parrill, writing in The Manual, said she’s an introvert who dislikes “the social battery drainage that comes from needless chit-chat with an overly peppy stranger” and asked a simple question: why can’t Trader Joe’s give shoppers the choice of going to a human checker or a self-checkout lane?

The Insider is compiled by Editor-in-Chief Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].