My First Aldi's Experience

Aldi's Grocery Stores seem to be all over my internet feeds lately. My dad's been a huge fan for a few years now. Still, because we don't have one where we normally go shopping I haven't bothered to actually try one out until yesterday. For the past few years we've been pretty loyal to Market Basket but with the changeovers in the company, I haven't tried shopping there in about a month so I've been looking around and trying to figure out what will work. So yesterday I bit the bullet and drove up to Aldi's. For me it's about 50 minutes away. That might sound a little crazy but since the prices at our local store are so expensive I usually have been meal planning and doing a weekly trip to a town 30 minutes away. I figured if the prices were as good as I've heard then I could just try and cut back to doing the bulk of our shopping once or twice a month and then picking up the other things that might spoil on a weekly basis from somewhere else. So anyways here's my mini review along with some advice -

1. Remember your quarter: thankfully my dad warned me about this one and actually I think it's pretty brilliant. You put a quarter in a slot to release a cart to use and then when you return the cart you put the little chain back in and your quarter comes back out. That way it keeps the parking lot clean and they don't have to have someone out there gathering carts all the time.

2. The prices on average were much better. I'd say overall that I saw 75% of things selling for at least $0.25 cheaper than I usually get. There are some catches to this though. Most of the brands there are not ones that are commonly known. Also there are some things that were more expensive and they just don't have a huge selection of items either. I had about 5 things that I still needed to stop by another supermarket to get after we left. One thing that I'm not sure of also is that the prices may have been more expensive based on the city I was shopping in. I'm not as familiar with prices in the area. Whole milk for example was $3.00 at Aldi's (2% and 1% were $2.00). Since it is $2.50 at the stores I usually go to I figured I would wait and get it at the other store. At the other supermarket however milk was selling for around $4.00.

3. Remember to bring cash or a debit card. I was buying for two weeks worth of groceries and spent around $100. I got to the checkout without even thinking about it but thankfully I've been working on switching to using cash more and brought some extra along and had enough to cover it.

4. One way that cut costs is that if you want your groceries bagged you do it yourself. Another area I felt pretty conspicuous is that I put my re-usable bags on the conveyer at the head of my groceries before I was able to pay attention to my surroundings.  Basically the cashier just puts everything back in the cart and then there was a counter a long the exit for people who wanted to bag their own. I started to do this but the kids were getting a little too crazy so we just decided to hang it and toss it all in the back of the car. Actually I didn't mind this very much because I could just put the cold stuff in my cooler without having to dig through the bags to find it.

So am I planning on going back again - sure! I probably won't rely on it for all my groceries though. Right now I think I'll just alternate going once a month to Aldi's and then once a month to one of the more local stores.