Oh man, California needs an ALDI bigtime
A lot of the brands they sell are almost Aliexpress-grade knock offs of known brands - they'll mimic the branding and packaging of a known brand almost to the point of being an exact copy with a slightly different name. The quality of these knockoffs is also pretty questionable in my experience, but some are actually comparable to the real thing.
Another minor complaint - the staff don't pack your bags like every other supermarket, but they also don't have self service checkouts so you get the worst of both worlds and none of the benefit. Every store near me is chronically understaffed as well so actually checking out can take upwards of 10 minutes even during off-peak hours.
Overall though it's not much cheaper and the whole thing kind of feels a bit grubby, don't really see any reason to shop there.
FWIW their "knock-off" brands frequently, but not always, are the same thing as the premium brands. They sell cheaper stuff to ALDI and use a (purposefully bad) design so as not to dilute the brand. This is more common for single-ingredient products like flour or oats than processed food.
And the cashiers at ALDI used to be the best-paid in the sector in the times before barcodes: every ALDI product had a different price, which they knew and punched in extremely quickly. They wouldn't bag anything for you (no supermarket in Germany does), but it tended to go rather fast (too fast for most people to keep up).
I said "used to", above, because they have drastically changed in the last decade, now selling fresh vegetables and occasionally even installing lights in their shops.
It is all about price and nothing else, never once where they really concerned about quality of the product. If they could have products cheaper than Coles/Woolworths they would do it regardless of how many short cuts where taken to get there. Thus you could have something like yogurt that was $1 cheaper but tasted like glue.
No price shock but you would definitely notice the quality issue once you got home.
Funnily enough Aldi aus did a study a few years back and noted that people will cut food costs before they cut entertainment. It was aimed at Coles and Woolworths to highlight that when things get rough they would flock to Aldi. Looking at their shelves recently, provided the supply chain is still running ok, it might have been true.
Imagine doing your shopping with a backpack, or clip-on/off bags from the carrier of your bicycle? That has to be done with some care, otherwise there will be potential mess when you get back home.
The richest nation on earth, and we settle for "tastes good, costs less".
Anyway, since about 2004 I've only experienced the latter (Aldi-Nord), and can't believe the US-branch still does this? Because the thing with the paletts is gone here, since at least a decade. Don't know how to define garbage oils, though. Got Linseed- and Hemp-Oil there, recently. Works for me.
But hey, as an avowed prole, what do I know?