Save a Lot's packaging and bags are extremely poor quality. Try dropping one of their yogurt containers (when it's not past its expiry date or moldy before that) or walking a distance with one of their paper bags.

Neither of those are in rural areas. Heck, people I know in urban areas are still excited when the Aldi's come to town.

There’s one in the town of 20,000 next to me (15 minutes away) along with two other grocery stores and a Walmart.

There’s nothing in my town of 2,000 of course, though I believe there’s a Dollar-Something in another local town.

I mean, nexuses of grocery stores exist in rural areas. But 15 minutes is pretty close for such a town. 5% of rural people live in a food desert. Meanwhile you probably live in Ohio or Illinois, because if you look at the Aldi map, that seems to be where most rural Aldis are. (WI and FL are the next guesses.) But, with three exceptions in NM and a bunch in Cali, there are no Aldis west of Dallas. That's a huge area.

Minnesota, actually.

For what it’s worth I don’t shop there. The one time I did I was unimpressed - that was the first time I’ve ever seen fruit flies in a grocery store. I also needed to go to my regular grocery store after and it was a huge timesuck.

Also, you're implying (2,000; 20,000) that you live in a rural area (that was the topic.) But there are a lot of suburbs of Minneapolis that seem to fit that bill.

I found Aldi to be perfectly fine, although you had to want whatever random stuff you got outside of a few fresh fruits. No flies at the ones I've been to, but that could just be because it's closer to a distribution hub? MN is the extreme ccorner of the area they serve.

The first model of the recent generation was 2005, so it could be a 16 year old car. A quick check on Autotrader shows these cars selling for about $6500.