Serioisly some bomb stuff and brands you cant get at walmart and the like, often cheaper and higher quality than name brand shit
According to the founding myth, the original inspiration behind Aldi were military logistics. The whole thing was designed to be efficient.
Only stock predictably fast-selling stuff, for easier logistics and less warehousing. Don’t stock wares into shelves, just dump the whole pallet or box on the floor to save on labor costs. Sell only your own generic brands so you can dump your supplier for a cheaper one. No big advertising campaigns, just print some leaflets and distribute them yourself. And then they massively expanded to benefit from economies of scale.
In Germany, in response to this, the competition created their own Aldi-style discounters with mostly identical prices and on average roughly equivalent quality, which are now everywhere. The other successful strategy is what Rewe did: This supermarket chain copied some of Aldi’s approach to cost-cutting, and is now a bit of a hybrid between a traditional supermarket and a discounter. Importantly, they offer similar price and quality own-brand product for most things an Aldi would sell, while also selling more expensive alternatives and having a larger inventory. Why go to Aldi when you can get same price/quality as Aldi, but also this thing and that other thing Aldi doesn’t have? No need to go to multiple stores.
Meanwhile Aldi and Lidl have expanded their inventory and become more supermarket-like themselves (my guess is computerized logistics made this easier to do cheaply, and they have to compete with Rewe).
One other thing that happened is that these very large chains can squeeze their suppliers with their massive buying power. They basically suck all the profit from the supply chain for the benefit of just a couple of superrich families (though this also happened in other markets with e.g. Walmart in the US.) Oh and they are militantly anti-union, but again the whole industry is.
We don’t have Aldi here, but Lidl is my go to grocery store, especially after they did the ultimate move of dropping the price of every vegan product.
You really can’t beat Lidl when your shopping list is something like:
- Bread
- Cheese
- Milk
- Eggs
- Kayak
- Plasma cutter
The staff all seem pretty relaxed too, the cashiers have seats and chat to pretty much everyone, but especially the older regulars. I know they squeeze their supply chain hard, but from the customer perspective it’s a pretty good experience.
Aldi and Lidl are my go to places to shop. They have a surprising number of vegan options
It’s cheap as fuck and they let the cashiers sit down, which is incredibly rare in amerikkka
I don’t have personal experience, but from what I gather they work their employees to the bone. Everybody in there is expected to do all the jobs at a fast pace. The cashiers are expected to work incredibly fast, and if the register is slow, they close it down even for a couple of minutes and have the employees do something else. Pay (in Germany) is above average for cashiers, but there’s been some serious union-busting fuckery at Aldi and Lidl that’s actually quite shocking by German standards. Lidl (maybe Aldi as well?) are surprisingly in favor of a higher minimum wage, because they need less workers than the competition thanks to labor-saving procedures, and that would give them a competitive edge. It sounds alienating as fuck.
