In the Pit Aldi’s came up, I want to say I enjoy shopping there. Most of their products are Of good quality. Eggs are cheap and dairy, imported cheeses. Their branded products are a good buy. They carry a chocolate chip brioche loaf they makes a rich and tasty French toast. Stand up for Aldi’s!
They have good prices on meat and fish.
Their salad bowls are cheaper than Walmart or Wegmans.
My wife is from Germany and is pleased that both Aldi and Lidl have found their way here.
When I was a kid, Aldi’s was absolutely disgusting. I really can’t say if that was the chain as a whole at the time (early 80s,) or if it was just the area I grew up in, but they’ve really come a long way since then and now I actually enjoy shopping there. A lot of their store-brand stuff is quite good (although for some reason their table salt comes in much larger crystals than other salts I’ve used so I ended up going straight back to our dear friend Morton…)
Aldi is interesting. Some of their stuff is fantastic for house-brand stuff. Or fantastic in general. Others, not so much. And they have limited runs of “interesting” stuff- like all their Deutche Kuche branded Christmas stuff that’s very unlike the normal grocery stores’ Xmas stuff. Or all sorts of crazy sausages and cheeses.
But they’re not consistent. Like you may have some kind of yogurt you like, and then find out that it’s a special version, and isn’t a standard thing that’s always on the shelves, and that it’s gone, either for good, or for a unspecified amount of time. Same thing with all sorts of other stuff.
I mean, they have the very basic things like a limited selection of meat, bread, vegetables, etc… but anything outside of the absolutely most basic stuff is highly variable in availability.
I find it pretty frustrating to find something I really like, only to find out that it’s apparently not standard, and will vanish, never to be seen again.
Yeah, this is a problem, but sometimes different stuff shows up that is awesome.
Oh, for sure. I just kind of get tired of finding something that I really like, and them pulling the rug out from under me.
I never shop at Aldi. Not because I don’t like it but because they have lots of really delicious snacky stuff and it’s so cheap that I can’t help but buy too much!
Last time I went there, I specifically went to buy snacks to send to my grandma in the nursing home. I looked at all their delicious European chocolate treats and managed to buy a rather large amount for grandma and you bet I got just as much for myself. UGH!
Low prices and low self control don’t mix 
I’m a huge fan. Though slightly biased as recently moved from many years in San Francisco to the DC metro. In San Francisco the prices of groceries were absolutely insane (I’d joke that the main business risk for the upscale supermarket up the street was someone would by too many groceries at once and exhaust the entire money supply in the world and crash the economy. 90 trillion bucks for a steak and two potatoes would be a bargain a Birite ). The supermarket up the street now is an Aldi (and its not even the cheapest one on the street!) so reasonably priced high-quality groceries are like some kind utopian fantasy that should never happen in real life.
There are some items that they just don’t carry, so I still have to make a trip to Giant Eagle every couple of months or so.
But then again, there are also some items they carry that no other grocery store does. And anything they do carry, is going to have a regular price about 2/3 the best sale price you’ll find anywhere else, for the same or better quality.
I would say that it also helps that there happens to be one in easy walking distance from me… except that it’s actually only the third- or fourth-closest grocery store to me. I still don’t bother with the closer ones, except for some specific specialty items they do better.
A bit like TJ’s I don’t shop there for basic groceries; I shop there for snacks and oddball specialty items.
Since COVID I’ve pretty well stopped going to both: too cramped and it’s nothing I need badly enough to warrant being exposed to the extra crush of people.
Aldi and Trader Joe’s are owned by the same corporation. Some of the comments sound like descriptions of Trader Joe’s (of which I am more familiar)
Aldi’s is sorta working class Trader Joes: emphasize cheap but good, not organic & frilly.
They evolved separately, but there’s a reason Aldi’s chose to buy TJs; there’s a similarity at their core.
Not exactly. Each is owned by one of two brothers, who didn’t get along and split their father’s company years ago, kind of like how the Puma and Adidas shoe companies are owned by competing brothers.
We got Trader Joe’s in SF and people loved it but I was never particularly impressed. It was a little cheaper than the competitors, but less range than Aldi IMO.
The companies are run as a separate concerns I believe, and don’t share stock (so you can’t get TJs stuff at Aldi or vice versa).
I like Aldi, but (at least lately) many of the things they carry aren’t really any better, in price, quality, or selection, than the store-brand items available at other major food stores.
I am a massive Aldi fan. We shop their weekly and you can not beat their prices:
$1.19 for a bag of chips
$1.39 for milk
65 cents for a dozen eggs
So many other things.
I find them to be fine for eggs, milk, bread and other staples but many things I’d grab on a full shopping trip they either don’t carry or carry in a single flavor/style. And while they might have some weird European chocolate paste or other fun treat, that doesn’t help if I still have to go to another store to finish shopping. So I tend not to go by there all that much.
I thought they were separate. When the two brothers split the business, one got the stores in northern Germany and one got the stores in southern Germany. The Aldis we have in the United States are owned by Aldi South. Trader Joe’s is owned by Aldi North.
I never knew that! Aldi’s is is too far for my usual grocery getting trips. I think there’s a TJ in GR. I really should plan an urban adventure soon as I definitely want to shop the Asian super grocery store.