ALDI Grocery Store

I have been to Aldsi’s five times now and am pleased with what I have bought. Each week brings me in with more ideas of what to to try out. Love their fresh fruit and produce and being newly retired am eager to save money and am willing to become organized as what is needed on my part to be most successful. So I’m getting my bags qued up and am learning… My goal is to cut down WMart and Sams to once a month and I am well on my way (as I am very pleased). Husband is a believer as I show him the individual prices on the fresh items. My goal is to reduce the amount of prepackaged, convenience items (such as cut up fresh fruit bowls) we are buying. Their Berryhill Hazelnut spread dipped in the Fit & Active Low Fat Granola is to die for…

Aldi is a very efficient (and spartan) discount grocery store. They are rightly giving existing grocery stores (including Walmart super-​centers) a very formidable competitor, both in terms of price and shopper satisfaction.
Their stores are small, but offer a full line of groceries, including fresh meat, fresh fruit & veggies, and refrigerated/​frozen foods. Thus they are totally different from convenience stores having a couple of refrigerator units and selling overpriced junk food.
It seems that 95% of their products are Aldi’s private label generics… but as are many generics these-​days, they seem to me as good as the national brands.
Aldi has 2 «innovations» to reduce costs… which some people (and reviewers) get confused, so here is the way it works
1. To RENT a shopping cart requires a quarter dollar coin. The coin is returned when you return the shopping cart to the corral. This innovation keeps the parking lot looking uncluttered.
2. Aldi does not provide shopping bags. They SELL a variety of paper, plastic, and cloth bags. Their paper and plastic bags are right by the check-​out register, and are often bought because the shopper (including me) forgot their own re-​usable bags. Note that Aldi’s plastic bags are much stronger and larger than regular (super-​thin) grocery store plastic bags. When I remember them, Aldi’s plastic bags are reusable for dozens of trips.

What people don’t realize is a lot of their products are actually brand named. They contract with some of the big named companies and send their own packaging and labels. This is what people don’t know about the «store brands» is often you are are getting a name brand.
I am from California– born and raised and used to stores like Trader Joes, Whole Foods etc. I was a bit of a snob, but after trying this ALDI’s I have become a ALDI’s snob!
Oh their Choceur chocolate is to die for– almost as good as Sees, chips great, happy farms cheese the best– I am a very picky about cheese and took me 2 years to find cheese that tastes as good as California cows cheese :), cereal don’t much care for, their brand of gatorade my Daughter loves– she is a gatorade snob too, water I put up against crystal geyser and could not taste the difference.
What I did is put their products up against the name brand ones for taste tests and I was pleasantly surprised to see the ALDi brand win out most of the time.
Please give this store a try.
PLus if you don’t like it you bring back the unused portion and get your money back and another product for FREE!!! How many other stores do that. I have brought back maybe 6 products over time that were food related– cereal-​etc.

This was a decent market with tons of «knock off» items at reasonable prices. We only found a very small selection of name brand goods, but we weren’t unhappy with the things we bought there.
You have to pay to get the cart off, so if you’re like me just take a cloth grocery bag and save your quarter (s). You also have to bag it yourself, which is not too awful strange, but worth mentioning in my opinion.
The biggest detraction is that they only take cash, food stamps, or debit. We like to use a card to get rewards, so if our bank starts a rewards with them I suppose we’d be okay from that.