Show HN: Aldi Price Map
aldipricemap.com
Hi HN, Inspired by the recent discussion on traderjoesprices.com, and sites such as mccheapest.com, here is a map of how much does it cost to shop (this week's promo items) at Aldi
aldipricemap.com
For me Aldi is just such a european thing that I was genuinely surprised by this.
https://www.aldireviewer.com/aldi-and-trader-joes-are-they-t...
But I read this as another anti-American comment which seems to be very fashionable recently.
Also Merica' #1 ... jk :)
It’s like me saying “McDonalds has stopped selling hamburgers” and expecting you to magically understand that this statement is about Indian McD’s and not American McDs.
There is a link to raw data (a big json). Aldi is Hofer in Austria. Prices are probably the same in all their stores? Not sure something similar exists for Germany.
In the case of this Aldi price map, they are doing regional pricing - it would seem that every store in an area has the same price regardless of neighborhood wealth for the individual store. So you get naval oranges in Los Angeles at $1.89, $2.39 in Chicago, and $2.99 in New York City (and Houston).
The difference probably has a lot to do with the cost structure for operating the distribution network. If you switch to the organic pasta sauce, it appears that the price is the same $1.99 everywhere except Los Angeles, where it is $2.19. Their oranges are likely coming from California and their pasta sauce is coming from somewhere east of the Mississippi.
Case in point: the Kroger in Oxford Ohio (where Miami of Ohio's campus is located) has had remarkably higher prices than other Krogers in the area for as long as I've known. Oxford is 'close' to Cincinnati, but there's enough corn and soybean fields between the two to make the trip a pain.
Yup, in my state they basically bought out ALL of the old Bed Bath and Beyond leases and are converting them to Aldi supermarkets.
And that will piss people off, and politicians everywhere don't liked pissed-off people.
https://www.ksn.com/news/national-world/why-do-people-add-s-...
For example, although adding a possessive suffix 's to the nane "Jordan" would result in "Jordan's," adding it to "James" could result in "James'". There's an apostrophe written at the end, but it's pronounced the same way as "James."
I said it's not universal because I still know people who would say "James's" (with an extra syllable at the end) in everyday speech anyway. I don't know to what extent this varies by dialect.
It's also elided when a plural already ends in s (and I think this is universal, but I haven't looked it up). For example, "the doctor's computer" (the computer of one doctor) sounds the same as "the doctors' computers" (the computers owned by the doctors). The apostrophe is written on the other side of the s, but it also sounds the same. Note that not all plurals end in s, e.g. man/men, woman/women, goose/geese, etc., and in these cases you still add the s, e.g. "the geese's beaks".
Baker's dozen -> Bakers' dozen
Or just omit "the" - We have many McDonald's here in our town.
I think the confusion in this thread and elsewhere makes it clear why companies release brand guides.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/con...
...and lets not get into the "paninis" situation.
Different grammatical situation of course but similar in spirit is “latte.” It just means milk in Italian and so in Italy you’d always say cafe latte. But in the states everyone knows it as the coffee drink (Starbucks probably to blame).
Same with salsa—just means sauce in Spanish—but it’s become an English word in the states at this point and taken a different meaning.
Entree being another more egregious example…
"Datum?" Almost nobody uses that in the vernacular.
When I was a child in the 90ies, older people still called Aldi "Albrecht" (and the middle class avoided going there for fear of being marked poor):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Albrecht...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Aldi-Kal...
https://www.lebensmittelzeitung.net/news/media/7/The-Albre-b...
Interesting side note: Aldi is not called Aldi in Austria (it's "Hofer" there, which blew my mind as a kid since the logo is the same), because the Aldi trademark belonged to "Adel Lebensmittel Diskont" there.
At least in larger cities, the average Lidl often looks a bit run-down and grimy, and the customers tend to be lower class (that's not the case in rural areas, however). I always found that interesting, because prices / quality are basically equivalent (although I tend to prefer Aldi products). I live near the border to France, and the situation there appears to be similar.
At least a few years ago, however, Aldis in Switzerland also looked very run-down (though not as run-down as Denner) with distinctly lower-class customers and a much larger focus on selling alcohol than in Germany.
[0] https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Bilderstreck...
However (I've lived some years in FR and PL too), nothing beats Dutch supermarkets in terms of shopping-speed. Nowhere. If you think (German) Aldi is fast, you should try a Dutch shop (preferably in the city around rush hour so you can see it shines under pressure). As a low anchor, you can try the same in France (any brand, but Lidl too) ;) This includes stock: Dutch supermarkets are rarely out of something, but in Germany this is par for the course (or I am extremely unlucky?)
Also, and this is actually quite true for the Netherlands as well, there is a quality problem. It can be good, but it rarely is great. The French (and Belgians) really have that beat, at the cost of speed. Only fresh veg and bread is where Lidl shines, and I love them for it.
I've given up on them. And almost anything else too. Because that is a function of modern bakery supply chains in general, not one specific 'outlet'.
Do not get in a bad-bread-pissing contest: Dutch will win it every time.
Anyway, I remember the talks about that fear of being marked poor. It was all a load of BS as you could see from the parked cars, and style of clothing of shoppers.
Similar to BILD.de perceived as trash-tabloid, nonetheless having the largest circulation.
Just to clarify why this is wrong. First we are not talking about more than one, there is only one "Aldi" company.
We don't use Aldi's (notice the use of the ' for possessive after a single noun) in this case even though every company name is a proper noun which would follow this rule. It's not used because the Price Map is not belonging to Aldi, it is a price map "FOR" Aldi.
The actual name of the company is J Sainsbury plc.
It started as "J Sainsbury" with no apostrophe s. Then it changed it registered as "J. Sainsbury Limited" in 1922, again no 's.
"John Sainsbury's supermarket" was only contracted and picked up much later for marketing.
There'a s few other examples but that's the one that always stood out to me
Holy moly. How is this even still a thing?
fitting for reading about a german supermarket chain
e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/business/aldi-winn-dixie-...
e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63015985
Aldi's corporate style is "ALDI" but that's just their internal guidance, not the rules of English.
E.g. The NYT itself: https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=nato
Even the Daily Mail: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nato+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2F...
But apparently the Guardian doesn't do the all-caps either. Are there any American publications/style guides that don't do all-caps?
I am saying this because currently, some items like 'Navel Orange' are cheaper on the West Coast vs the East whereas items like 'Veggie Burger' are cheaper on the East Coast compared to the West Coast.
* spaghetti squash (named for the long fibers in it's flesh)
* butternut squash
...should probably be written with some hyphens: "Spaghetti- or butternut- squash"
...or with some parens: "Squash (spaghetti or butternut)"
There are a few larger categories (groceries/rent/etc.) rather than individual items.
This one tracks all online prices of all the austrian grocery brands https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise
Related thread on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37533633 But didn't took of.
They also gathered some historical data and competed with an government initiative to establish a price comparison app.
Intersting to see how the prices relate just in the US though.
Also I'm not quite sure about the grammar of "Aldi's"
It'd be amazing to see this data mapped across time, as it'd be a relatively good indicator of grocery inflation.
:)
But I've heard that it has not the whole collection of items available as the physical stores.
Close at the border we have a lot of shops where people from Denmark (and even Norway and Sweden) travel to to go shopping, because it is so much cheaper here. But thinking about it, I have never seen/overheard Danes in an Aldi - and I wonder why?
It may also be partly due to Aldi reluctance to carry brands beyond their own. For some items Danes don't care, but if you then can't get the brand name cereal or ketchup, then you have to go somewhere else anyway. The Danish supermarket space is insanely competitive, in regards to price, so Aldi just didn't have much of an advantage over local discount stores anyway, at least not enough that you'd bother splitting your shopping between two stores.
I believe they lost €125m+ per year in the final years, loses that need to be covered by Aldi Nord in Germany. In the end they just didn't want to keep losing money. REMA1000, from Norway, bought a large number of the stores. Not sure why, they look nothing like REMAs own stores, and in some places they are literally across the street from an existing store.
The stores furthest from the port also have the highest cost.
In the past that used to be around 2-3%, which is why, until 2014, they wouldn't accept credit or US debit cards, as the fees were higher than their margin and they couldn't pass those on to customers.
Revenue must remain greater than expenses (outside VC funded moonshots).
I was referring to passing them on on an individual store basis rather than averaging across all stores.
When Publix sells a rotisserie chicken for $8, they're taking a loss on every one. If people only came to Publix for the chicken, they'd go bankrupt in a month. Hence they aren't passing on the cost. They hope people will buy other items too, which have higher margins, and make up the difference of lost profit - and they are right.
But the commenter I replied to then clarified they meant the business does not evenly spread the transportation costs equally amongst all customers nationwide.
Other examples:
- "Free" online services aren't paid for by users, so the business eats the cost of the service. But they hope to recoup the cost from advertisers or from selling data. The users are customers, and the advertisers are customers, but only some of the customers are subsidizing the business, hence the cost is only passed to some of the customers.
- Another example of the above: 40% of the profit for Neiman Marcus comes from 2% of the customers. The brunt of the cost of the business is not getting passed on to 98% of customers.
- Tech darlings (Uber, etc) lose money hand over fist for years, sometimes decades, never recouping their cost.
- Some businesses/industries are heavily subsidized. The customer sees a low price, and the business's costs are actually "passed on" to a tax-paying polity, who are often not the customer.
- A business may write down costs (due to a loss), paying the difference out of pocket, without passing on this write-down to customers.
So a business can spend more money than it makes, it can spend someone else's money [not needing to recoup said cost], it can literally just pay a cost out of pocket without any expectation of return, and it can spend a lot of money to make very little in profit.
Surely GP's text should be ever-so-slightly charitably read to mean overall/aggregated costs, not that each and every individual cost is passed on.
EDIT: Makes sense for fruits and vegetables mainly, due to California's agriculture. But shelf-stable and prepackaged goods still maintain a very high price even over in the South.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39304068
Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's (traderjoesprices.com)
2024-02-08T16:37:38 (270 points / 146 comments)
[1] https://www.aldi.us/online-shopping/new-aldi-grocery-website...
They divide Europe up by country so you'd have to get them to cooperate on that.
Flying a thousand miles to pick up a pack of dried lentils, then another thousand miles to get a couple of tins of chopped tomatoes and then some more miles to pick up a bag of flour - that would have made great content a few years ago. This would be legitimate because the revenue from the 'content' would have paid for the flying.
It does not apply to specialist medicine, and only to a very limited extent to Apple products. So Apple can "enshittify": extract the maximum the market is willing to bear. They can steer demand. Aldi cannot.
The price a farmer gets is peanuts per unit.
Less applicable to an iPhone, but very applicable to produce or even toilet paper.
Which is probably where that informal use of 'peanuts' comes from.
That said, these don't seem to cover things most people really buy - meat particularly, and fresh veggies. Or paper products. Have you considered adding more items?
French Green Beans and Washington Granny Smith Apples are good ones to compare. West coast: only bottom-end prices. East coast: only top-end prices. These are two items you could grow on either coast, need temperature control for shipping, can be seasonal depending on the source. You could find them locally on either coast, so they're probably not shipping them from one coast to the other (or are they?). Price fluctuation might be just regional retail costs or supply/demand. Or it could be they're shipping them cross-country just to simplify logistics and marking up the price accordingly.
Simply Nature Organic Pasta is all over the place. Could be regional price fluctuations, could be logistics, maybe demand.
There is no meaningful midpoint here. A sequential scale from light to dark would be easier to read.
Here in Germany the situation is different to the US though, we often don't just go to one shop, we usually mix and match between 2 or 3 different shops even in one shopping trip. Though I guess if you had a Kaufland nearby you could probably just manage with one shop
What's kind of interesting is that in some sectors (wine, whisky, bakery), Lidl has started to win quality/tasting awards against premium retailers like Waitrose and M&S Food. But the prices are still down on the floor in comparison.
The only downside is the range can be limiting. Want to buy some fresh tarragon? Maybe some pods for your coffee machine? You're going to have to head elsewhere.
Maybe it is how the stores look? In NL Lidl looks like a normal supermarket that just happens to be cheap. Aldi is like someone went out of their way to make a supermarket as ugly and uncomfortable a shopping experience as possible.
I think they reached the point in the UK that everyone willing to put up with chaos in store was already shopping there, so they had to start competing with the traditional supermarkets like Tesco and Sainsburys.
Oh, and depending where in Hamburg, there is also https://www.globus.de/hamburg-lurup/index.php# which reminded me of my childhood, shortly after they've opened at the remodeled site of a former real,-, which is second only to https://www.edeka.de/eh/nord/edeka-center-st.-pauli-neuer-ka...
I'm an immigrant from the UK though, this is all new to me. As others pointed out, most supermarkets are basically comparable in the UK. In Germany the variety between different supermarkets is crazy. Even between different Bio markts the quality difference can be extreme.
I haven't been to that Globus in a while, have just been there shortly after it openend in the summer, and 2 times after that. It really reminded me of my childhood, because then there was another Globus elsewhere, where I went, and it was always fun because there was stuff to sample. Like there was in this new one. Instant flashback! While the sortiment isn't that overwhelming, it tops Kauflands and probably most Rewe easily, Edeka not so sure. What they do have though, is freshly pressed pomegrenade juice. Where else do you get that? Oh, not to forget, also a large (real) bakery IN STORE where you can look into, which is always busy, and gives the outside air a really nice smell at 4AM in the morning. Which is very rare nowadays.
Whatever. Enjoy the ride ;-)
What would give you the indication that the situation is different in the US? In any given week I shop at Aldi (Favorite), Trader Joes, HEB, Whole Foods, Costco and Wal-Mart.
I'm consistently shocked by which stores have the best prices AND best quality produce.
I would love to see something like this but for all supermarkets around the world with prices in local currencies adjusted.
i.e.
Where is the cheapest place in the world to buy a banana?
Where is the most expensive place in the world to buy a banana?
Now the 'banana' -- could be any food item, it doesn't matter.
A future tool like this could be able to help future societies predict which areas of the world are in economic ascent and which are in economic decline (cheaper prices = economic ascent, expensive prices = approaching potential future economic peak and/or approaching potential future economic decline, etc.)
Anyway, looks great!
The nearest K-mart would be 1.5 miles out of town and of course everyone would take the car to go there to buy groceries in bulk.
Granola bars admittedly can be ridiculously overpriced for what they are but even just one CLIF Bar is less than $1.50.
Seriously. What's interesting is that in the big cities (NYC, LA, Chicago) if you go to the neighborhoods where people actually live, grocery prices for fresh items are usually lower than in suburban or rural parts of the US. High sales volume overcomes the high real estate and labor costs.
Almost nothing on this list I ever buy, other than some of the produce. Why not some staples for the rest of us like milk, butter, bread, sugar. Heck, basically any pizza without cauliflower crust.
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Here are some demos [1][2] I've made without using any third-party map services. All open source! [3]
[1] https://wcedmisten.fyi/project/north-america-hospital-distan...
[2] https://wcedmisten.github.io/nextjs-protomap-demo/isochrone
I am pretty sure vegetables/fruits will get bad and loose their vitamins faster too if sliced.
Also it is a waste of packaging for nothing. I'd rather have someone standing in the vegetable area of the shop to slice stuff for the handful of people with disabilities than have them already packaged.
Personally, I find washing the mushroom debris off the knife and cutting board to be more inconvenient than the slicing itself
This is awesome! Thanks!
And if not, why ?
When I was in college (within the last 10 years), Aldi was a god send. We could get a load of whole wheat bread for 70 cents. A one pound bag of pretzels was like a dollar. A dozen bagels was $1.25. A pound of turkey lunch meat was $3. I had a semester where my food spend averages $23 dollars a week, all thanks to Aldi's insane prices (I let it go up a bit after that).
While everyone has been affected by food price increases, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Aldi is still notably cheaper for a lot of things about two weeks ago. The bad part is now when I see a can of beans for $1.50, it seems like a rip off since it's about _twice_ as much as the Aldi equivalent. The ingredients are the same: beans and salt.
I love Aldi for their raw efficiency that they generally take up. I know quite a few people who hate the structure of an Aldi, but I absolutely love it.
I was sad they closed down, but a few companies have popped up since, but I've not been able to try them to see if they come close to how good it was. Heck, at the time I thought about creating an alternative, but wasn't sure where to start, so didn't end up trying.
Anyway, point is, we need more of this sort of comparison sites for things to keep things competitively priced, and to ensure people don't pay more for the same things.