That was my thought as well. I live in Denmark, I think ALDI is one of our least efficient supermarket chains which is why they’ve had to fill the niche of low-quality-low-price.

I never knew American supermarkets were so terrible. I mean, you read about the Amazon grocery stores and get the picture of Europe being far behind.

I think ALDI being low quality is mostly a myth, just assumed because of their low prices. The only thing I don't but there is meat, greatly prefer the local butcher.

In some cases the cheaper Aldi products is the same as the more expensive product from another store.

When I was younger there was no difference between olé’s chocolate and Leo with the exception of the package. It was the same taste and factory producing them.

If you have a thing for Girl Scout cookies, the Aldi generics taste just the same for a fraction of the price

There are two ALDIs as article mentions and they differ in quality: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/63hce5/aldi_nord_bl...

Aldi Süd seems to be more preffered, however I personally prefer Lidl which is based on similar efficiency concepts.

> There are two ALDIs as article mentions and they differ in quality

At least in Germany, where there exist both Aldi and Aldi Süd, quality is not a trait that people would claim that these two differ (they would rather say that the difference lies in assortment).

You are right, I worded it wrongly. Unfortunatelly I can't edit or delete my prev post.

According to wikipedia:

> Internationally, Aldi Nord operates in Denmark, France, the Benelux countries, Portugal, Spain and Poland, while Aldi Süd operates in Ireland, Great Britain, Hungary, Switzerland, Australia, China, Italy, Austria and Slovenia. Both Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd also operate in the United States with 1,600 stores as of 2017.

Aldi Denmark is the worst Aldi I've ever been to.

Aldi made quite a lot of those things standard in Europe.

This. Aldi was founded in 1946, and many of its efficiency-oriented practices were later adopted by other supermarkets in Europe[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi

Albert Heijn started the whole self-serving thing in 1952 (and was founded in 1887!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Heijn

And in the chart in the article you can see that they (AHold) are really big in the US, too. Didn't know that.

Euro here, I don't think chasing the bottom of the barrel is worth celebrating. Also, Germany has the worst standard of grocery stores (I'd prefer grocery stores in general from neighboring France, Switzerland etc) due to their assortment and quality of products - and Aldi and Lidl are responsible for that.

Cheap medium-quality food is not really just an Aldi/Lidl thing, it's culturally a German thing. Germans just don't care about food quality as much as e.g. French people, so competition values price over quality. I'm German and also this way, that's why I'm generally happy to shop in Aldi/Lidl.

It's also diet and food choices. For example I shop in Aldi here in Ireland and this week a standard problem happened. I went with a list of ingredients to make an Indian curry from scratch and only managed to get about 70 percent of what I needed there. The same thing has happened before when doing a Thai or Chinese meal. Comparatively a normal sizwd Tesco would nearly always have everything. In particular Aldi would have a lot less options for things like spices etc.

One thing I do find funny though is the Lidl (and Aldi) practice of selling loads of random items in one or two of there aisles. Many is the funny story I or friends have of going into the shop for milk and bread and coming out with a unicycle, power welder and night vision goggles instead :)

That's my experience as well as an Aldi customer in the USA. I just go to see what they have rather than with a specific list in mind because their selection is quite sparse and at least 20-25% of it changes regularly.

At least here in Houston my Aldi is in the middle of an economically depressed area, so despite the poor selection they're still better than the small convenience stores which have little to no fresh food of any kind. Everything is prepackaged.

I’ve heard They call it three tiered shopping here in Germany - 70% in Aldi, the rest in an upper level discounter (sic) and the delicious or rare stuff at a specialist store or a marketplace.

That would explain why Aldi can be successful in the USA. Even after more than a decade living in more than one states, and I am still not used to the generally poor quality of fresh produce.

Seasonal gardening and local farmers help, but it's not cheap at all. I grew with up with seasonal farmer's market having higher quality at the same or even slightly lower price than the grocery store, but not in the US, higher quality but at fancy price, although they receive the same subsidies and it does cost them that much more.

Germans who can afford it buy only basic stuff at discounters. Fresh vegetables are bought at traditional grocery stores or markets, bread is bought at a bakery, and meat at a butcher, etc. though these latter two professions are heavily in decline in the last 20 years. Comparisons with France and Italy are unfair; these are in a league of their own with respect to food quality (at a price, though).

Good point, actually

Living in Switzerland, I often choose to shop for groceries in Germany! Better prices and (much) better range in Hieber. (Although agree that France usually has both beaten.)

Assuming you mean the Hieber in Weil am Rhein, they really do offer a superb shopping experience, but it's vastly above the standard. I wish more supermarkets would adopt the self-scanning devices, it's perfect when buying single-digit items.

In Lithuania food is so expensive that there's a joke that it's cheaper to drive to Germany to shop. That's a bit of a hyperbole (German border is about 1000km away), but it's definitely cheaper to shop in Poland.

In Poland it's pretty common to do shopping in Germany, if you live close to the border.

It's pretty ridiculous how in that region, as you drive south the average wage increases, but the food prices decrease.

I don’t know about the quality it’s not particularly bad as they also have a brands but Lidl is certainly not all about efficiency. Not those here in Belgium regardless where you go to the Lidl.

I really dislike going there. They have 8 cash registers and open only on or two. The reason being that they are understaffed and employees have a gazillion of tasks: baking, unloading, stock, cash register,...

Haha except in EU it's not a quarter, it's 2 euros! And tons of carts still hang around abandoned with 2-coins in them.

In Germany most newer carts take 50ct, 1€, and 2€ coins. The older ones took 1€ (or 1DM before the introduction of the Euro). Abandoned carts on the premises aren't much of a thing anywhere I lived except for maybe the odd lazy person with a plastic coin in it (some.people carry those around e.g. on their key chain for when they don't have coins on hand).

The plastic coins are given out by the shops themselves.

I usually keep one in my pockets, not really out of laziness, I just don't use coins for much these days.

Any of the ones that take a 1 eur coin will take a 20c one as well. Which is good, because there are always a bunch of them in the cup holders.

I’ve never seen this anywhere, ever?

And honestly, if there was two euros going for simply moving a trolley back to its parking zone, I suspect you would have shoppers who found it worth doing that for all of the free carts, let alone people with less money coming in to collect.

Sometimes there are homeless people loitering in the parking lots offering to take your empty cart to pocket the coin in them.

Indeed. The only few cases are for trolleys left kilometers away.

Don't you have homeless people? ;) In Poland they are quite good at collecting coins from those (and also collecting cans).

What I more often see than carts with coins lying around is people straight-up stealing the carts. If they live in nearby streets they just push the cart home and then use it to carry or store stuff around the yard. You can see several such carts in the streets surrounding supermarkets.

And in Sweden we're removing the coins since the customers no longer carry cash...