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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.

I know quite a few people who hang out for the day that the Aldi snow gear reappears. The boots in particular are excellent value.

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.

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.

(at least in Germany and Austria) you can even find a ~€10 book in bookshops listing the Aldi offers for each week

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.

Good point. I was trying to vocalise this feeling but did not find the right explanation why I enjoyed so much the selection of random stuff.

You don't pick up the leaflet that tells most of what's coming each week then? :p

> 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.

> 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.

> Aldi and its slightly-nicer copycats siphon

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 think this is mostly snobbery.

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.

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.

Lidl's own-brand washing powder is supposedly pretty good though, if I recall correctly.

>"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.

Perhaps Lidl has a different approach for your market ?

At least in Europe you have a chance to choose what you want: The classical premium brands, premium Lidl brand or cheap brands.

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.

The middle empties out

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 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.

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.

> 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.

Ha, whoops, I accidentally a word. That definitely changed the meaning a little bit.

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.

> a misguided mission to penny-pinch

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.

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.

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?

It's really not like that, their mainstream products are as good as any other supermarket, better in some cases.

> What do you mean with saving 10 USD?

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'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.

You should definitely write. I like your style of prose.

Is this post generated with AI or something? It has that should-make-sense-but-doesnt vibe to it.

It reminds me of what passes for journalism these days.

You get what you pay for.