There’s something almost everyday about how this story began. A man goes to a Florida Trader Joe’s, buys some food, gets his receipt, and leaves to go home. Millions of times a day, all over the country, this kind of deal is made without giving it much thought. But Brian Keim seems to have looked twice at that receipt. What he saw in March 2019 was the start of a lawsuit that would last more than five years and cost Trader Joe’s $7.4 million in the end.
The problem was clear and important to understand. FACTA, which stands for the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, makes it clear that receipts given to customers at the point of sale can only show the last five digits of a credit or debit card number. The idea is just to protect consumers. If you print out too much of that card number, identity thieves could use it to start their own fraud. Keim said that some Trader Joe’s stores were printing both the first six and the last four digits, for a total of ten digits. This is illegal, even if there wasn’t any actual fraud.
Trader Joe’s has always denied doing anything wrong. The company says that these receipts were not made in every store and that even in the stores that were affected, they were only made for a small percentage of transactions. There was never a customer who came forward to report identity theft related to the event. That background information is important, and it’s one reason why the case has some vague moral weight. It wasn’t a data breach. It was clear that no one’s account was drained. It was a technical violation of a privacy law, which meant it was illegal but didn’t have any real effects on the people it was said to have hurt.
But the law only needs to be broken for someone to be legally responsible under FACTA. It doesn’t need to cause harm. And so the case went forward. The settlement class includes all people who used a credit or debit card at a Trader Joe’s between March 5, 2019, and July 19, 2019. People who filed a valid claim by the deadline of June 9, 2026, could get a share of the money that was left over after lawyers’ fees and administrative costs were taken out. Class counsel asked for fees of about $2.47 million, which is a lot of money for most individual claimants to ever see in a class action.
People often have doubts about that part of class action lawsuits. Reports said that people who were eligible could get more than $100 each, which seems like a good deal until you realize that number changes based on how many people actually filed claims. The lawyers’ cut, on the other hand, is set in stone. Law professors have been criticizing this structural tension for years, and this case doesn’t really fix it; it just shows it again.
The brand in question is what makes the Trader Joe’s case worth pausing over. There is a special place in American retail culture for Trader Joe’s. It is loved, a little strange, and famous for its $3.99 wine and happy employees in Hawaiian shirts. It’s not the kind of company that makes people want to sue right away. People were shocked when the lawsuit came out, like when your favorite bakery from the neighborhood showed up in court.
That doesn’t change what the receipts showed. The deadline for the settlement has passed, but no one will get a check until the court gives its final OK. Once they are written, those checks are good for 180 days. The case is likely to quickly fall out of the news, being buried under new lawsuits and scandals. But on a quiet Tuesday in 2019 in a Trader Joe’s in Florida, a man looked at a receipt, and the clock began to run.
