The Aldi effect: how one discount supermarket transformed the way Britain shops

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

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.

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...

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. :)

Modern stores in Germany or Britain have pretty good stuff. Wish they would bring this to the US.

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).

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.

Aldi is Aldi South (Sud).

Same company, just split between 2 brothers.

https://www.handelsblatt.com/images/billig-allein-reicht-nic...

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.