We investigate the greedy version of the L p -optimal vector quantization problem for anby (a 1 , . . . , a N −1 , a)). We show that this sequence produces L p -rate optimal N -tuples a (N ) = (a 1 , . . . , a N ) (i.e. the L p -mean quantization error at level N induced by a (N ) goes to 0 at rate N − 1 d ). Greedy optimal sequences also satisfy, under natural additional assumptions, the distortion mismatch property: the N -tuples a (N ) remain rate optimal with respect to the L q -norms, p ≤ q < p + d. Finally, we propose optimization methods to compute greedy sequences, adapted from usual Lloyd's I and Competitive Learning Vector Quantization procedures, either in their deterministic (implementable when d = 1) or stochastic versions.