In the U.S. Aldi is where you buy off-brands like Drinkerade and Cool-o-Cola. I have seen an inordinate amount of Aldi-related posts recently, are they planning a new strategy that is being headed off with a PR campaign?
It appears so. My town already has an Aldi on one end of town, but they just bought up some land on the other side of town to open another one (much closer to the university campus). According to the PR around it, the US branch of Aldi is spending something like $5B to expand to 2500 stores (a quick Wikipedia search indicates that they have ~1900).
At the risk of sounding like a shill, I get a lot of amusement out of going to Aldi and seeing them toe the line of trademark infringement (e.g. Green Irish Wizard brand cereal with marshmallows, Fruit Circles cereal with a tropical bird on the box, Mad Apples cider, etc)
I'm in England and I agree with the first comment. The brand rip-offs are completely shameless. And while Lidl and Aldi do have brand names, they definitely make up less than 10% of the stock
Totally different companies now. They do have an agreement to not compete in most countries though. The only countries both are present are Germany and the United States.
I would think so, but if the non-compete deal was made as part voluntarily splitting up the company, I could understand the argument that there's no net harm to the consumer.
In my experience in the US, grocery stores have way more competition than stores in most other retail sectors. It's also one of the few retail sectors in the US where regional brands tend to outcompete the national brands. I'm not sure the main cause of that, but I'd be interested to find out.
> Aren’t such deals usually banned as anticompetitive?
I wonder who would bring the suit if they're divvying up the world country by country. Who has jurisdiction? The EU?
Giving this marginally more thought, maybe the agreement is simply on use of the shared brand name, and that's what the agreement covers? I note both are active in the US, but under different names. That might just be enough to keep regulators happy.
Only if the deal had any chance of hurting consumers, which it does not. Customers in Europe have many supermarket chains to pick from, including a near-perfect clone of Aldi called Lidl.
That may have been the agreement in the past. But in South Florida they are opening stores all over. What they don’t do is directly compete with each other. You’ll find an Aldi’s near Walmart or Target but never a Trader Joe’s.
I can't speak for other major US cities, but in my neighborhood in Chicago, Aldi is right there at the Wilson and Granville train stops. And those are not exactly the highest income areas.
I live in a fairly well off part of Los Angeles but the 2 closest Aldis to me are in Inglewood and Compton, which are also not particularly high income cities.
Here in Southern California their meat prices are very competitive. They mainly seem to have great pricing on their own branded items. Between Aldi’s, Target and CostCo, I almost never go to a traditional supermarket.
Anecdotally, my grocery bill is about $20 cheaper per week if I can find everything I need for the week at Aldi, versus Safeway or Giant (local grocers in the area). Mileage may vary, of course--there's usually something I need that they don't have, which requires a trip elsewhere. Produce is usually their biggest shortcoming.
It's complicated to make cost comparisons - do you compare own brands or known brands, etc. But in the UK shoppers report Aldi and Lidl as being better value
Aldi in the us has a cheap weekly meat special on par with Costco. Fruits and veg is also cheap, and then all of the brand name knockoffs. You can find meat a bit cheaper if u shop around. I think hyvee is basically the best of all options.
Have you compared a few of your own receipts from a big shopping list? We can do about half our shopping at Aldi and come out ahead, and the main alternative is another debit-card-only supermarket. Great Value brand is also pretty cheap, as alluded to in that article. And we learned about Aldi from my wife’s mother shopping there growing up, back when it was really cheap but lower quality.
In the UK, I find our weekly grocery bill is about 30% less week on week at Aldi than any of the majors, whilst being equal or better quality. There a few notable exceptions and a few items we like that aren't available. So a trip to one of the majors once a quarter covers the gaps whilst keeping the enormous saving.
For many things Aldi are also clearly better than both brands and other supermarkets on quality (e.g. bakery, chocolate) as well as being cheaper. So we need to buy fewer brands at all. I can't imagine going back to one of the others on a regular basis unless Aldi screw up badly or close down. :)
> For many things Aldi are also clearly better than both brands and other supermarkets on quality (e.g. bakery, chocolate)
The minimum standard for baked goods and chocolate in Germany is far higher than in the U.K. What’s the reverse, where you just couldn’t sell it in the U.K. but in Germany you’d just occupy the low end of the market?
Sandwiches and other ready-to-eat food? ALDI UK has an unusually small selection of them (compared to other UK shops). Don't know about the quality, but surely better than what ALDI Germany sells.
I noticed tea biscuits (digestive cookies, ginger cookies etc) and chips (en-us) / crisps (en-uk) being better than in Germany in the UK. Chips are better than in Germany in most any country I've been to - though Lay's has been raising the bar (back, since Chio deteriorated) since their market entry. As far as you can buy Indian food in supermarkets, probably that too - at least the standard in restaurants is much higher in the UK.
Chocolate and baked goods are generally better anywhere in Western Europe that is not the UK. Good small UK bakers are getting few and far between. :(
Aldi just has the advantage of not having the tasteless junk from what Tesco or Asda laughably calls an in store bakery, or the inedible slimy crap that Kraft now pretends is Cadbury or Green and Black chocolate. Aldi own brands just seem to retain some memory of bread needing to have taste, chocolate like chocolate etc.
That said, their 70 and 85%, chilli and single origin aren't really low end. I don't think I miss out on much taste, or quality, just some flavour options.
And for people wondering why this is relevant, Trader Joe's is owned by Aldi Nord.
(American stores with the Aldi brand are owned by Aldi Süd. Nord [North] and Süd [South] are separate entities owned by brothers, and they voluntarily avoid competing with each other geographically in Europe. The easiest way to tell them apart is with their distinctive logos.)
The one time I went to an Aldi is the only time I ever hope to. It was disorganized in a way that makes Costco look tidy and filthy besides. The poor selection was just icing: I'm not a brand snob but I need a wider variety of goods.
I love Aldi (And Lidl) The great thing about the lack of choice means the supermarkets are small so its quick and easy to do your whole shop. Its like Costco with sensible sizes.
You can't do your whole shop because it's a lottery what they'll be stocking that day. They seem to just stock whatever was cheap at the time, which always makes me think someone else was trying to get rid of it for some reason. It's all random junk with no system or logic behind the range at all.
Not stocking apples today, but they have a huge range of pneumatic power tools for some reason, is a typical experience.
Yes, these Lidl/Aldi stores are just the old wholesale market evolved. They buy large ammount of product (whatever is cheap), split up and sell all over the world. This is why there might not be any apples but ten different sorts of paper, sunchairs and pneumatic drills.
You can't love Aldi and Lidl at the same time - that is not allowed. You have to choose which you love. Of course, you can still occasionally visit the other but only while bearing a subtle smirk of contempt. Like Star Wars and Star Trek or Lego and Playmobil. I'm proudly follow Aldi now in the third generation.
Aldi is really quite bizarre, in a way the article tries to capture. For all their rock-bottom prices on store brand goods, whose quality ranges from pretty good to never-again mediocre, they stock the store with a rotating selection of random crap that fell off the boat, baiting the impulse for an aspirational or just-in-case buy. But then again, by now, Amazon's front page recommends a carousel of similar dropshipped junk from vendors whose names appear to be machine-generated. At least Aldi bothers to "curate" in the sense of commissioning most of its stock as a store brand, whereas Amazon is seemingly devoid of the slightest amount of steering from above, save for locating popular items after-the-fact and releasing an AmazonBasics.
In the process, Aldi and its slightly-nicer copycats siphon away marketshare from normal stores who actually carry name-brand food and home goods you'd want to buy again, if you weren't on a misguided mission to penny-pinch. Stores pivot towards overpriced premade sandwiches, cafes and hot buffets, and meal kits that make zero economic sense, because that's where you can still pull a good margin. The middle empties out.
If you look, you can see this same process play out in other areas of retail and services. Aldi's gain is our collective loss, the widespread embrace of an insincere "good enough", either because our budgets are truly crunched, or because we don't let ourselves value our mundane maintenance desires. On the far side, people who have rejected this can look like they're engaging in conspicuous consumption. Sometimes they are.
Aldi siphons away marketshare from other stores with large overheads and from brands which spend more on advertising than the products themselves. Personally I very rarely notice a difference in quality between Aldi-bought products and those from more expensive chains (e.g. Edeka or Rewe), though the latter are more hit-and-miss (never need to check the expiration date at Aldi, always have to at Edeka…) and much more chaotic. This second aspect, which makes it hard to shop quickly, combines with very slow people working the tills, meaning that the time it takes me to buy a single item in Edeka is longer than what I need to buy a whole week’s worth of food at Aldi.
The random collection of stuff is mostly useless, yes, though there are some items there with sufficient regularity and quality to be worthwhile, e.g. WD-40 and tape. Clothing is typically also ok though neither fashionable nor pretty.
"Clothing is typically also ok though neither fashionable nor pretty. "
Nor durable in my experience. Also I bought sandals that fell apart after a week.
And the tech I bought there also only looks good on the specs.
So AlDI is ok for food, but anything I'd like to last, I buy elsewhere.
I bought a winter coat there for 24.99€ in November and so far it lasted quite well. Given that it’s predecessor was 10x as expensive and was quite worn after 8-ish years, it was ok.
Absolutely agree on tech, "Aldi-Notebooks" tended to have a bit of a bad reputation (not sure if they still sell them…).
Oddly enough, their plain T-shirts seem to be better quality than most of the others I own from mainstream clothing stores (and definitely better than the ones I got from Gap).
been an entire decade since I've been in an Aldi. Their products used to entirely suck. I'm quite impressed with the stuff they got now, or my tastes have changed from early twenties to today in terms of differientiating food quality.
Their quality has always been above budget level. In France, the quality was actually much better than the store-brand of other grocers.
Supermarkets use different brand categories to price differentiate, while quality is not always changing quite as much. Furthermore, Aldi's low cost logistics allows them to be more efficient.
So at a time, the average quality at Aldi was pretty much the same as Carrefour or Franprix in France, just less variance.
And then there's always some items where Aldi's quality is simply better, even better than the quality brand.
I distinctly remember that you could not buy decent cured salmon, even for like 6-7€ anywhere except Aldi, which had perfectly good cured salmon in two or three varieties for around 3€
> they stock the store with a rotating selection of random crap that fell off the boat, baiting the impulse for an aspirational or just-in-case buy
I believe this is the key to their fanatical customer base. The random crap aisle means that when you go into the store there's a chance of an awesome deal on some random thing. This provides strong intermittent reinforcement which directly triggers the brain's reward mechanism, no different to loot drops in an MMO or payouts from a poker machine. People literally get addicted to Aldi's random-stuff aisle.
We've actually taken to referring to Aldi as "visiting the casino". :P
This is an amazing observation, and as someone who used to shop there and at similar stores a lot, I have to agree.
You really _do_ get nice deals though. Many of my tools are from Aldi or Lidl, and in my experience, they're cheap in terms of price, but still surprisingly decent quality, pretty consistently.
It is really interesting (and horrifying) to watch people storm the discounters in the morning, when there is the day that the new deals are arrieving ...
Quite alienating seeing them fight over crap to save a few euros ... if they even would have bought those things in the first place normally.
What do you mean with saving 10 USD? In volume or in actual product? If you buy things that has been watered out, do you still save money?
I mean, in a can with 400 g of content, 50% of the product can be water or other filling material. In another product the fill-content can be 25% but at a higher price. Often these prices actually evens out, or the supposedly cheaper product is actually more expencive.
This can also be applied to other products than food, just in different state of breaking faster.
Germany is full of these types of stores, Aldi's products feel like a bit more quality than the rest when you talk to people. Some people does a run on mondays and thursdays to Aldi, Lidl, Extra, Plus, Norma and so on, that all get different products every week. Some of them twice per week. If they don't get sold within a week, they get moved down further towards the exit, at even cheaper prices when the new stuff comes and gets placed at the premium area.
There are a lot of products at Aldi/Lidl that are literally identical to what's sold in regular supermarkets (except for the label), because it comes from the same factory. This is particularly obvious in smaller markets like Australia, where there may be only a few manufacturers for a given item (say, some kinds of cheese or fruit yogurt with no sugar added). The article even mentions somebody buying Aldi's clone cereals and finding a box of "real" Froot Loops inside.
It's gonna take a lot to convince me that buying chicken breast for $1.50 a lb, eggs 50c a dozen, and basically any box of cereal for $1.25 is a bad thing.
I love Aldi. I find the vast majority of their products to be good quality. Their girl scout clones in particular might be even better than the originals, and they're 99c a box.
I'm all for cheap produce and Aldi has some of the best around, but paying that little for animal products like meat or eggs seems ethically wrong to me.
> Aldi's gain is our collective loss, the widespread embrace of an insincere "good enough", either because our budgets are truly crunched, or because we don't let ourselves value our mundane maintenance desires.
Maybe as a German I have another view. Maybe I don't know the stores in other countries enough. But in Germany all of the big and nice retail chains were forced to introduce non-brand/own-brand discount product lines so that their customers don't flee to the discounters. And whenever I am at one of them I find myself searching the big aisles for exactly those products. Because most of the time, those products are exactly as good (as in exactly the same product with a different label) for a lower price. And they use many tricks to make buying the more expensive version more comfortable for those that don't care about their money. This is why I as a customer prefer the real deal.
If I feel that I need to pay extra for higher quality products, then I want some guarantees, such as the label saying something like local or organic. And surprise: discounters know that and offer a lot of organic products. But I don't need a choice of one and the same product just with differently "valued" brands.
But also from reading the article there are some takeaways, that could make you reconsider your position:
1. They don't waste employees on unloading boxes of products when their customers are perfectly capable of taking something out of a box. I didn't even notice this difference before reading the article and it never bothered me as a customer. Or waste employees on collecting stray shopping carts from the parking lot. Still they don't waste my time: I spend much less time buying the same than in bigger shops, where I have to search longer and walk more, because they try to force me to see everything they want to sell me.
2. Apparently they pay their employees relatively good, but don't need as many as their competitors. They do everything that is possible to make the stores as efficient as possible to make that happen.
In my view this is retail heading the same direction almost all professions did: become more efficient, value the people doing it more and free up the rest to do something else.
I feel compelled to object strongly to this language. It implies that Aldi is doing something wrong like they’re siphoning fuel out of their competitors fuel tanks or something. When all Aldi are doing is doing it better, more efficiently and in many instances with better quality.
It’s sad that those entrenched interests that got used to their own idiosyncratic way of doing things cant respond to vigorous competition with anything better than sour grapes.
A lot of the random stuff in the middle aisle is genuinely very good. Their own-brand chisels are something of a cult item among traditional woodworkers, because they're ludicrously cheap but perfectly capable of fine work. There's always excitement in the cycling and running communities when Aldi release a batch of sports kit, because it's excellent value and it does the job. You're never going to shop at Aldi for a pair of featherlight race shoes or an aero skinsuit, but their kit is brilliant for everyday training use.
I don't think that Aldi is bizarre, I just think it's very German. There's more to life than GDP. There's nothing insincere about "good enough". Not everything has to be an ostentatious display of aspirational consumerism. Most of us are satisficers in some aspect of our lives. I'll spend stupid amounts of money on finding the perfect mechanical keyboard, but I just don't care very much about paper towels or laundry detergent or potato chips. I might shop elsewhere for some items, but I'm perfectly happy to do the bulk of my shopping in a store with a very simple value proposition - perfectly acceptable quality at a consistently fair price.
In a mainstream supermarket, I have the pervasive feeling that I'm being manipulated. There are too many SKUs, too many special offers, too many coupons and loyalty schemes. It's like shopping for a cell phone contract - you know you're being taken for a ride by a deliberately overcomplicated offering, but you don't have the time or the inclination to figure it out. I don't get that feeling in Aldi. I'm in and out in half the time, I spent half as much and I'm rarely disappointed. If that's the future of retail, then sign me up.
Snow/winter gear for kids are a very big hit. Parents queue out the front of shop about 30 mins before open time. Why not, their value is great. Cheap enough for that few months before the kids grow out of their sizes.
The good thing about Aldi and Lidl is that you get to choose the quality and pay premium or not. This is one of the reasons why i often shop on any of them. I'd like to have a choice to pay premium for what i feel it should be premium.
I think that's the complete opposite of what they stand for. If I go into Lidl I have to buy their own-brand fake ariel washing powder. Where as if I go to Tesco, I can choose the expensive name brands, Tesco's own brand or anywhere in between.
>"I have to buy their own-brand fake ariel washing powder"
You give too much credit to advertising and brand identity if you think "fake ariel" is something inferior to "real ariel", or that "real ariel" is something hard to achieve that means quality.
I didn't say it was necessarily better or worse, just that almost all of their branding intentionally rips off brand name designs.
I've shopped in Lidl and Aldi a good few times over the years, and some of their stuff is fine quality, some I wouldn't touch with a bargepole. You just don't know until you try each product.
I don't think it's mostly snobbery. They carry products that are perfectly fine, but they also sell things that (in my view) are just wrong.
One simple example that comes to mind: crisps. I don't know what they do with them, but they tend to be WAY overseasoned. And that applies to salt, pepper, paprika, etc. A significant amount their products have this problem.
Now whether that is worth a premium to you or not is a different discussion. An actual M&M still tastes better than their copycat equivalent. I'm not saying the mainstream brands are always good, definitely not, but I'm happy to pay for some of those things if the quality is better. Just like I don't mind paying for fresh fruit / veggies / meat / chicken etc.
Also, to add to that, the "house" brands (i.e. for milk / sugar / etc) of most more expensive supermarkets generally tends to not be much more expensive than Aldi.
>An actual M&M still tastes better than their copycat equivalent.
It can easily taste better "than their copycat equivalent" while being much worse nutritionally and ingredients quality wise, so there's that.
Sort of like to many people a McDonalds meal tastes better than a three course meal at a great (not talking "fancy haute cuisine", just honest cooking) restaurant.
Not saying Aldi's M&M copy is better. Just that something as personal as taste is not a solid criterion for whether it's worse, better or equally well made.
> Aldi is really quite bizarre, in a way the article tries to capture. For all their rock-bottom prices on store brand goods, whose quality ranges from pretty good to never-again mediocre, they stock the store with a rotating selection of random crap that fell off the boat, baiting the impulse for an aspirational or just-in-case buy
That's a serious misunderstanding. Shitty electronics aside, their prices are not achieved by lowering quality, it just means that they very aggressively compete on price, while explicitly being worse in terms of brands, customer convenience and most importantly product diversity. A typical grocery store usually stocks tens of thousands of items. Aldi sells up to roughly a thousand different items, the vast majority being "fast movers" which are bought very often, like milk, eggs, bread, vegetables, toilet paper and so forth. Basically the opposite of an "aspirational or just-in-case buy". This vastly reduced product diversity immensely simplifies logistics and gives them a a very strong position in negotiations with producers.
I really prefer shopping there. They do not try to pull off the usual tricks like having a big box of cereals which is actually more expensive than the smaller one. But the most important thing is that they are not trying very hard to make you buy a lot of shit you do not need.
I'm generally pretty happy with the weekly buys, to be honest. I have not found them to be inferior to the garbage on Amazon's front page. They also haven't rolled out self check out (at least near me) the way their godforsaken hellhole competitors (Tesco, etc.) have. I hope I never hear "Unexpected item in bagging area" again.
Not to mention that Tesco, Dunnes (I live in Ireland) etc. are generally horrifically bad. Every time I get tesco delivered I regret it. I specifically say "NO SUBSTITUTIONS WHATSOEVER" and they literally sent me sandwich meat when I asked for plain frozen chicken breasts.
Also, as noted in the article, Aldi entered the UK when it had some of the highest margins on groceries in the world, suggesting that at least some of what you were spending was going towards Tesco's profit margins, rather than quality.
I still shop at nicer markets. Marks and Spencer, Fallon and Byrne (if in Dublin), etc. But when I just want to buy potatoes, some OK-ish red wine for not too much money (Animus, from Portugal, is more drinkable than anything from the major retailers under 10 euro a bottle) and maybe some cheap shelving for the shed (if that's what they have that week), Aldi delivers where the big grocery stores fall flat on their face.
I find this comment quite bizarre. Have you ever actually tried an Aldi or Lidl?
> Aldi and its slightly-nicer copycats siphon away marketshare from normal stores who actually carry name-brand food and home goods you'd want to buy again
Huh? By name brand food I presume you mean well known with a marketing budget. It's rarely better or if it's from Kraft Mondolez ever worth wanting to buy again. What Aldi achieved though, was allowing me to stop thinking some own-label wasn't even worth trying. They could be markedly and consistently as good or better than brand names with marketing budget. Sure, there's things they can't do well (tea for instance), but unlike the big 4, own label is often best of the lot rather than second rate but cheap.
No need to spend 40-100% extra to fund Kellogs, Nestle, Pepsis, Mondolez's marketing. Those are the names I've often come to trust least after a dozen recipe changes to cheaper ingredients sold for same price, buyouts and general lack of care when it's just one logo in the portfolio of 200.
Offers baiting at Asda (Walmart) or Tesco's etc is far more cynical with end of shelf bad offers put there for placement $$$. They just usually throw out weird, branded, terrible value and expensive as "offer". The "limited best offer" that turns out to be 1.3% off regular price. Aldi middle aisle stuff is usually surprisingly good, for remarkably little, and no end of shelf bullshit.
Price, or penny pinching (nice loaded term btw) is not why we now shop there weekly. Nope, that's because they are better than the alternatives and often than the brands.
So tell me what's the appeal of a "normal" store that carries brands, when many of those brands are worse? When half the brands have been sold on so many times that they're now just a meaningless marketing label. I really don't see it any more.
>Aldi stores has tripled since the early 90s to nearly 2,000(SKU's), although that remains tiny compared to the 25,000 or more in a big supermarket.
This is why I shop at Aldi when possible. I'm willing to make small compromises on quality and overall selection for efficiency gains and less frustration. I don't want to navigate 25+ brands of canned tomatoes, disect manipulative pricing schemes (10 for $10* | * must buy 10, lesser quantities sold at $2.79/ea), subsidize add-on services I don't use like free in-store daycare or check cashing, walk to the deliberately deeply placed staple sections like produce, dairy, etc., calculate savings in expiring and unclear fuel rewards at on site gas station, or be forced to provide my private information for my purchases to be tracked and sold in order to be eligible for purchasing things at advertised prices.
And then best of all, because of the low SKU count, you can do your entire regular grocery shop in three or four aisles which is convenient.
And because the canned tomatoes they do stock are of good quality, I rarely have to worry about it—at least for most staples. There are rare exceptions where I prefer a particular name brand product but I know what these are so I save them up for a visit to the traditional large supermarket every other week to "fill the gaps".
Also, I am affluent enough to not be price sensitive, but I do like being able to pick up canned tomatoes without the mental load that goes along with seeing many brands of the same product and pretending that I can judge the difference in quality by the aesthetic of the product packaging.
I read on the back of the packaging to see how much actual tomatoes I get and then I stick to the brand with most tomatoes. The first times shopping takes longer until you learn what you like, after that you can be just as fast anywhere. (Until they rebuild the store to make you confused)
I got the tip somewhere to buy whole tomatoes in a can, instead of the diced ones because they can add extra seeds and other waste products. Just use your scissor to cut them appart in the can before using them in your cooking. The liquid they lie in is also mostly water and tomato puree so even more tomatoes.
I'm fine with the principle but I generally find I can't shop there because it's too limited, often missing just one item I need that they either don't have or a brand I don't like. With spaghetti bolognese it's the pasta sauce, the aldi ones are feral. For chilli con carne their canned goods (beans and corn) are often/always unavailable. It get's even worse when you combine things, like when I want $x for dinner tonight but $y for breakfast in the morning and the $y at aldi is horrible.
My inner city shopping habits are to buy stuff for just the next day or two, so going to different stores isn't an option and lately they've been trying to "cater" to this and removed the bulk options, so I'm seeing even less reasons to shop there now.
I wish other stores weren't so customer hostile though. Generally store brand items make up most of my shopping and are price competitive with aldi but they'll make them hard to locate. They also try and group items into some kind of "theme" so you end up with a canned goods section but have to go over to the mexican section for canned black beans, they whole idea collapses for anything that fits more than one theme or none. Then there's the constant nagging to join there loyalty program.
Here in Germany, where Aldi originates, those don't exist.
My reason not to go to Aldi is, that they lack the things I want to buy. I cook every day and whenever I end up at Aldi I wonder what people do there because it does not seem possible for me to get all the ingredients I need.
Out of curiosity: what do you cook that you do not get at Aldi?
Myself, I could get more than 90% of the ingredients of most recipes at Aldi.
Some things I buy at an Asian or Turkish store, and I have to buy most cheeses somewhere else.
But Aldi has come a long way, now they sell a decent variety of organic, regional produce.
I live close to an Aldi in the US. When it was first opened (Aldi 1.0) I would agree with parent that the selection and availability made it difficult to get the bulk of my grocerie needs there but since they remodeled (Aldi 2.0) they have wider selection and larger more reliable inventory especially for fresh items (produce, meat, dairy) and now it suites most of our needs. This my play a part in the varied experiences commentors are reporting
Same here. Once a year or so I enter Hofer (Aldi for Austria) because I remember they had some cookies I liked, and I am shocked that I can't find ANYTHING I usually need for my everyday cooking there.
I am glad I found Trader Joe’s. Never have I ever been excited about a trip to super market. It rivals Costco too (in food section). Before that, I took weekly trips to Aldi/Lidl for a year, and few of their products’ quality is quite low in my opinion, and not everything is cheap.
Trader Joe is a fun trip, but my enthusiasm is tempered by some truly disgusting house brand crap they sometimes sell as well as frequently dropping items that I like (e.g. crackable almonds in shells, half-popped popcorn).
I tried to go all out on TJs, but I couldn't make it work. They are, like one commenter above said, "the disappearing middle" even though they're kind of the bottom. Costco beats them out for most of the things I'd buy: booze, meat & poultry, bulk veggies, dairy. The only things I'll buy exclusively at TJs are berries. What's up with their soupy peanut butter too?
This is what I have been telling Publix managers for a while now. They don’t want to want to see it either, saying that their customer service is so far advanced and thus Aldi won’t play into their territory. Oh well, we shall see.
I don't, and likely never will, understand why anyone would want go to chains like Aldi, Lidl, Shoppers etc. to shop unless they had no choice. These are the most depressing supermarkets in the world. I can understand low cost, but why do the stores need to look and feel like you've been transported back to Cold War-era Soviet Russia?
I will also never understand, I suspect, the austere attitude in Germany to supermarkets. I've only ever lived in Berlin, but I longed for a Whole Foods or at least a Trader Joe's while I was there -- Aldi, Lidl, Rewe, Edeka, they're all super depressing. Berlin has a decent selection of "bio" supermarkets, fortunately, but their selection is also frustratingly limited, and the slight increase in quality isn't really worth the increase in price.
The US has plenty of terrible supermarkets, too, but they're often depressing for another reason; despite a much bigger selection, they devote an enormous amount of shelf space to disastrously unhealthy food and candy. (And then there's the bread. Very difficult to find good, freshly baked bread in the US that isn't plain white.)
Well, I don't understand why someone would make their groceries (a major portion of monthly spendings) 2-6x more expensive just because the shopping experience is less "fun". Personally, groceries are a chore no matter where I shop.
All in all I just shop wherever convenient. I live next to a Lidl right now so I shop there, and my only annoyance with it is that they don't have that much stuff (not in terms of brand choices but in terms of items altogether).
You misunderstood my comment. I do much of my shopping at a local low-cost chain, but it's nowhere near as depressing as the ones I mentioned.
That said, being a low-cost chain, I have to make trips to several other supermarkets to completely cover my grocery needs during the week, which is frustrating.
Lidl just opened several stores in my area (metro Atlanta) and they are all modern, fairly nice looking buildings with big glass facades [1]. The insides are decent too and the bakery is much better than any of the other grocery stores around here.
Are you aware Trader Joe and Aldi are sister companies and owned by two German brothers? In fact, the Trader Joe parent company is called Aldi[^1]!
[^1]: not the same Aldi though. There is an Aldi North and an Aldi South. Aldi North owns Trader Joe (American name only, globally Aldi North chains are also just Aldi). And Aldi South owns the Aldi stores in the USA.
I know, but they're completely different stores in terms of design, inventory and pretty much everything else. I'd happily shop at Trader Joe's if there were one near me.
Trader Joe's is an Aldi subsidiary. Two brothers split their inherited Aldi company into two, Aldi North and Aldi South (or Nord and Sud) and split territories, both operating in Germany and each getting a selection of countries to operate in. Both operate in the US, Aldi Sud as Aldi and Aldi Nord as Trader Joe's.
You're the second person to point this out, but I don't see how company ownership is relevant. Aldi and Trader Joe's are completely different stores in terms of design, inventory and pretty much everything else — they're a world apart.
> I can understand low cost, but why do the stores need to look and feel like you've been transported back to Cold War-era Soviet Russia?
The alternative tends to be cheap and somewhat tacky/fake, which I find worse because it's still cheap but they're trying to mislead you into thinking otherwise. I'll take honest austerity any day. I'm sure cheap and nice are possible but it's not what I tend to see at other stores.
Personally when I moved back from living in Austria to living in the UK I could go to Lidl and it had the same products in the same place between countries. Its really annoying when normal supermarkets start shifting their products around and you need to spend 5 minutes looking for the new location.
>I like the low prices and the efficiency of the checkout process.
I especially liked standing in line for five extra minutes while the customer in front of me demanded they pay a different (lower) price for their frozen pizzas because, they said, the pizzas were in the wrong spot.
They eventually got the lower price. Woo Aldi.
I hope they're kicking Temple Grandin a percentage. It's hard to shop at their stores without feeling like cattle being moved from one place to another.
Aldi is a favorite here in the rural Ozarks. The closest ones to us are over 40 miles away but my wife and I make a point to shop there when we're in the area.
There's talk of one being built in Branson, MO, which is less than half the distance and everyone in the entire County has their fingers crossed they will.
These are big issues here. Aldi's would give us all another option and save us money too.
Here, a lot of the little "mom & pop" stores got killed by Wal-Mart and Lowes close to 20 years ago. Dollar Stores have now replaced them in the past few years, which is kind of strange to see because they're very similar in most ways, and they've now taken a pretty good chunk of WalMart's market share.
Our first Wal-Mart in Branson is still there, and it's pretty small compared to the "Super Wal-Mart" they built there a few years ago. But locals don't really "love" Wal-Mart like they did 25 years ago. In fact, most really do not like it, but they didn't have many other choices just a few years ago because all the little Mom & Pop grocery stores had closed.
The two Aldi's close to us are constantly busy. They're like a rural "Trader Joe's" for us bumpkins in that they have stuff no other stores carry, and their produce is usually a lot better too.
There's many comments here complaining that it's impossible to shop at Aldi because they won't have all the ingredients for whatever dish they were planning to make.
This is largely true, but I feel misses the point. For a grocery store to exhaustively and consistently stock all combinations of products you need for a given dish you have in mind costs money they need to roll onto you as a consumer.
Rather, the idea with Aldi is that like with a farmers' market you should see what they have in stock at that moment and then decide what to cook.
> Second, the main chains – the big four as well as the leading “soft” discounter Kwik Save (which stocked a larger range than Aldi) – were listed on the stock exchange. The best way to fight Aldi early on is to slash prices, but few bosses of public companies are happy to accept lower profits, and thus lower bonuses, by pursuing long-term strategies.
This is not at all surprising, but it's rare to see such a clear-cut (more so in context in the article) example of short-termism hurting companies.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadModern stores in Germany or Britain have pretty good stuff. Wish they would bring this to the US.
Less products, cheaper, better service etc.
Aldi is Aldi South (Sud).
Same company, just split between 2 brothers.
In my experience in the US, grocery stores have way more competition than stores in most other retail sectors. It's also one of the few retail sectors in the US where regional brands tend to outcompete the national brands. I'm not sure the main cause of that, but I'd be interested to find out.
I wonder who would bring the suit if they're divvying up the world country by country. Who has jurisdiction? The EU?
Giving this marginally more thought, maybe the agreement is simply on use of the shared brand name, and that's what the agreement covers? I note both are active in the US, but under different names. That might just be enough to keep regulators happy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidl
Besides, why should the Government force a company to open stores where they have chosen not to?
People who drive SUVs don't need another choice for groceries--people who can't afford SUVs do.
I can't speak for other major US cities, but in my neighborhood in Chicago, Aldi is right there at the Wilson and Granville train stops. And those are not exactly the highest income areas.
Aldi only recently moved into those locations. Their US base is actually low income neighborhoods.
https://efficiencyiseverything.com/grocer-comparison-aldi-wa...
Crazy loss leaders get people into the store, but 1$/lb more expensive meats kill any cost savings immediately.
It's complicated to make cost comparisons - do you compare own brands or known brands, etc. But in the UK shoppers report Aldi and Lidl as being better value
https://www.which.co.uk/news/2018/02/the-best-and-worst-supe...
Speaking of random, those center aisles... I'm almost always tempted to buy some interesting item that we really don't need.
Though I can't say I've ever been disapointed with the products and their return policy is super flexible.
- A standalone olde-style jukebox machine.
- A half-sized Street Fighter arcade cabinet.
- A split system air conditioner.
- Numerous power tools.
- An inflatable water slide.
Currently fighting against buying an 8-camera home security system to upgrade our dodgy 4-camera one.
For many things Aldi are also clearly better than both brands and other supermarkets on quality (e.g. bakery, chocolate) as well as being cheaper. So we need to buy fewer brands at all. I can't imagine going back to one of the others on a regular basis unless Aldi screw up badly or close down. :)
The minimum standard for baked goods and chocolate in Germany is far higher than in the U.K. What’s the reverse, where you just couldn’t sell it in the U.K. but in Germany you’d just occupy the low end of the market?
Aldi just has the advantage of not having the tasteless junk from what Tesco or Asda laughably calls an in store bakery, or the inedible slimy crap that Kraft now pretends is Cadbury or Green and Black chocolate. Aldi own brands just seem to retain some memory of bread needing to have taste, chocolate like chocolate etc.
That said, their 70 and 85%, chilli and single origin aren't really low end. I don't think I miss out on much taste, or quality, just some flavour options.
(American stores with the Aldi brand are owned by Aldi Süd. Nord [North] and Süd [South] are separate entities owned by brothers, and they voluntarily avoid competing with each other geographically in Europe. The easiest way to tell them apart is with their distinctive logos.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi
https://www.handelsblatt.com/images/billig-allein-reicht-nic...
You can't do your whole shop because it's a lottery what they'll be stocking that day. They seem to just stock whatever was cheap at the time, which always makes me think someone else was trying to get rid of it for some reason. It's all random junk with no system or logic behind the range at all.
Not stocking apples today, but they have a huge range of pneumatic power tools for some reason, is a typical experience.
At least that's my experience of my local Aldi.
I tried it once. It turned out that I can.
> Not stocking apples today,
That is not my experience of any supermarket, ever. Although people are predicting that it might be after the end of this month.
In the process, Aldi and its slightly-nicer copycats siphon away marketshare from normal stores who actually carry name-brand food and home goods you'd want to buy again, if you weren't on a misguided mission to penny-pinch. Stores pivot towards overpriced premade sandwiches, cafes and hot buffets, and meal kits that make zero economic sense, because that's where you can still pull a good margin. The middle empties out.
If you look, you can see this same process play out in other areas of retail and services. Aldi's gain is our collective loss, the widespread embrace of an insincere "good enough", either because our budgets are truly crunched, or because we don't let ourselves value our mundane maintenance desires. On the far side, people who have rejected this can look like they're engaging in conspicuous consumption. Sometimes they are.
The random collection of stuff is mostly useless, yes, though there are some items there with sufficient regularity and quality to be worthwhile, e.g. WD-40 and tape. Clothing is typically also ok though neither fashionable nor pretty.
Nor durable in my experience. Also I bought sandals that fell apart after a week. And the tech I bought there also only looks good on the specs. So AlDI is ok for food, but anything I'd like to last, I buy elsewhere.
Absolutely agree on tech, "Aldi-Notebooks" tended to have a bit of a bad reputation (not sure if they still sell them…).
Supermarkets use different brand categories to price differentiate, while quality is not always changing quite as much. Furthermore, Aldi's low cost logistics allows them to be more efficient.
So at a time, the average quality at Aldi was pretty much the same as Carrefour or Franprix in France, just less variance.
And then there's always some items where Aldi's quality is simply better, even better than the quality brand.
I distinctly remember that you could not buy decent cured salmon, even for like 6-7€ anywhere except Aldi, which had perfectly good cured salmon in two or three varieties for around 3€
My observation as well. A frustrating phenomenon, happening in so many markets. Been going on for at least a decade now.
https://www.economist.com/business/2006/05/18/the-disappeari...
I believe this is the key to their fanatical customer base. The random crap aisle means that when you go into the store there's a chance of an awesome deal on some random thing. This provides strong intermittent reinforcement which directly triggers the brain's reward mechanism, no different to loot drops in an MMO or payouts from a poker machine. People literally get addicted to Aldi's random-stuff aisle.
We've actually taken to referring to Aldi as "visiting the casino". :P
You really _do_ get nice deals though. Many of my tools are from Aldi or Lidl, and in my experience, they're cheap in terms of price, but still surprisingly decent quality, pretty consistently.
Quite alienating seeing them fight over crap to save a few euros ... if they even would have bought those things in the first place normally.
What do you mean by this? I save at least 10USD a week by buying certain items from Aldi. 10USD is a lot of money for some people.
I mean, in a can with 400 g of content, 50% of the product can be water or other filling material. In another product the fill-content can be 25% but at a higher price. Often these prices actually evens out, or the supposedly cheaper product is actually more expencive.
This can also be applied to other products than food, just in different state of breaking faster.
Germany is full of these types of stores, Aldi's products feel like a bit more quality than the rest when you talk to people. Some people does a run on mondays and thursdays to Aldi, Lidl, Extra, Plus, Norma and so on, that all get different products every week. Some of them twice per week. If they don't get sold within a week, they get moved down further towards the exit, at even cheaper prices when the new stuff comes and gets placed at the premium area.
It's really not like that, their mainstream products are as good as any other supermarket, better in some cases.
I get the same calories and satisfaction from the food and drink as I would from the bigger name store items, but it's cheaper.
I love Aldi. I find the vast majority of their products to be good quality. Their girl scout clones in particular might be even better than the originals, and they're 99c a box.
For anyone who is, like me, not American, this refers to a particular type of cookies.
Maybe as a German I have another view. Maybe I don't know the stores in other countries enough. But in Germany all of the big and nice retail chains were forced to introduce non-brand/own-brand discount product lines so that their customers don't flee to the discounters. And whenever I am at one of them I find myself searching the big aisles for exactly those products. Because most of the time, those products are exactly as good (as in exactly the same product with a different label) for a lower price. And they use many tricks to make buying the more expensive version more comfortable for those that don't care about their money. This is why I as a customer prefer the real deal.
If I feel that I need to pay extra for higher quality products, then I want some guarantees, such as the label saying something like local or organic. And surprise: discounters know that and offer a lot of organic products. But I don't need a choice of one and the same product just with differently "valued" brands.
But also from reading the article there are some takeaways, that could make you reconsider your position:
1. They don't waste employees on unloading boxes of products when their customers are perfectly capable of taking something out of a box. I didn't even notice this difference before reading the article and it never bothered me as a customer. Or waste employees on collecting stray shopping carts from the parking lot. Still they don't waste my time: I spend much less time buying the same than in bigger shops, where I have to search longer and walk more, because they try to force me to see everything they want to sell me.
2. Apparently they pay their employees relatively good, but don't need as many as their competitors. They do everything that is possible to make the stores as efficient as possible to make that happen.
In my view this is retail heading the same direction almost all professions did: become more efficient, value the people doing it more and free up the rest to do something else.
I feel compelled to object strongly to this language. It implies that Aldi is doing something wrong like they’re siphoning fuel out of their competitors fuel tanks or something. When all Aldi are doing is doing it better, more efficiently and in many instances with better quality.
It’s sad that those entrenched interests that got used to their own idiosyncratic way of doing things cant respond to vigorous competition with anything better than sour grapes.
I don't think that Aldi is bizarre, I just think it's very German. There's more to life than GDP. There's nothing insincere about "good enough". Not everything has to be an ostentatious display of aspirational consumerism. Most of us are satisficers in some aspect of our lives. I'll spend stupid amounts of money on finding the perfect mechanical keyboard, but I just don't care very much about paper towels or laundry detergent or potato chips. I might shop elsewhere for some items, but I'm perfectly happy to do the bulk of my shopping in a store with a very simple value proposition - perfectly acceptable quality at a consistently fair price.
In a mainstream supermarket, I have the pervasive feeling that I'm being manipulated. There are too many SKUs, too many special offers, too many coupons and loyalty schemes. It's like shopping for a cell phone contract - you know you're being taken for a ride by a deliberately overcomplicated offering, but you don't have the time or the inclination to figure it out. I don't get that feeling in Aldi. I'm in and out in half the time, I spent half as much and I'm rarely disappointed. If that's the future of retail, then sign me up.
I have done all of my food shopping at Aldi for years, and the quality is perfectly fine.
All Aldi are missing is the name brands that advertise on television, and good riddance to them I say.
You give too much credit to advertising and brand identity if you think "fake ariel" is something inferior to "real ariel", or that "real ariel" is something hard to achieve that means quality.
At least in Europe you have a chance to choose what you want: The classical premium brands, premium Lidl brand or cheap brands.
One simple example that comes to mind: crisps. I don't know what they do with them, but they tend to be WAY overseasoned. And that applies to salt, pepper, paprika, etc. A significant amount their products have this problem.
Now whether that is worth a premium to you or not is a different discussion. An actual M&M still tastes better than their copycat equivalent. I'm not saying the mainstream brands are always good, definitely not, but I'm happy to pay for some of those things if the quality is better. Just like I don't mind paying for fresh fruit / veggies / meat / chicken etc.
Also, to add to that, the "house" brands (i.e. for milk / sugar / etc) of most more expensive supermarkets generally tends to not be much more expensive than Aldi.
It can easily taste better "than their copycat equivalent" while being much worse nutritionally and ingredients quality wise, so there's that.
Sort of like to many people a McDonalds meal tastes better than a three course meal at a great (not talking "fancy haute cuisine", just honest cooking) restaurant.
Not saying Aldi's M&M copy is better. Just that something as personal as taste is not a solid criterion for whether it's worse, better or equally well made.
That's a serious misunderstanding. Shitty electronics aside, their prices are not achieved by lowering quality, it just means that they very aggressively compete on price, while explicitly being worse in terms of brands, customer convenience and most importantly product diversity. A typical grocery store usually stocks tens of thousands of items. Aldi sells up to roughly a thousand different items, the vast majority being "fast movers" which are bought very often, like milk, eggs, bread, vegetables, toilet paper and so forth. Basically the opposite of an "aspirational or just-in-case buy". This vastly reduced product diversity immensely simplifies logistics and gives them a a very strong position in negotiations with producers.
I really prefer shopping there. They do not try to pull off the usual tricks like having a big box of cereals which is actually more expensive than the smaller one. But the most important thing is that they are not trying very hard to make you buy a lot of shit you do not need.
Not to mention that Tesco, Dunnes (I live in Ireland) etc. are generally horrifically bad. Every time I get tesco delivered I regret it. I specifically say "NO SUBSTITUTIONS WHATSOEVER" and they literally sent me sandwich meat when I asked for plain frozen chicken breasts.
Also, as noted in the article, Aldi entered the UK when it had some of the highest margins on groceries in the world, suggesting that at least some of what you were spending was going towards Tesco's profit margins, rather than quality.
I still shop at nicer markets. Marks and Spencer, Fallon and Byrne (if in Dublin), etc. But when I just want to buy potatoes, some OK-ish red wine for not too much money (Animus, from Portugal, is more drinkable than anything from the major retailers under 10 euro a bottle) and maybe some cheap shelving for the shed (if that's what they have that week), Aldi delivers where the big grocery stores fall flat on their face.
> Aldi and its slightly-nicer copycats siphon away marketshare from normal stores who actually carry name-brand food and home goods you'd want to buy again
Huh? By name brand food I presume you mean well known with a marketing budget. It's rarely better or if it's from Kraft Mondolez ever worth wanting to buy again. What Aldi achieved though, was allowing me to stop thinking some own-label wasn't even worth trying. They could be markedly and consistently as good or better than brand names with marketing budget. Sure, there's things they can't do well (tea for instance), but unlike the big 4, own label is often best of the lot rather than second rate but cheap.
No need to spend 40-100% extra to fund Kellogs, Nestle, Pepsis, Mondolez's marketing. Those are the names I've often come to trust least after a dozen recipe changes to cheaper ingredients sold for same price, buyouts and general lack of care when it's just one logo in the portfolio of 200.
Offers baiting at Asda (Walmart) or Tesco's etc is far more cynical with end of shelf bad offers put there for placement $$$. They just usually throw out weird, branded, terrible value and expensive as "offer". The "limited best offer" that turns out to be 1.3% off regular price. Aldi middle aisle stuff is usually surprisingly good, for remarkably little, and no end of shelf bullshit.
Price, or penny pinching (nice loaded term btw) is not why we now shop there weekly. Nope, that's because they are better than the alternatives and often than the brands.
So tell me what's the appeal of a "normal" store that carries brands, when many of those brands are worse? When half the brands have been sold on so many times that they're now just a meaningless marketing label. I really don't see it any more.
This is why I shop at Aldi when possible. I'm willing to make small compromises on quality and overall selection for efficiency gains and less frustration. I don't want to navigate 25+ brands of canned tomatoes, disect manipulative pricing schemes (10 for $10* | * must buy 10, lesser quantities sold at $2.79/ea), subsidize add-on services I don't use like free in-store daycare or check cashing, walk to the deliberately deeply placed staple sections like produce, dairy, etc., calculate savings in expiring and unclear fuel rewards at on site gas station, or be forced to provide my private information for my purchases to be tracked and sold in order to be eligible for purchasing things at advertised prices.
And because the canned tomatoes they do stock are of good quality, I rarely have to worry about it—at least for most staples. There are rare exceptions where I prefer a particular name brand product but I know what these are so I save them up for a visit to the traditional large supermarket every other week to "fill the gaps".
Also, I am affluent enough to not be price sensitive, but I do like being able to pick up canned tomatoes without the mental load that goes along with seeing many brands of the same product and pretending that I can judge the difference in quality by the aesthetic of the product packaging.
My inner city shopping habits are to buy stuff for just the next day or two, so going to different stores isn't an option and lately they've been trying to "cater" to this and removed the bulk options, so I'm seeing even less reasons to shop there now.
I wish other stores weren't so customer hostile though. Generally store brand items make up most of my shopping and are price competitive with aldi but they'll make them hard to locate. They also try and group items into some kind of "theme" so you end up with a canned goods section but have to go over to the mexican section for canned black beans, they whole idea collapses for anything that fits more than one theme or none. Then there's the constant nagging to join there loyalty program.
Here in Germany, where Aldi originates, those don't exist.
My reason not to go to Aldi is, that they lack the things I want to buy. I cook every day and whenever I end up at Aldi I wonder what people do there because it does not seem possible for me to get all the ingredients I need.
https://www.flytraplife.com/blog/half-popped-popcorn/
As the US market is larger than most other countries combined they shared it with this agreement (Aldi is from Aldi South, TJ is Aldi North).
Might be an urban legend.
I will also never understand, I suspect, the austere attitude in Germany to supermarkets. I've only ever lived in Berlin, but I longed for a Whole Foods or at least a Trader Joe's while I was there -- Aldi, Lidl, Rewe, Edeka, they're all super depressing. Berlin has a decent selection of "bio" supermarkets, fortunately, but their selection is also frustratingly limited, and the slight increase in quality isn't really worth the increase in price.
The US has plenty of terrible supermarkets, too, but they're often depressing for another reason; despite a much bigger selection, they devote an enormous amount of shelf space to disastrously unhealthy food and candy. (And then there's the bread. Very difficult to find good, freshly baked bread in the US that isn't plain white.)
Well, I don't understand why someone would make their groceries (a major portion of monthly spendings) 2-6x more expensive just because the shopping experience is less "fun". Personally, groceries are a chore no matter where I shop.
All in all I just shop wherever convenient. I live next to a Lidl right now so I shop there, and my only annoyance with it is that they don't have that much stuff (not in terms of brand choices but in terms of items altogether).
That said, being a low-cost chain, I have to make trips to several other supermarkets to completely cover my grocery needs during the week, which is frustrating.
1. https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x88f53d4a2321927...
[^1]: not the same Aldi though. There is an Aldi North and an Aldi South. Aldi North owns Trader Joe (American name only, globally Aldi North chains are also just Aldi). And Aldi South owns the Aldi stores in the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi
The alternative tends to be cheap and somewhat tacky/fake, which I find worse because it's still cheap but they're trying to mislead you into thinking otherwise. I'll take honest austerity any day. I'm sure cheap and nice are possible but it's not what I tend to see at other stores.
I left the place and informed my children to work hard so they don't have to shop at Aldi.
Less choice, less time spent in the supermarket. I buy 90% of my weekly groceries there and it takes me less than 15 minutes to be out of the door.
The remaining 10%, I buy at different shops as those are really specific items that Aldi does not carry.
I like the low prices and the efficiency of the checkout process.
Anecdote: I have noticed a saving of approximately 15% compared to when I was shopping at the competitor's stores.
I especially liked standing in line for five extra minutes while the customer in front of me demanded they pay a different (lower) price for their frozen pizzas because, they said, the pizzas were in the wrong spot.
They eventually got the lower price. Woo Aldi.
I hope they're kicking Temple Grandin a percentage. It's hard to shop at their stores without feeling like cattle being moved from one place to another.
(But 15%! What a deal!)
If one time or rare bad things were a good measure wouldn't we all end up being judged on HN based solely on our worst comments?
> (But 15%! What a deal!)
It is for some people.
There's talk of one being built in Branson, MO, which is less than half the distance and everyone in the entire County has their fingers crossed they will.
These are big issues here. Aldi's would give us all another option and save us money too.
Here, a lot of the little "mom & pop" stores got killed by Wal-Mart and Lowes close to 20 years ago. Dollar Stores have now replaced them in the past few years, which is kind of strange to see because they're very similar in most ways, and they've now taken a pretty good chunk of WalMart's market share.
Our first Wal-Mart in Branson is still there, and it's pretty small compared to the "Super Wal-Mart" they built there a few years ago. But locals don't really "love" Wal-Mart like they did 25 years ago. In fact, most really do not like it, but they didn't have many other choices just a few years ago because all the little Mom & Pop grocery stores had closed.
The two Aldi's close to us are constantly busy. They're like a rural "Trader Joe's" for us bumpkins in that they have stuff no other stores carry, and their produce is usually a lot better too.
This is largely true, but I feel misses the point. For a grocery store to exhaustively and consistently stock all combinations of products you need for a given dish you have in mind costs money they need to roll onto you as a consumer.
Rather, the idea with Aldi is that like with a farmers' market you should see what they have in stock at that moment and then decide what to cook.
This is not at all surprising, but it's rare to see such a clear-cut (more so in context in the article) example of short-termism hurting companies.