If your family budget ever finds out there is an Aldi nearby and you are not shopping there it may never forgive you. The food is top notch, the shopping experience is pleasant, and the savings are simply irrefutable. Aldi is a German-based company with about 1,500 stores in the United States that seems to have found the sweet spot where efficiency and excellence reach their mutual peak. But lest you think the savings that even beat out Walmart mean you are getting a low-quality deal, let me clue you into the secret truth about Aldi prices and why you should start shopping there today.
Aldi Prices: Unprecedented Efficiency
It’s not that I have a problem with punk teenage kids stocking groceries, but if it means I can cut $50 bucks off my family shopping trip then the kid has got to go. Aldi uses significantly less staff than the average grocery store because instead of paying that kid to neatly arrange the cans of chicken noodle soup on the shelf. they use a box system that accomplishes stocking in seconds.
In addition, rather than pay for an employee to police the shopping carts in the parking lot, they provide a small incentive for you to do that yourself. To use a shopping cart at Aldi requires a $0.25 cent deposit that you get back when you return the cart. Through a variety of measures like these, the average Aldi store can be maintained by as few as 4 staff, and the savings are passed directly to you.
Aldi Prices: Private Labeling
Rather than pay the middleman significant portions of the profit, Aldi creates their own line of products. It’s a tactic you might be familiar with at bulk stores like Costco, but Aldi does it without asking you to buy a year’s worth of toilet paper at a time. But just like Costco, these private labels have been sourced to provide a quality product.
With 90% of their products coming from this private label, Aldi actually sells fewer products than the average grocery store. And if that sounds like a bad thing, ask yourself if you really need to see 20 different brands of peanut butter before you make your purchasing decision. By focusing on key products, they are able to eliminate the waste and pass on the savings.
Aldi Prices: Speed and Savings
Time is money and one of the most dreaded experiences of shopping for the consumer is the checkout line. Not only is the time you gasp when you see the total, but you might have spent 20 minutes waiting in line just to get there. No so at Aldi. One of the advantages of their private labeling is that they have plastered the packaging with bar codes. Which means the cashier spends little time looking it getting you checked out at a desirable pace.
In addition, their fruit and vegetables are sold in packages or as an individual unit rather than weight.
Consequently, there is no time lost weighing products and you as the consumer know exactly how much that product will cost before you hit the checkout line.
Truthfully, it’s not rocket science and the Aldi experience is so simply it is actually quite genius. They start with crafting their own line of top notch products and use as few staff as possible to sell them to you. Their use of box shelving may not be the most aesthetically pleasing in the industry, but I have rarely sat and admired the beauty of ramen noodles on a shelf. If you like money and good food, shopping at Aldi when ensure you walk away with a little bit more of both than you average shopping experience.