Et Tu, Aldi?

It was the day that I stopped forever my weekly visit to Kroger.

The COVID-19 epidemic was underway, and we were advised to stay away from each other. It was cold, and the forecast was that an ice storm would hit about sundown (made an hour earlier each year for no good reason by the switch to standard time).

I wanted to nip into the local Kroger store for a few items, most especially Campbell’s Minestrone soup. (I should have been alarmed — I get a hankering for Campbell’s Minestrone soup only when I’m about to get sick and sure enough, by nightfall I was.) Its parking lot was full — not unusual when winter weather is coming — but I did not expect that the place would be filled with angry, confused people.

Kroger had decided that now was the ideal time to rearrange everything. Now people, in a hurry to get home before the storm and advised by the government (from whom we were inexplicably getting our medical advice) to avoid crowds, were packed in the place, unable to find anything. I decided that now would be a good time to check out the Aldi store across the street, and I’ve shopped at Aldi ever since. I believe that Kroger thinks I’m dead — I no longer get mailers from them. Which if I did would go unused, even the coupons for a free jar of peanuts.

I’d been in Aldi before, over the years. It had a certain quirky charm, with groceries carefully packaged and named to resemble well known brands. It had struck me as a store exclusively selling counterfeit goods. (That is less the case now, due to at least one lawsuit. It now even has some name brands. And some of its house brands are pretty good.)

The center aisle was what I thought of as a permanent flea market. There are signs all over saying that what’s in stock today may not be tomorrow; I think that this applies specifically to the flea market selections. The warning encourages impulse purchases. For some reason this has resulted in more things I wish I had gotten than things I got and regretted having purchased. Having said that, I’ll note that I’ve gotten a few items from that aisle that I’m glad to have purchased. For instance, two or three coffee-can-sized space heaters. Just the thing for chilly days when you don’t want to turn up the thermostat. Or the $15 stick blender. I don’t know why I decided to purchase it, but I did, and it rescued me when my expensive Braun stick blender began to leak, sucking the liquid up into its plastic shaft and spewing it in unhappily altered form back into my protein drink. I use a stick blender daily. The item from the Aldi flea market aisle saved the day for me, and has been reliable ever since.

I did not get the coffee-can-sized humidifier, because either it wouldn’t humidify much or would would have to be refilled every 15 minutes. Likewise the one-person rice cooker, to which I was drawn for its cuteness but quickly realized its impracticality.

My one regret is the sweatpants. Oh, they’re heavy and comfortable. The pockets are strong as is the elastic in the waistband. Just about perfect in every way except one: minutes after you put them on, even right out of the dryer, they begin to smell bad. After noticing this I looked at the sewn-in label. They were made in Bangladesh from 75 percent recycled polyester. Polyester absorbs odors that do not wash out, ever. Having seen more than one documentary showing armies of underprivileged rag-picking children climbing the piles of trash in South Asian dumps, as sorry as I am for them and their tragic plight I do not want to wear anything made from what they found, especially odor-retaining polyester. Thrown-away polyester might be profitably made into many useful things, but clothing is not among them.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself. The day Kroger demonstrated disregard for its customers I crossed the street to Aldi and have been going there ever since. There are so many Subarus in the parking lot one starts to think it’s a health-food store. Which it certainly isn’t, though it does carry some things that have health-food aspects. For instance, its tomato paste contains tomatoes and citric acid. That’s it.

One gets used to Aldi, learns it, as one must. For instance, there is a deposit on shopping carts, just like the favorite Russian store of the reprehensible Tucker Carlson, except that Aldi has been doing it forever. The idea has been that by making you put a quarter at risk, you’ll be more likely to return the cart to its row in front of the building and get your quarter back (a lesson for football teams?) than leave it in the parking lot. A common small act of kindness is for people to give their carts to arriving shoppers and not accept their quarter. It’s in keeping with the feeling of the place, which is sort of harmlessly subversive.

One learns which items are good (the kettle potato chips, the “Woven Cracker” imitation Triscuits, the fruit juice, the fairly cheap eggs, the frozen vegetables, some of the produce — I got peaches not long ago that included one whence an earwig crawled when I cut it open) and which ones are to be avoided (the tough and tasteless “Thin Wheat” crackers, the sometimes rancid mixed nuts, and the processed meats). As with any other grocery store, one learns where the landmines are.

And over the years I’ve become very comfortable with Aldi. Oh, and you should bring your own grocery bags. They’ll sell you some if you don’t, and the paper bags they sell you are heavier than the ones you’ll get for free at other grocery stores, but not having your own makes you feel as if you hadn’t done your homework, a feeling I know well.

(Athens, Ohio, the locus of all the above, passed an anti-plastic-bag law a while back. The state government after a few weeks pronounced the ban illegal. It’s still in court, though it’s reported the city won’t appeal its latest loss. Whether the state action brought more people to Aldi in protest is unknown to me. Anyway, I got these and they’ve held up well. They are three to a package. I gave one to a neighbor who has only one hand, so it worked out well. And the bags are very sturdy.)

So my trips to Aldi became a comfortable and efficient part of my routine.

But then on Monday I made my weekly trip there.

At the front sliding door I was met by an older gent. I didn’t know him but Aldi is an informal place.

“Have you been here lately?” he asked. “They’ve moved everything around. I was a young man when I got here.”

It wasn’t obvious at first. The produce was right there, and my chief concern was whether the red grapes were nicely crunchy, which it turned out they were. After that it was disappointment.

The old fellow was right. It was all jumbled up.

Grocery stores need an organizational system, like the Dewey Decimal System for libraries. But they don’t have one. That’s because many of them sell shelf space to the highest bidder, though the stores pretty much have to give shelf space to popular items. But they can put dry dog food next to breakfast cereal if they want to and no one will stop them. So shoppers need to more or less memorize their favorite grocery store, which does much to increase customer loyalty because once they’ve come to know the place customers can shop efficiently.

So why would stores rearrange everything from time to time?

I asked a guy who was moving around boxes, which is all most employees at Aldi seem to do. “They want to make every Aldi like every other Aldi,” he (probably) lied. A little online research led to marketers as the culprits.

“It's no coincidence when supermarkets switch up their layouts, and they often do it to create customer interest, which hopefully leads to impulse purchases. In short, you'll buy more if you see more!” writes someone named Joe Rumrill.

“From enhancing the shopping experience to adapting to market trends, these modifications are not just about aesthetics—-they're about meeting the evolving needs of shoppers and the business alike,” says Garry Robinson, seemingly taking time away from writing rationales for website, as well as grocery store, cookie placement.

The idea is this: The more time you spend in the grocery store, the more likely you are to indulge in an impulse purchase while looking for the things you actually came for. A shorter way of putting it: Screw you, customer. As far as we’re concerned, your time is worth nothing.

It feels like a betrayal of loyal customers.

While I was there, I heard a lot of grumbling. And Aldi customers, at least in Athens, Ohio, are not generally the sort to grumble. “I might as well go there,” said one woman, nodding toward Walmart, across the street, next to Kroger. I’d been thinking the same thing, now that one of the chief advantages of Aldi — my having memorized it — was gone. As was much of the flea market aisle!

Maybe it is supposed to make me buy more, but it had the opposite effect, because I couldn’t find, for instance, “Woven Wheat Crackers.” Maybe they were there someplace, but I don’t have all day.

There was one other noticeable change. Every time, without fail, the checkout person at Aldi says, “Did you find everything okay?” Not Monday.

I suspect she was tired of hearing the answer.