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Shopping at Aldi could be a good way to save money on your grocery bills. Aldi is known for its competitive prices. And if you have a larger household, buying food at Aldi could be a less expensive way to keep your fridge stocked.
But Aldi isn’t necessarily the best grocery store for everyone. Here are a few signs you shouldn’t shop there.
1. You only have time to go to one grocery store per week
If you work a demanding job or have a busy schedule, then you may only have enough time to hit one grocery store in person during the week. If that’s the case, you probably don’t want that one store to be Aldi.
One pitfall of shopping at Aldi is that the selection tends to be inconsistent. Aldi doesn’t fill its shelves with national brands, like most major supermarket chains. Instead, it specifically stocks lesser-known brands that don’t cost a lot, so it can pass savings onto customers.
While you may get lucky and sometimes find everything on your shopping list at Aldi, that often won’t be the case. So if you need a one-stop shop for all of your weekly essentials, you’re better off sticking with a traditional supermarket.
2. You have picky eaters at home
As just mentioned, Aldi’s lesser-known brands are behind the savings you might enjoy at the store. But if you have picky eaters at home, buying products they’re not familiar with could lead to a lot of wasted food — and wasted money.
It’s one thing to buy pasta from Aldi if it’s cheaper than buying it at your regular supermarket. If you use the same sauce you always do, chances are, the people in your household won’t be any the wiser. But be careful when buying things like bread, granola bars, or other items with a taste of their own at Aldi if they’re not the brands your finicky eaters already know and love.
3. You tend to give in to impulse buys
If you’ve ever shopped at Aldi, you may have noticed that its “Aldi Finds” aisle isn’t stocked with food so much as seasonal or rotating products. These might include kitchen items, home decor, and even apparel.
But there’s a reason that section of the store is also called the Aldi “Aisle of Shame.” Shoppers tend to ignore their budgets when they enter that aisle and load up on the many fun products it contains.
If you easily fall victim to impulse purchases, then you may want to avoid shopping at Aldi altogether. You can tell yourself you’ll stay away from that specific aisle. But chances are, you won’t. So if money is tight and you can’t afford extra spending, you may want to stick to a grocery store that pretty much only sells food and household essentials.
There’s nothing wrong with shopping at Aldi if you have the flexibility to stop by multiple supermarkets, your family isn’t super picky about food, and you’re good at avoiding impulse buys or you have wiggle room in your budget for them. Otherwise, you may want to avoid Aldi at all costs.
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Where’s the money trail here? Has the lust to create click-bait content reached the point of representing objective qualities of a successful low-cost grocer as signs one should not shop there? First, what readers need such drivel as the three reasons, reasons anyone able to walk through Aldi’s doors twice will already know! Yes, it’s a small grocer that has fewer items than the biggies; yes, it ads revenue to the industry-average of less than 2% profit margin on groceries by selling special-buy items (which it identifies as such in its ads) — which I happen to enjoy shopping. But these qualities of Aldi are on public display, not hidden, not minimized. And the title of this piece is absolutely ethically hollow: I should “not set foot in [my] local Aldi”? That kind of (here fake) warning serves readers only if there’s imminent danger, such as a store’s fixtures including sharp edges known to injure shoppers or their children or a store’s deserved reputation for treating shoppers poorly. No such danger exists in any Aldi’s I’ve shopped; in fact, the opposite is my normal experience: because Aldi stores are small and because it seems all employees do lots of things, including cashiering, cleaning, stocking, and helping customers, I find them more reliably helpful than any number of Walmart associates (especially those yellow-jacketed self-checkout observers).
I have no respect and in fact disdain for the anonymous “content creators” publishing such worthless pieces — and, Motely Fool and Retirely, your running such crap drops you to the bottom of my list of trusted sources.