How to Shop At Aldi, For the Uninitiated

With bonus tips for sales-spotting and child-wrangling

I’m a regular Aldi shopper, cruising the aisles with my son almost every week now that I’m an independent adult who has her act together, or at least some semblance of such a thing. But my history with Aldi goes back a lot further — all the way to my preschool years when my mom first began shopping there. It’s safe to say I have insider knowledge at this point.

Aldi isn’t like your typical grocery store, where shopping carts are wild and free and cashiers slowly bag your items — which you chose, willy-nilly, from a staggering array of options — as you wait in an interminable line. Aldi is hip and European and fast-paced and clean and tiny, as dizzyingly foreign from the American supermarket experience as a corporate chain can be.

When I arrive at Aldi, I have a system. Load my two-year-old into the baby seat of a massive cart, place my stash of reusable bags on the seat beside the toddler, argue with my four-year-old about sitting in the cart (and eventually agree to let him walk alongside IF he doesn’t take things off the shelves), and stick my quarter into the cart’s greedy cash receptacle — oh, yes, you have to pay for the carts here, but you get your money back when you plug the cart back into the corral system before you leave. It keeps costs down (fewer stolen or lazily lost carts) because everyone wants their quarter back at the end of the trip. You actually can’t buy anything for 25 cents these days, but psychology is a funny thing.

Today, I am prepared with my own quarter. Other times, I’ve forgotten it and have had to scour the corral for a Good Samaritan cart. This is an unofficial bit of Aldi folklore — though most carts are returned according to the system and money accordingly pocketed, every so often someone decides to do a random act of kindness and leave a cart in the corral with the quarter still inserted.

Or maybe they just didn’t realize that you’re supposed to take the quarter out by connecting the cart’s chain to the one behind it in line.

Either way, it makes a nice fallback for those of us who occasionally forget to bring cold, hard cash.

(Of course, if no quarters and no freebie carts are available, a desperate shopper could always approach a departing fellow customer and offer a dollar in exchange for their cart, prompting the other — in many if not most cases — to graciously surrender the cart for free. This exchange, though good at restoring that ever-crumbling faith in humanity, is nonetheless embarrassing for the freeloader.)

At Aldi, shoppers bring their own reusable bags, to save the planet or save money — it’s not clear which. Suckers who didn’t know this are forced to shell out for admittedly sturdy paper sacks at the checkout, or roam the aisles looking for abandoned cardboard boxes in which to tote their comestibles. I watch as a man in flip-flops and sweats shifts lunchmeat and cheese from one arm to the other, freeing up a hand to grab coffee creamer, and gazing around uncertainly for a lone box. From my smug vantage point (pushing a cart loaded with cloth bags), I wish I could offer one, but I haven’t spotted any. It’s a busier morning than usual, and there are no boxes unclaimed.

As aforementioned, Aldi keeps their costs tamped down pretty low in comparison with other markets. (For reference, I usually spend around $100-$120 for a week’s worth of food, toiletries, and household goods like soap and paper towels, for a family of four.) In olden times, they offered only one kind of each item they carried. You want to buy sandwich cookies? OK. Here’s a generic 24-pack in plain chocolate with vanilla filling. That is the only flavor. That is the only size. Eat it and be thankful. Oreo who?

If you’re loyal to particular brand names, Aldi is probably not the one-stop shop for you. But if you’re okay with bedecking your pantry with Baker’s Corner flour or sugar and Happy Harvest canned vegetables, and filling your fridge with Countryside Creamery butter and Tuscan Garden salad dressing, you’ll quickly find that the taste quality is just the same as the fancier, more expensive varieties with recognizable and sometimes dastardly trademarks.

I should probably note that Aldi isn’t paying me to say any of this. If they’d like to fund my writing whimsy, I’m certainly open to corporate sponsorship (whether in cold hard cash or in a free supply of Benton’s cookies) but for now, I write only out of the goodness of my heart, and my desire that all humanity shall see and hear of the glory that is the Aldi supermarket chain.

That reminds me, I need to grab a 99-cent bag of baby carrots and a $2.45 jar of the best mild salsa my delicate wimpy taste buds have ever experienced.

As I shop for groceries, I prefer to stick to a prewritten list (see above notes regarding Thrift and Budgeting and Spending Less Than $150 Every Week). This resolve is usually thwarted at least once by what I like to call the Valley of Temptation aisle. Located near the back of the store, featuring BUY NOW! closeouts and extra-discounted extraordinary extra overstock, the Valley of Temptation aisle is very good at convincing me that I absolutely NEED to buy a lawn sprinkler for a lawn I do not possess. Today, I manage to avoid the siren call of the autumn-scented candles and frosted Halloween giant cookie kits, and succumb only to an adorable egg slicer shaped like a cartoon hen.

…Which is slightly disturbing imagery, if you think about it too hard.

One more note, before we proceed to checkout: though the imported German foods usually featured on aisle endcaps are certainly not as cheap as many other Aldi branded goods, I have yet to be disappointed when I pick up a new-to-me treat. The Deutsche Küche cornichons with herbs (a savory pickle) are a favorite of my husband’s, and I am probably going to yield some day soon to the irresistible magnetism of the frozen Bavarian soft pretzels. Today, I content myself with a box of raspberry jaffa cakes (a seasonal item usually only available around the time of Oktoberfest).

The speed with which the Aldi checkout line functions is bewildering to a first-timer, a marvel to the newly initiated, and blasé to an old salt like me. As the next customer in line unloads their groceries onto the belt, the cashier — lightning-fast, robotic-precise — sweeps the items over the scanner and into a second, waiting cart on the other side of the register. Once the transaction is complete, that customer’s old cart is brought forward to house the groceries of the next player in the game.

Got it? Hold onto it. There’ll be a quiz at the end.

Babies strapped into cart seats complicate the issue. It slows the whole clockwork process down if a parent has to haul a struggling chubby bundle from one cart to the next, transferring sippy cup, toy, and handle cover as well. I brace myself to ask if the usual rigmarole can be upended to inconvenience the entire line because of my inconsiderate reproductive choices, but the cashier — a man who is new to the store, but apparently old hat to this kind of problem — is one step ahead of me. “Leave the baby where he is,” he calls down the conveyor belt, and pushes the extra cart aside.

I tumble my groceries onto the belt as fast as I can, trying not to keep the people behind me waiting. I shouldn’t have worried. The cashier moves my groceries back into my original cart as quickly as if there’d been no break in the action, and (as I’ve been implicitly trained to do) I insert my credit card into the reader before he’s scanned the last item. In what feels like a few seconds, I’ve paid, gotten my receipt, and moved on to bag my own groceries at the counter along the far wall.

I could go on and on with this exercise in writing about a mundane weekly mission, but I’ll save the enthralling process of unloading groceries with a hungry toddler in tow for another day.

I promised a quiz at the end, so here goes (it’s a short one, don’t worry): are you an Aldi shopper? If not, has this piece convinced you to become one? And if you don’t have an Aldi in your neighborly vicinity, how do you cope with the tears of grief that bedew your pillow at night? I could use some tips, in case my store ever closes.

A version of this post was originally published on Medium.com.