Except that I probably haven’t weighed a fruit or vegetable in years. I don’t care how much my five apples or celery stalk weigh. I’m slightly more likely to care about the weights of bulk items, but even then 98% of the time I’m just eyeballing it to see if it will fit in the bin back home.
Isn’t Aldi the one that is like a dollar store, off brand stock, etc? Kind of down market? Doesn’t strike me as like TJ’s at all. Though TJ’s did get rid of scales and charges by the unit for fruit, and sells other things pre-packaged. So no scales, but their is some waste from their selling everything as a unit approach.
No. Unless your dollar stores are a lot nicer than our pound shops. 
Like Lidl, they have a lot of their own-brands - which are generally produced by exactly the same people as the brand names, just stuck into different packaging.
Those products are cheaper, yes but consistently win awards.
In blind tastings, they don’t necessarily beat the top brand name but they tend to come in second or third while being a lot cheaper and scoring comfortably better than most of the “good” brands that aren’t the brand.
So for example, their ketchup won’t beat say Heinz (for UK purposes) but it will beat all the rest and costs much, much less.
Depends what you mean.
No more so than, say, Walmart.
Judge for yourself.
Certainly in Europe, their special offer items (in the US they seem to be called Aldi Finds) - tools, sports equipment, etc. always get very solid reviews. Again, usually not as good as the ‘best’ item of that kind but perfectly workable and very good for the price.
1 Like
Interesting, The Aldis I’ve been in in Australia and Germany were kind of annoying stores. Sort of unpleasant, with bargain bins and dead eyed staff. Perhaps I’m misremembering?
Woolworths Metro stores in Australia are much more like TJs than Aldis.
That would be Aldi Nord in our parts.
There is another Aldi and it is marketed to a lower income market but isn’t on the west coast.
Depends when you went. They certainly used to be very industrial in aesthetic. Very much, “you’re buying in bulk and you want it cheap”. So yes, a bit pound shoppy.
But they’re now much more like a standard supermarket and standard supermarkets have become more like them.
Is it say, Waitrose or Morrisons? No. Do they have a nice pretend butcher’s counter? Do they have a nice fake bakery?
Some Lidl’s do. Aldi, no. You’ll get your meat pre-packed and like it. And you will like it.
Is it a pleasurable shopping experience - no, I can’t say that.
But when is going to a supermarket a pleasurable experience? About the best you can hope for is to get in and out with what you wanted reasonably unscathed.
I would dispute that Aldi Nord or Süd are marketed at different income segments. They have different regional areas and some slightly different product lines but other than that they’re pretty much the same.
The US is a bit odd in that Aldi Süd is there as Aldi and Aldi Nord is there as Trader Joes. Everywhere else is either Nord or Süd.
1 Like
Yeah, I think that is a primary reason I can’t think of them as being similar to Trader Joes. Trader Joe’s sells a lot of pre-prepared food - lots of shortcuts for cooking, as well as staples like fruit and veg. It is not a bulk food store.
1 Like
To be honest neither is Aldi (or Lidl) in UK. They LOOK like bulk discount stores 'cos they used to use - and some still do - industrial racking instead of nice ‘proper’ supermarket shelving. So the aesthetic is a bit ‘cheap and cheerful (and ruthlessly efficient)’ just as pound shops and bulk outlets are, but the products are supermarket comparable. It’s just that if a large Tesco carries say (making it up) 10,000 lines, an Aldi or Lidl probably has 2,000 lines. No “which of these 27 identical soap powder brands shall I buy” but more “here’s some good and cheap soap powder - one or two brands maybe and likely some brand you’ve never heard of, even cheaper”
1 Like
Well, if it works for you… 
And it would work for me too, and it did back in the days when they weighed at the checkout. I rarely bothered to weigh what I selected.
But some people want precise quantities, and perhaps more importantly others want to know how much what they put in a bag will cost them, before they get to the checkout - especially people on a tight budget - for these people, self-weighing/printing a label at the veg counter may be a great benefit.
(Though I’ve never actually seen someone weigh and then remove some in order to hit a given cost - but I guess it may happen.)
1 Like
Well, in Marin, “biodegradable” bags can’t be put in the curbside composting bins because the Waste Management facility they are trucked to is certified organic and won’t take them. So, instead, they just go into landfill and produce methane (also not good). So, at the moment, biodgradable plastic seems like it may not be quite ready for prime time and reusable bags are a much more environmentally friendly choice.
2 Likes
Also do not put pet waste in the compost bin. Marin can’t handle that or biodegradable pet waste bags.
1 Like
I used to have some reusable produce bags that had the tare weight printed on them, and at least some would subtract that out. I wouldn’t care when buying apples, but it was useful when buying spices and other high-unit-price-small-volume items
Fairfax County recently made a big push to get us to stop putting plastic bags in the recycling bins. The plastic gets caught in the sorting machines, so apparently everything we thought we were recycling for the past nine years was pulled and just tossed into the landfill or burned. Now that we know that, we have been just tossing everything unsorted and unbagged into the bin. But they don’t take plastic bags of any kind, but the grocery store does. I don’t know what they do with it, but I have been trying to cut down on the number of single use plastics when I can.
1 Like
Various agencies in Marin have been doing community outreach on reducing contamination in the recycle bin and loose plastic bags are apparently a huge, expensive problem that jam convenor machinery causing work stoppages that cost thousands and have to be melted out with torches. 
Plastic bags fit into what they call “Wishful Recycling”…something with all manner of things tossed into the recycle bins. Not recyclable: Styrofoam. Paper cups (they have plastic linings). Milk/OJ/etc. cartons. Diapers. ( what are people thinking?) YMMV.
1 Like
Pizza boxes. Who knew?
But weirdly, you can compost them…
Only clean paper for the recycle bin. Which means that single stream recycling BS, because it insures that the paper is going to get dirty when it’s tossed in with all the bottles and cans.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
