Lidl – Gilmerton

Maybe it’s because I’m married to a Glaswegian, but I like this Lidl.
In Lidl in the city centre, I seem to recall it was mostly frozen meals, ice cream, and other frozen desserts. There wasn’t much in terms of fresh food. In this Lidl, there’s loads of cheap fresh veg, good quality meats, and lots of stuff that we would ordinarily buy in other supermarkets where we would pay more. It’s my understanding that their produce and meat are Red Tractor rated which means that they’re high quality, and sourced whenever possible from Scotland. Not bad for a cheap-​o bargain store!
The only problem is that when we first started coming here it was kind of like going to Costco «ooh, that’s cheap, let’s buy it!» «ooh, I might be able to use that at some point but more importantly it’s so cheap that I want it right now!» and impulse bought a lot of crap. The Man bought some sort of pneumatic drill (whatever that is) without some air pressure thing that you need to make it work. D’oh. He also bought a mitre saw which was apparently a great deal but also means that he attempts to mitre every bit of wood in the house.
So, we learned to take our shopping list with us and try to only buy what’s on it, topping up anything that couldn’t be found with a Tesco/Sainsbury’s shop during the week.
I’ll put Lidl’s main benefit into perspective — there are two of us in the household, I cook dinner every night and cook meals to bring for lunches as well. S0, that’s 20 meals a week. Our weekly shop last week was £37 and opposed to an average of £50 when we shop at a bigger name store. That’s me sold.