I would honestly rate this 3.5 if I could but decided to round it up to give this a good yelp start.
Aldi is an awesome shop where someone could save a good amount of money compared to the traditional supermarket like nearby Giant and Wegmans.
It has discount priced fruit, veggies, packaged goods, and food in general. It also limited time special products that are often good. The package non-name brands in all various things from yogurt to cereal to bars to cookies is fine as well. The plant milk is good too. I'm glad I can get all that type of stuff and spices and baking basics and basic toiletries at better prices than at big supermarkets.
My girlfriend is plantbased so I can't really comment on the recent years meat or cheese quality, as we haven't eaten it for a long time now. But the vegan special items are pretty good.
But it loses out to the newish Lidl nearby by a big margin. Here is why:
-Nearby Lidl has 99% of the benefits of aldi but it also has:
-Fresh Bread. The lidl bread is baked right there fresh and is of much higher quality, aldi just gets low quality pre-packaged bread.
-Plantbased items are better and more expansive at Lidl. I can get two types of vegan pizza, Impossible ground meat, beyond sausages, almond-based yogurt (Silk) and various other products daily. At aldi, besides the plantmilk, I'm mostly constrained to 5 varieties of veggie burgers (vs meat-like) and chikn nuggets, which aren't my thing and things on special.
-Salsa is better at Lidl. Idk what it is, but I used to buy salsa at Aldi all the time, I think by Little Salad Bar, and a couple years ago just smelled chemically. Tried several times since, most recently with the pico de gallo and same thing.
-Weekly special items of both non-food (and sometimes food) are simply not as good as Lidl and less likely stuff I do buy. It's not to say Aldi doesn't ever have something worth buying, it's just getting rarer. And I'm someone that has splurged on higher tickets items like a Medion (aldi) computer, tablet, and GPS long back (decade+ ago in Pottstown Aldi by Home Depot). Still use the computer and GPS. But those type of offers are long gone, now it's mostly just junky stuff interspersed by sometime interesting stuff.
BIG THING though:
---No self-checkout! No matter what, I can figure I'm waiting in line at aldi. It might be 2 minutes, it might be 5. But there is max only 1 person at the registers (they could be working too often) and there's often a line even on non-peak hours.
At Aldi, I have to wait for the register 95% of the visits on average of several minutes. 95% of the time at Lidl, I'm breezing though at Self-checkout.
I hate waiting. This is why I don't go to aldi 1/3 as much as before the Lidl moved here. There are some items I still like better, like the Moser Roth Dark Chocolate (no milk!) with Hazelnuts for example. But I can stock up on all that once a month.
I really love Aldi, it saves me lots of $$$, it's just that competition finally came to town and caught up. They are still way better than the big box supermarkets though! read more
