Our First Experience at Aldi

I've seen and heard several people talking about Aldi lately and what a great deal they get on groceries.  One Sunday afternoon Mark and I decided to see what it was all about.  It goes a little something like this:

When we pulled up, I remembered that we were supposed to bring our own bags. but noticed I had forgotten them. Ok, no big deal, we'll still go in and see what this is about.

Mark walks up to get our buggy and realizes they are chained together.
Some lady saw Mark and told him you have to pay a quarter to get a cart. WTH?
Mark turned around and was ready to leave. Laughing, I encouraged to stay.

As we are cracking up because of the buggy incident, we clearly were Aldi virgins, we enter the store.

Immediately we realize everything is in warehouse pallets,again  no big deal. We also don't recognize any of the brands.

So we continued on just to see if there was something that we needed. We made it to the cereal and breakfast items. The breaking point was when we saw off-brand poptarts and Mark looked at me and said "honey, there are just some things you can't substitute." He is used to Kellogg's and was really ready to bail now.

Again, we continued on and actually did find some nacho chips, canned goods for soups, taco shells and a frozen pizza that Mark is still scared to eat.

We made it to the checkout and had a moment of panic when they didn't take plastic. We NEVER have cash but luckily this day, for some reason, we did. So we had just enough to pay for our groceries.

Remember we had no bags, so all this piddly stuff was just in our cart. We take our groceries out and load them into our truck where they were slung around the whole way home. We returned our cart AND got our quarter back.

The experience was nothing like we had imagined and I'm not sure I really saved anything on my grocery bill but it was worth the laughs and funny experience I shared with my husband.

And no wonder they can sell things for cheap, they have no expense of bags, they charge you to use the cart, no real stocking labor and no credit card fees.

Maybe one day we'll return and when we do we'll look like old pros.