Best Store In Town

I've been meaning to write this post for a while and I think today should be the day.

I love Aldi. This store is AWESOME! A certain large chain store claims to always have the lowest prices but they don't have ANYTHING on Aldi. Oh, sure, sometimes I can go to that store and get great deals and that store also has some things that I cannot get at Aldi.

That said, Aldi has consistently better prices on produce, milk, eggs and meat. The first time we went to Aldi we had a coupon for $5 off our $25 purchase... We struggled to spend $25 and we left with 4 lb of butter, 3 dozen eggs, popsicles, milk, 7 bell peppers, stir-fry vegetables and more. One thing to keep in mind, don't expect to find name brands at Aldi. If you MUST have Wheat Thins you will not find them there, however, their brand of thin wheat crackers tastes just as good! I don't really have brand loyalties but there are some things that always seem to be better in the name brand so I was a little wary to try some of their brands. So far, we haven't been disappointed.

Another thing you should know about Aldi: they have cut out all the unnecessary bits to save you money. You rent your cart for a quarter and when you return it you get your quarter back. This is how they ensure that carts are not left in the parking lot, nobody has to go out an collect them from far corners or from neighboring stores and people rarely leave with the cart unless they are going to return with it to shop again. If you didn't bring your own bags/boxes you can purchase bags for your groceries or you can select boxes from a bin of empty cases. You bag/box your own groceries. The checkers are extremely efficient and all groceries are returned to an empty cart. You then take your grocies over to a counter to organize and box them up yourself.

There's no way that I can really tell you how much I love this store. I actually enjoy boxing up my own groceries because so few baggers do it right anyway. There are new things to find every time I go and I now have no problem spend over $25 because I'm buying almost all of our groceries. Eveyone should have a store like this!