You may be broke, but Aldi isn’t! As consumers cut back, more of them are shopping at deep discount stores like Aldi. The German-owned grocer usually doesn’t advertise, but the economic slowdown is helping business, and Aldi is investing in a few commercials.
From the WSJ:
Among the beneficiaries of those shifting dollars is Aldi Group, a no-frills, deep-discount grocer that operates more than 900 stores in 29 U.S. states. The chain, based in Germany, used to shun television advertising, but it recently ran a series of national commercials stressing its low prices on private-label products. The campaign’s slogan: “Shop Aldi Smart.”
Last month, a survey by Retail Forward showed that consumers were doing 25% more of their spending at deep discounters like Aldi than they were a year earlier.
Have you started to shop at more stores like Aldi?
Retailers Recalibrate Pitch To Strapped Consumers [WSJ]
(Photo: Morton Fox )
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Aldi might be worth another look for some…a friend from Ohio told me Aldi was pretty trashy there, but they’ve recently opened stores in Atlanta that are clean, well run and have good prices and products. I think they’re changing for the better
@ryan_h: That is a parent problem, though, not a problem of the store. The parent needs to stop that behavior or the manager could come over and stop it. You should have complained. Trust me, no manager is going to mad at being alerted to a safety hazard.
@Serenefengshui: Yeah, I wish we had Aldi, too.
Mostly i shop at the Ranch 99 Market, which has rock-bottom prices and if you compare your Grocery Outlets you’ll likely note that some are better than the others.
Then again, i spent a week in NYC recently and as a direct result, when i returned to town at 1am i blew $40 at Safeway as i was amazed how much cheaper even the overpriced grocery store is here.
At our local Aldi’s, you can get a fresh bag of “Fresh Express” spinach for $1.49. Sliced cheese is less than half the price at the Harris Teeter across the street. Baking soda is around 35 cents. Real vanilla is 1/2 the price of other grocery stores. Their whole wheat bread is HFCS free.
I love Aldi’s. You can get in and get out of the store in about 20 minutes with a cartload of food. So what if you have to bring your own bags/rent a cart.
The only bad food we’ve had there is the frozen tubes of ground turkey (too many “crunchy bits”) and the brown rice (cook time was wrong, tasted horrible).
a cheap place that i guess is similar to aldi is Big Lots
tenio from Cbus
@Captain_Collide: I agree entirely. I do a lot of my shopping at Aldi, in part because it is on my way home from work, but also because the food is significantly better quality than what you might expect from a discount grocery, it is run efficiently and my local store is always clean and tidy. I supplement my Aldi runs with higher-end meat and produce from local farmers’ markets and Amish-run grocers and bake shops.
A lot of people look down their noses at Aldi, but I have only purchased one or two items that were sub-par, and received the double guarantee (replacement and a refund, their policy for everything they sell) without a hassle each time.
@luckybob343: Way to look down on low-income pregnant women, single moms of young kids, struggling families and nutritionally at-risk children… WIC is a great program, and I’m really glad it exists. I’ve never had to use it and I never will, but I’m more than happy to have my tax dollars go into it. I certainly wouldn’t agree that a “WIC-heavy crowd” equals a sub-par customer mix. I think it’s a good thing when people are trying to improve the nutrition of mothers and their children.
@ryan_h:
It’s “Tastes Like Butter” not “It’s really not butter”.
My father in law used to work in the grocery industry and said that all private label brands come from the same places the name brands come from. That Kroger brand mac and cheese? Same thing as Kraft mac and cheese. And so on and so forth.
Aldi is a great store that more American chains need to follow to cut costs. I discovered it 20 years ago in college and still buy many things from there. I can’t understand the snobbery of folks who “can’t touch Aldi stuff”. The majority of Aldi products are of great quality and rival the name brands. And that’s not just my opinion. I know plenty of people who are drive German sports cars and are not ashamed being found shopping at Aldi. Bad times or not, it makes financial sense. But then there are no grocery bags and you have to walk to return the shopping cart back to the store, which seems to much trouble for many shoppers.
American consumers still haven’t woken up to the fact that 40-50% of the prices of the food they buy at full-service stores (e.g. Wegman’s, SafeWay, Albertson’s, Publix, etc.) are for the additional services such as bagging and free bags, customer service counter, extra employees wandering the store, tens of thousands of items, lots of thrown away produce for the sake of building large attractive displays, etc.
Credit card companies also charge the retailer a percentage of the sale as a fee, so all customers pay for this in the cost of the food.
If you are really willing to pay an extra $50 -100 per month for these things, even if you don’t use them, then more power to you. But I believe that if most people knew why they pay so much for food, they’d reject the extra fluff forced on them by these larger grocery stores.
Next time you shop look around you and try to identify the things that are obviously costing the store money, but you don’t take advantage of. Then remember that you are paying for it anyway.
@betatron: Wow, maybe I should head down the road to your Aldi!
Anyways, I know I’ve preached at the altar of Aldi many times in the comments. It saves us something like half our bill. I was skeptical at first, but now I am a true believer.
The drawbacks to Aldi is the general disarray of the store (due to the stacked-pallet nature of the goods) and its limited selection on certain things I need (mostly anything that’s not a basic staple).
People who poo-poo Aldi for its lack of brand names: fine, go ahead, spend an extra $80 on groceries elsewhere. That means one less person I have to get past in order to get my half-priced milk.
@boomerang86: And have a quarter for the cart unlocker.
Two concerns seemed to come up a couple of times that I’d like to address.
Several people said ALDI’s ‘has long checkout lines’ I can definitely confirm that is true, especially if you shop there between 4pm and 6pm, or on Saturdays. However, try timing the lines in your regular market, and then in an ALDI’s. ALDI’s easily handles twice as many customers per register as a typical supermarket. This is due to several efficiency practices of the store: the customer has to bag their items away from the checkout area so the clerk spends 100% of their time running the register; the limited amount of unmarked items means the clerk usually can enter any produce codes from memory; the vertically integrated business model means they control the packaging and they have designed the packages with oversized barcodes that are almost always picked up on the first scan. Altogether, I can’t recall ever spending more than 10 minutes from the time I got in line, to the time I had finished paying – I doubt you can say the same about a typical supermarket.
The second ‘complaint’ is that they don’t take credit cards. While I admit this has been inconvenient occasionally, once you are used to it and ALDI’s becomes a regular shopping trip, you plan on using ALDI’s as your ATM by just getting cash-back by using your debit/ATM card to pay for your purchase. It saves you a stop at your bank’s ATM or from paying a fee at another bank’s ATM as cash-back on purchases is usually not an additional charge (ymmv).
On the down side, I do wish they had a couple of specialty items, particularly lactose-free milk, high-fiber bread, and whole wheat pasta.
@CyGuy:
Aldi does carry 100% Whole Wheat Spaghetti, Rotini and Penne Rigate. It is located next to the other pasta items.
You aren’t likely to find 100% whole wheat pasta elsewhere. Most all of it is “made with” whole wheat and still contains bleached processed flour.
It should be noted that Aldi and Trader Joe’s use the same suppliers, regardless of the company, and sell many similar items under different brand names.
A good example of this is the Jumbo Shrimp that both chains sell, which are sold in exactly the same box (same images, same design), save for the branding.
Aldi is generally cheaper on these items than TJ’s.
I just went here for the first time a couple weeks ago. The prices were good, but I embarrassed myself by only having credit and while they take Discover, I always keep that card in my car, so I had to run out there and get it.
I shop Aldi semi-regularly. They have good soup and frozen goods – I especially like their Pocket Sandwiches. I even bought a Medion Desktop Computer for only $350 U.S.