I have nothing but good things to say about shopping at Aldi.  A first glance at your local Aldi grocery store doesn’t look like much.   In fact, I drove past our local Aldi many times before realizing it was a grocery store.  Only after friends and family began telling us about Aldi did we venture over to check it out.  We were warned in advance of the oddities we would encounter and came prepared.

When we started shopping at Aldi we only tried a few things wanting to check the quality.  I’ve found that most of the products are either of the same quality or better than name brand.  There are items that I like to purchase name brand or that Aldi does not have available, but we now purchase at least sixty percent of our groceries at Aldi.  Purchasing  Aldi products allows us to save at least 25% on our grocery budget for most staple products that we purchase.

The first oddity about about shopping at Aldi is that you have to rent a shopping cart for a quarter.  Rest assured that the quarter is returned once you return the shopping cart.  Putting the responsibility on the consumer to return the cart allows Aldi to keep costs down by not having an employee collect carts in the parking lot.  

Upon entering the store, you are greeted with wide well lit aisles. Merchandise is stacked on either side of the aisle on crates in their original shipping boxes. Product prices are either above the item on a price board that runs the length of the aisle or directly in front of the merchandise and reminds me a little of Sam’s Club.  The majority of items sold at Aldi are their own store brand sold exclusively at Aldi.  Aldi has just about everything that can be found at your local grocery store only on a smaller scale.     

The other odd thing about shopping at Aldi is that you will need to provide your own shopping bags.  They have paper bags ($.05 each) and plastic bags ($.10 each) available for purchase if you didn’t bring bags with you.  Aldi accepts cash, debit cards, and the Discover card as forms of payment.  Checking out is actually pretty quick since the cashier doesn’t have to bag your groceries.  Your purchased items are moved from the conveyor belt to your basket where you can then push your cart to a counter available for you to bag your own groceries.   

Once you get past the fact that you have to pay for your shopping cart, bring your own bags (or pay for theirs), use an acceptable form of payment, bag your own groceries, and put your shopping cart back at the cart return for your quarter it should turn out to be a great shopping trip.

Tags: Aldi, Grocery Shopping

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 12:46 am and is filed under Aldi Grocery Store. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.