Today was one of those “stock up days”; the pantry was depleted. We went to a produce store for the produce, and I’ll have to pick up gluten free bread somewhere this week, but my Aldi list is not insignificant:
spaghetti noodles - 2 pounds
pasta sauce - 4 jars
mac and cheese - 4 boxes
corn tortillas
flour tortillas
cheddar cheese
“Mexican” cheese shreds
American cheese
sour cream
eggs
bacon (thick cut, 2 pound)
hot dogs (3 pound package)
bread
hamburger buns
milk
1/2 and 1/2
french vanilla coffee creamer
coffee beans
ground beef
cereal
diced tomatoes - 4 cans
crushed tomatoes - 2 big cans
tomato sauce - 4 cans
tomato puree - 3 cans
kidney beans - 4 cans
chili beans - 2 cans
canned soups - 6 assorted
lunchmeat
boxed pasta salad mix - 2 boxes
rice crisp treats
fruit cups
frozen burgers
paper towels - 12 pack
CFL bulbs
And “impulse buys” (which I’ve learned to work into the budget!):
6 pack of German “Sparkling Apple Drink” (it’s apple juice concentrate, water and CO2. 60% apple juice. Not too sweet. Mixes well with vodka and a splash of sour mix. Shhhhh!)
frozen large shrimp
frozen jumbo shrimp
refrigerator cookie dough, clearance from Easter - 2 huge tubes
frosting, clearance from Easter
sprinkles, clearance from Easter (I really only want this for the 6 compartment shaker; I’ll dump most of the sprinkles and use the shaker as a spice/herb jar for camping.)
boxed stuffing mix, clearance from Easter - 4 boxes
boxed sliced potato with sauce mix, clearance from Easter - 2 boxes
Total, with tax: $150.63
Uh oh. Wish I’d seen this warning BEFORE I went to the store. Oh well, if we don’t like them either it’ll be back to the beef ones. (Which I really like!)
We do about 85% of all our grocery shopping at Aldis.
A local store is closing out the latest batch of the bread in the OP for 99 cents. It’s “day-old” bread so I checked the sell-by date: 04-04-2014. I don’t know if they do the date Euro-style or US-style so it might either be the 4th of April or April 4th, but I’m pretty sure that 2014 is eons from now, by the standards of fresh bread. How do they they get moist bread to last that long? I would guess that it was irradiated, but I thought that the German A-bomb tests on Rügen in 1944 and in Thuringia in 1945 had cured them of the need to blast radiation all over the place.
ETA: And it has no preservatives and none of the traits that would betray it having been frozen or even refrigerated before it went on the shelf.
I wonder if they’re closeouting (is that a verb?) it because someone noticed a misprint on the date label. 'Cause seriously, even Twinkies don’t actually last that long.
Yes, ALDI, which I thought was obvious because I referred to my own OP. Yes, it might be a mistake, but I’m surprised they made it past the federal inspectors.
No, they are not being closed out because they are no longer fresh. They are fine and it’s illegal to sell bread nearly two months past its sell-by date. And why would it still be good now, long past when mortal bread would be either a mold farm or an anaerobic slurry?
We may never find out because the two loaves will be gone soon.
I can’t believe milk was so cheap (somewhere) just a year ago. Right now at my Aldi it’s 3.39, still cheaper than the regular store, where it’s 3.69.
When this thread started, I still lived in Tucson and had never been to an Aldi. Now I live near Asheville, NC, and I go there all the time. I love it, especially the produce, which seems to be fine to me, but very, very cheap. I buy big bags of huge lemons for $1.99, pineapples for $1 when they’re $4-5 everywhere else, bags of oranges and apples and potatoes and trays of squash, among other things. I also like their prices on butter and cheese and bacon. I never buy meat there- it’s not cheaper here, for some reason. I usually leave there feeling like I’ve spent half what I would have at a regular store- love it!!
Believe it or don’t, they have a great canned fruit cocktail (and I usually HATE canned fruit.) And they don’t have them very often, but when they do, the veggie burgers (one of the name brands) are just 2.50. My Dad bought a tiltable umbrella for the deck and a tent there last weekend…quality, but inexpensive. Their “triscuits” are great and only have three ingredients vs the name-brand.
I haven’t bought real milk in years, so I have no idea how expensive it’s gotten. $3.69 a gallon? Glad I switched to soy or almond milk–those are about $1.69 at Aldi’s which is about $1 less than even the discount groceries here.
My only real complaint about Aldi is the layout of the checkout area. There’s two Aldi’s in Asheville and I won’t go to the one on the west side of town because the store is laid out so that the lines for checkout back up into the aisles. In the other one, there’s enough room so that the checkout lines can sort of curve around a little.
My complaint about Aldi’s checkout is that they own five cash registers but insist on only using one at any given time. By an act of God or Congress, they might have two open. There’s checkout lanes at my local store that, in years of shopping, I have never seen open once.
How can I trust the savings from a place that buys 250% more cash registers than it’ll use?
I shop there regularly although I’m a bit selective about it. There’s stuff that frankly just isn’t as good as the name brands and so I skip on it until I hit a more “mainstream” grocery. They’re great for stocking up for my kid’s school lunches though: lunch meats, breads, snacks and that sort of thing. Frozen stuff is pretty good. Milk & eggs are milk & eggs so I get them where they’re cheapest. Produce is hit and miss but at least it’s obvious what’s good and what’s to be passed over. I’ve never gotten a fruit fly infestation from them which is more than I can say for some stores. Cuts of meat I get from a butcher shop near my work. Costs more I’m sure but once I tried it, it’s impossible to go back.
$3.69? I just went to Aldi an hour ago and regular milk was $1.99 a gallon. In the summer(well, the past two summers anyway), it drops to $1.69 a gallon.
Milk at 7/11 around here is $2.99 a gallon, due to it being marked way up in a convenience store.
I’m going to check at the regular grocery store this afternoon and see how much milk is. As I said, I’ve been drinking soy milk for the last six years so I have no clue how much it’s gone up or no.
My local ALDI is the closest grocery store to me, so I tend to buy nearly everything there, supplementing it with the occasional visit to another store for things like decaffeinated tea. Their regular tea bags are excellent, by the way, much better than the Lipton’s that CostCo sells and nearly as cheap. I’m drinking some as I type.
Their hamburger is excellent and cheap, although that may have a lot to do with being in Kansas City, a very beef-intensive location. The fresh chicken is perfectly fine, although their frozen chicken tends to be made up of undersized parts. That’s true with a lot of their stuff - they have frozen salmon and tilapia fillets, but both are smaller than what you will find at other stores. Same thing with their canned asparagus, which is made up of smaller pieces than the expensive full stalks you’ll find in some other store. On the other hand, they occasionally offer full stalk white asparagus in a jar. I love it, but I’m apparently alone in my love. A case always winds up on the discount shelf and I can stock up on the cheap.
One of my favorites is their occasional English and Irish cheeses. Some of those are absolutely amazing!
Oh, and this last week, large eggs were $.89 a dozen!
Well, okay… I feel like you’re saying that I could be lying about the price of milk, which would be a weird thing for me to do. But I’m sure you’ll see that it’s true- we go through a lot of milk, so I buy a gallon every 2-3 days, so I’m pretty familiar with the price of it.
Related to ALDI: My son’s favorite snack is chips and salsa. I frequently buy both at ALDI for less than I spend at my “regular” grocery store.
Regarding the price of milk: Where I am (Maryland) it’s approaching $4/gallon in the larger grocery chains. I feel as if $3.79 is what I’ve been seeing. Earlier this week we were all the way out of milk and the easiest place to stop between work and home is Trader Joe’s. There it was $3.99 for a gallon of 2% My mom likes to tell about a time when my dad was incredulous that she didn’t know the price of a gallon of milk. He reasoning was “I never look. It’s not like I’m gonna stop buying it. We need it.”
