A Valentine To ALDI

So this isn't a review of any ALDI food product, it's a review of my local ALDI store. I feel like I beat up on ALDI a lot and I want to say a few nice things about them, because they do do a lot of things pretty well. So, Ladies and Gentlemen I give you...ALDI, How Do I love Thee?

Be Mine?

Okay, we all know how tough I am on ALDI. But there's a lot to love too. What follows after the jump, a list of things I think you do right, ALDI.




Let me count the (top 10) ways.

1. Specially Selected Sea Salt Caramels. These are amazing. ALDI, you should contract whoever makes these to make all your products.

2. Quarter for a cart, cart rental. I love pulling into the ALDI parking lot and not dodging carts or worrying that some lazy a-hole is just going to let one roll around the lot banging into my car.

3. Clean stores. It's always clean at my local ALDI. Like ridiculously clean. And everything is in the right place. Ghetto Kroger, you could learn something here.

4. Nice workers. Contrary to the reviews I read on pissedconsumer.com, I've found EVERYONE who works at ALDI to be super nice.

5. Low, low, sometimes ridiculously low prices. Sure, sometimes the stuff is a bust but it's really cheap and if you hate it, you really can take it back and get your money back.

6. Price tags. Almost, like 99.9% of the time, there's a price tag hanging over the product. And it's big enough that I don't have to squint to see what it's going to cost me.

7. Crazy fast check out people. These people do not f*ck around. They are blazing fast. Even when the line is pretty long it moves and in some cases they'll even temporarily open another one to make it even faster.

8. They try. ALDI could just shlep out your normal groceries and call it day but they don't. They really try to include some weird new items - ALL THE TIME. Every week is a new adventure which keeps this blog rolling. It doesn't always work, but they try. Kudos.

9. No free bags / box recycling. While I'm certain this is just to keep prices low, selling people bags seems to cut down on the amount of useless plastic bags dumped in the environment. BONUS - they give away the display boxes to pack your groceries in which keeps them out of ALDI's trash and I naively like to think poeple toss them in their recycling bins when they get home. Oh, and a shout out to the city of Atlanta for giving us all those giant recycling bins making it easy to not fill up our landfills. Thanks, Kasim.

10.  This blog. ALDI has provided us with a never ending supply of things to write about. Some good, a few great, some terrible. And thanks to the three of you who read this mess.

Happy Valentine's Day everybody! I'm off to cook the Lady a special ALDI based Valentine's dinner.

XOXO,
The Gentleman